Elizabeth Patel

I was terrified my first time too but the regulars will help you out if you get stuck. Most important thing is just speak clearly and dont rush through everything. Oh and have the repeater frequency and offset handy in case someone asks, you'd be surprised how often that comes up. If someone has traffic just let them handle it, you're mainly there to facilitate not solve problems

CW latency over RemoteHams is just kind of what it is honestly. i run a remote station through them for a buddy who lets me use his tower setup about 50 miles out and for phone modes its totally fine, great even. but i stopped trying to do CW through it after maybe two sessions. the round trip just kills the feel of it. what ive seen some people do is run a separate keyer at the remote end that handles the actual timing locally — like you send the dit/dah commands over the control link and the keyer at the station end does the actual timing. RemoteHams does have something for this i think but ive never messed with it myself. on the rolling your own question — its totally doable but you end up spending a LOT of time on stuff that isnt radio. port forwarding, VPN configs, dealing with whatever weird routing your parents ISP does. if you just want to operate its probably not worth the headache unless you really enjoy that kind of systems admin stuff.

yeah this trips up a lot of newly licensed folks so dont feel bad. the short answer is the ARRL band plan is basically a gentlemens agreement, the actual legal limits are in Part 97 which defines things like which license class can use which frequencies and modes. so for example as a general you have specific sub-bands on 40m and 20m etc where you're authorized, and going outside those is an actual FCC violation, not just bad form the third party traffic thing is relevant to you actually. Mexico does have a third party agreement with the US so your wife saying hi is fine in that case, but there are countries where that would technically be a violation because no agreement exists. the ARRL has a list of which countries have agreements and which dont, worth bookmarking for plain english explanations i always point people to the ARRL's own regulatory info pages, and honestly Gordon West's study material still has decent summaries even after you pass the exam. Part 97 itself isnt that bad once you find the sections that apply to you, mostly 97.301 and 97.305 for frequency and mode privileges

i use messaging semi-regularly during our county ARES nets, works pretty well once you figure out the infrastructure situation. but yeah what the other guy said is right, two-way igates are rarer than you'd think. one thing to double check on the 710G — make sure your MYCALL is set correctly with the SSID and that you have the message ack timeout set to something reasonable. i think the default might be kind of short and if the network is even slightly congested the acks dont come back in time and the radio gives up. i had that issue for a while before i figured out what was happening

yeah the K index spiking like that will absolutely kill a 15m opening, even when the SFI looks decent. solar flux tells you the potential is there but the geomagnetic conditions are what actually determines whether the ionosphere cooperates. when K hits 4 or above you're really fighting uphill especially on the higher bands. 17m tends to hold a bit better than 15 in my experience when the geo is unsettled but even that has limits. i've been monitoring dxmaps and the cluster pretty regularly and there have been some really short-window openings lately, like you said, 20-30 minutes and then gone. its not just you. we had a minor geomagnetic storm move through last week and those always seem to leave the ionosphere kind of ragged for a few days after even when the K comes back down. might just need to be patient and keep watching pskreporter if you do digital modes, thats often the first place you'll see a path starting to develop before it gets loud enough for phone.

congrats on the activation. one thing that helped me a lot when i started was just writing the exchange on a piece of paper and taping it to my radio so i wasnt fumbling around trying to remember what to say when the pile hit. sounds dumb but it works. also for the antenna angle thing, even a pretty ugly dipole will usually get the job done for POTA, most of the hunters are running decent stations and can pull you out even when your signal isnt perfect. what park reference was it if you dont mind me asking, always curious what states people are activating in

this will actually be my first hamvention if i end up going, still on the fence about it. kinda nervous i wont know what im looking at when people are selling stuff. like how do you even know if something is a good deal or not without being able to test it right there

i went through this same thing about a year ago lol. the waiting is brutal when you just want to get on the air. mine showed up on day 5 i think. once it posts to the ULS you can actually start operating even before your physical license shows up in the mail — just screenshot the database entry. i ended up keeping my sequential call for now and might do vanity later when i upgrade to general or extra since the nicer format calls open up more. seemed like a lot of hassle for a call i might just change again anyway

While the number of questions that actually change may be small, the entire pool is considered 'new' every four years to keep up with ham radio technology advances and FCC rule changes. For now, focus on mastering the current material.

congrats on the ticket. that first QSO feeling is something else, you never really forget it. i remember mine was on a repeater in 2003 and i was so nervous i forgot my own callsign for a second, had to look at the paper i had taped to the desk. dont worry about the baofeng stuff, get comfortable first and worry about gear later. whats your general area if you dont mind me asking, might be some nets nearby worth checking out

so i've been running 100w into a dipole for about two years and honestly never really thought much about QRP until my buddy kept going on about it at the club meeting last month. figured i'd give it a shot and dug out a little Rockmite kit i built like three years ago and never really used. got it on 40m, hooked up a random wire in the backyard, and just started calling CQ around 7.030 or so. took maybe 45 minutes of nothing but then this station in Missouri came back to me, full copy, gave me a 559 which felt almost unbelievable considering im running like 500mw. the guy was super patient with me when i fumbled the exchange a bit. honestly that contact felt way more satisfying than most of my regular HF pile-ups ever have. there's something about knowing the signal is just barely there scratching its way across multiple states on less power than a night light. now im looking at maybe building one of the ubitx kits or maybe a 4state QRP group kit. anyone have opinions on where to start if you want something a little more versatile than a single band crystal radio? still learning the kit building side of things so nothing too crazy complex would be ideal

yeah what the other guy said about HamStudy is right, that site is great. i'll add though that if you actually want to understand the impedance and reactance stuff rather than just memorize it, the ARRL General Class License Manual isn't bad. some people find it dry but it helped me connect the dots on why certain things work the way they do. it does matter a little bit in practice, like when you're trying to figure out why your antenna tuner isnt happy or whatever. but you dont need to be an engineer to pass the test or even to be a decent operator. the exam itself is 35 questions and you need a 74% so you can actually miss quite a few. once you get General you'll want to get on 40 meters and just listen for a while before you transmit, get a feel for how HF is different from the repeater stuff. its a pretty different world

yeah this is pretty much exactly what every ARES group discovers the first time they do a serious exercise instead of just a checkin drill. the repeater dependency thing is huge and it bites everybody at least once. our group actually made a rule after a similar exercise that all emcomm operators have to demonstrate they can work simplex out to their assigned shelter before they're considered ready for activation. sounds obvious but you'd be surprised how many people have never actually tried to hit a specific location on simplex and dont know if their mobile or HT can even do it. the ICS forms thing is real too. we went through a whole Saturday session just going over 213 form handling and how to pass the information over voice without it turning into a mess. honestly the message handling piece is where a lot of technically solid operators fall apart because theyre used to ragchewing not structured traffic. Winlink helped us a lot once we got people trained on it but thats its own can of worms with everyone needing to be able to operate it under stress with no tutorial in front of them.

ive been trying to get my kenwood tm-d710 working with APRS for the past week and im losing maybe 30% of my packets. using a jpole at about 40 feet, radio is set to 5 watts on 144.39. my home station shows up on aprs.fi sometimes but then disappears for hours. checked my path settings and using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 like everyone says but still having issues anyone else run into this? starting to think its either the antenna or maybe the digi in my area is flaky. located about 15 miles west of atlanta if that matters

There are no more "Mixed" applications combining cards and LoTW, so submit them separately. I always do LoTW first since you can check your new award status in LoTW the day after processing, even before getting anything in the mail. Congrats on the milestone - DXCC is addictive!

so i passed my general back in march and joined my county ARES group maybe two months ago. been going to the monthly nets and the training sessions which have been really good actually. but next weekend theres a real activation, local marathon with about 800 runners and they want us to handle comms along the course. my EC said its a pretty low-key event and good for new folks to get their feet wet but i still feel like im going to mess something up. like i know the basics of net discipline and how to pass traffic and all that but when its actually happening with real people depending on you it feels different than practice. im mostly worried about freezing up or missing a call or something dumb like that. anyone been through their first activation and have any advice? im going to be at a water station about 2 miles from the finish line with one other ham who has way more experiance than me so at least theres that. just want to make sure im as ready as i can be

Gordon West makes a study book specifically for tech that a lot of people swear by, its pretty readable compared to the arrl stuff. i used it back when i tested and it breaks things down section by section in a way that makes more sense for someone just starting. that said i think most people end up using the online quiz sites anyway for the actual drilling part, the book is more for building context around what youre memorizing. one thing i'll mention that nobody told me before my exam -- bring a calculator, you're allowed to use one, and there are a few math questions on things like frequency and wavelength that are way easier if you're not trying to do it in your head. the formula is simple but still. good luck with it, tech exam really isnt bad at all once you get rolling

the theory stuff is definitely a step up from general but its not as bad as people make it sound, at least if you give yourself a few months and dont try to cram it. i went through the same thing, no engineering background, just a guy who likes radio. what helped me was going through the question pool and when something didn't make sense i'd go look up that specific topic rather than trying to read the handbook cover to cover which yeah that thing is a lot. the impedance and filter questions have actual math but once you see the pattern they're testing it kinda clicks. there's a few youtube channels that cover the extra material and honestly those helped me more than any book. gordon west has a study guide too that breaks things down pretty accessibly if you learn better that way. took me about three months of casual studying and passed on the first try. the privileges are real too, i do notice more room on the cw portions especially during contests when general is just wall to wall.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from the house. been hunting parks for a few months and figured it was time to just go do one myself. packed up the KX2 and a 40m EFHW, got there early morning which was great because nobody else was around yet. problem was the noise floor was absolutely terrible near the parking area, like S7-S8 just sitting there, i think there was some kind of electrical box or lighting system nearby. moved maybe 300 feet away and it dropped down to like S2 which was way more workable. anyway i ended up getting 12 QSOs on 40m and 3 on 20m before the battery started acting up. 15 contacts total so it counted as a valid activation right? i was sweating it for a while because the pileup wasnt exactly overwhelming lol. also had a question about logging — i used HAMRS on my phone and it seemed fine but i noticed a few of the hunters were giving me their state and i wasnt sure if i needed to log that or if callsign and signal report is enough for the POTA upload. first time using the app in the field and kept second guessing myself.

that domed cap is almost certainly your problem or at least one of them. i had a 7300 come through here with nearly identical symptoms and it ended up being two caps in the PA bias supply that had gone high ESR. once the bias rail sags the finals just sit there doing nothing and the drive signal goes nowhere. you can check them in circuit with an ESR meter if you have one, though honestly at that age in a humid environment id just replace the whole cluster around that area while youre in there. nichicon or panasonic FM series, dont cheap out on the replacements. the icom service manual for the 7300 does exist, it floats around if you know where to look, might help you trace the bias circuit before you start swapping things randomly.

so i finally got activated for the first time last weekend, our county had a pretty serious flooding situation and the served agency (local EOC) needed some extra comm support while their systems were getting sorted out. ive been part of the local ARES group for about 8 months now and done maybe 4 or 5 training nets but this was the first real deal. overall it went fine i think, net control seemed happy with how things went and i didnt make any major mistakes that i know of. but i realized pretty quick that theres a difference between running a training net on a tuesday night and actually being at a served agency trying to figure out what they need from you. like nobody really explained to me ahead of time that the EOC coordinator might not actually know what they want from us or how to use us effectively. i ended up kind of just sitting there for the first hour waiting for something to do. anyway my actual question — is that normal? like do other ARES groups do specific training around how to interact with the served agency side of things, not just the radio procedures? feels like thats a gap in our training but maybe im just missing something that was covered before i joined

timing is everything man, youre not wrong about that. i ran a DXpedition to a small pacific entity a couple years ago (nothing huge, 6 man team) and from the other side of the pileup its really obvious who understands timing and who doesnt. the guys who just machine-gun their callsigns continuously are almost never the ones we pull out. its the ones who listen first, figure out the rhythm of how we're working the pile, and then drop in at exactly the right moment. the suffix thing works but it depends a lot on the operator. some DXpedition ops love working by suffix, others find it annoying because you get collisions from people with the same suffix. when it works it works great though. tail-ending i have mixed feelings on — done right its fine, done badly it just makes more QRM. if youre stepping on the tail end of the previous guy finishing his callsign youre doing it wrong. on your second radio question — yeah absolutely, SO2R style monitoring is a real advantage if you can do it without causing intermod in your own setup. spacing matters a lot. i run two radios with a bunch of filtering between them and even then certain band combos are just not practical. 40 and 15 works pretty well, 40 and 20 can get ugly depending on your antenna situation.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i still get a little anxious about nets. like i understand the basics, net control calls for check-ins, you say your callsign, got it. but what about those times where you tune in late or youre not sure if the net is still going? do you just wait for a pause and try to check in or is that rude? i did it once and the net control kind of just skipped over me and i wasnt sure if i did something wrong or if he just didnt hear me. also whats the deal with joining a net just to listen — is that totally fine or do some nets expect everyone who's listening to check in? feels like there are unwritten rules nobody explains and the license exam definitely didnt cover any of this.

73 tripped me up too when I first started lol. I thought someone was signing off with their age or something. One thing that helped me was just keeping a notepad next to the radio and writing down anything I didn't recognize, then looking it up after. After maybe a month of that I stopped needing to look things up as much. Also dont worry too much about the obscure ones, honestly in day to day operating you only really hear maybe a dozen Q codes regularly. The rest you'd only see on like CW or digital modes where people are abbreviating everything to save time.

so ive been using N1MM pretty much exclusively for the last couple years, mostly for contesting but also just general logging because i got lazy about switching apps. it works fine for contests obviously but for day to day stuff it feels like overkill and the interface is kind of a mess when youre not actually in a contest, all those windows everywhere. been hearing a lot about Log4OM lately and it seems like its more geared toward general logging with decent contest support on the side, which might actually fit how i operate better. i do maybe 4-5 contests a year — sweepstakes, FD, a few state QSO parties — so its not like im a hardcore contester where N1MM is the only answer. the other wrinkle is WSJT-X. i run FT8 probably 3 nights a week and right now i have WSJT-X logging to N1MM via UDP and it mostly works but every few weeks something burps and i lose a handful of contacts before i notice. not sure if thats a N1MM config thing or a WSJT-X thing or just my ancient laptop being weird. anyone actually running Log4OM as their main logger and feeding WSJT-X into it? how does that integration hold up compared to the N1MM setup? and does Log4OM handle Sweepstakes exchange logging without wanting to throw your radio out the window, because that exchange is already painful enough