Daniel Jackson

the roof center is genuinely better for pattern, you get a cleaner omni vs the trunk lip which skews things a bit toward the rear of the car. whether you can actually tell depends a lot on terrain and what youre doing. i ran a NMO mount on the roof of my last truck, drilled a proper hole, and yeah it was noticeably cleaner on 70cm especially. but that was a permanent install and i knew i was keeping that truck. for a commuter car i wouldnt bother drilling. the mag mount speed concern is real too, ive seen people lose them. get a mount with a strong magnet and keep an eye on it but a roof center mag at highway speeds should be ok if the base is solid. the Tram youve got is a decent antenna anyway, dont overthink it

haha the logging chaos is real, i still mess that up sometimes and ive been doing SOTA for like 4 years. what i do now is just use a paper log on the summit and enter everything into SOTA CSV or the database when i get home. yeah its a bit more work but trying to fiddle with an app when youre also doing a pileup and the wind is blowing and your fingers are cold is just not worth it. some people swear by the SOTA Goat app or Activator Log on android but i never really got on with them also on the water thing, yeah that gets everyone at least once. i now just have a checklist i run through the night before and water is literally item number one because everything else you can kind of survive without but not that. congrats on the first activation though, sounds like you did great honestly, 4 contacts on rough conditions with a homebrew antenna is not bad at all

get a WebSDR recording of yourself, thats the real test. phone speaker monitoring is useless for this. find a WebSDR thats close enough to hear you and have someone key up while you transmit a test message. youll hear exactly what others hear and it changed everything for me when i first started on phone. i was shocked how different my perception of my own audio was vs what was actually going out.

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and mostly just ragchewed on 40m and did some local nets but lately ive been getting into DX and honestly its kind of addictive. im sitting at around 87 confirmed entities right now on LoTW which i know isnt a lot compared to some of you guys but its exciting to me. my question is mostly about how the credit submission process works. i understand you need 100 confirmed for the basic DXCC award but do all the confirmations have to be through LoTW or can you mix paper QSLs and LoTW? i have a bunch of paper cards from some of the earlier contacts and i wasnt sure if those count toward the same total. also does anyone know if WAS and DXCC credits are tracked separately on the ARRL side or is it all one big account thing. asking because i want to start chasing WAS too and dont want to mess up my records somehow. anyway been lurking here a while and you guys seem helpful so figured id just ask instead of trying to decode the ARRL website for another hour

yeah the through-hole NMO is the way to go, did mine last spring and kinda wish i did it sooner. just tape off the area really well before you drill and use a step bit, takes like 20 minutes. the coax routing through the firewall is the annoying part but once its done its done. i ran mine down the A pillar under the trim and its completely invisible.

the parametric EQ on the 7300 is actually really worth learning, most people just leave it default and wonder why they sound muddy. the thing is SSB doesnt need the low end you might think — rolling off below about 300hz cleans up a ton of boominess and on the other end you dont want to go much past 2700-2800hz for a typical voice, the sideband just gets splattered and it doesnt help readability anyway. for the PR-40 specifically youre probably getting too much proximity effect if youre talking close to it, that mic is designed for broadcast work and really wants you back 6-8 inches minimum. try that first honestly before touching anything in the radio. compression is a big one too. a little ALC activity is fine but if youre pegging it constantly youre gonna sound terrible. the 7300 speech compressor can be useful but crank it too high and everything turns into mush. i keep mine around 5-6 and watch the ALC meter — if its buried dont touch it, just back off the mic gain instead. takes a while to dial in but once you find the sweet spot it stays there

general is definitely a step up from tech but not by as much as people make it sound. the electrical theory stuff looks scary but honestly theres only so many questions they can ask about it and if you use hamstudy or the qrz practice exams you'll see them cycle through pretty fast. i spent maybe 3 weeks on it, probably an hour a night, and passed with a decent margin. the hardest part for me was the operating procedures and some of the propagation stuff, not the math. as for getting on HF without spending a lot, used radios are the way to go. an ft-757 or one of the older icom 706s can be had for not much on qrz.com classifieds or ebay if you're patient. a decent wire antenna like a simple dipole cut for 40m can be built for almost nothing and 40 meters is a great band to start on, especially in the evenings. you dont need a fancy antenna tuner right away either, just cut it close to resonance and you're fine on most rigs with a decent built in tuner

so ive been doing contests pretty seriously for about 3 years now, usually top 10 in my section for single op stuff, and every time i look at the high scores i see all the serious guys are running SO2R and i keep wondering if its actually doing that much for their rate or if there's other stuff going on too like better antennas and location and whatnot my current setup is a k3 and an ic-7300 that i use for monitoring but its not really wired up for proper SO2R, no bandpass filters, no antenna switching automation, nothing like that. i've tried manually switching between the two during slow periods and honestly the interference between them even on different bands is pretty rough without filters. ran 40 and 15 simultaneously for about 20 minutes during sweepstakes last year and could hear the k3 bleeding into the 7300 rx even with them on opposite ends of the room is it even worth getting into properly if im not going to spend the money on the full station2station filtering setup? or is there a budget way to do this that actually works. also curious how much rate improvement people actually see from SO2R vs just getting better at running and s&p switching on a single radio

yeah im planning to go, dragging my buddy along who just got his tech last month and wants to look for a cheap HT. last time i found a decent MFJ antenna tuner for like 12 bucks so im hoping the deals are still there even if the crowd is smaller the fox hunt sounds fun actually, never done one at a hamfest before, usually they just have a talk-in on the local repeater and thats about it

so i've been parked on 7.200 for like the past hour just listening and there's barely anything going on tonight. usually this time of year 40m is pretty lively but its just dead quiet except for some distant AM station bleeding in from somewhere. not complaining really, sometimes its nice to just have the radio on in the background while im doing other stuff in the shack. got my old kenwood warming up and a cup of coffee and honestly thats not a bad evening. just curious if anyone else noticed conditions being weird lately or if its just my part of the country

dont overthink the software side of it, i'd just go arduino with a cheap ESP8266 or ESP32 instead of the pi zero. less moving parts, boots in 2 seconds, no SD card to corrupt, and the wifi is built right in. you can serve a simple html page straight from the chip. i use an ESP32 for a bunch of shack automation stuff now and honestly its replaced the pi for anything that doesnt need real computing power.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff confused me for a while too when I first got started. so yeah you basically have it right — LoTW is the gold standard for DXCC and most ARRL awards, and it's free once you get the certificate set up which you already did. eQSL is its own thing, some awards accept it some don't, and a lot of the more serious DX guys don't really use it or don't check it very often. physical cards still matter for certain awards and some DX entities only confirm via paper, especially the rarer ones where the operators are old school or operating from some tiny island with no reliable internet. for everyday contacts though, saying youre on LoTW is totally fine and a lot of people will appreciate it honestly. you'll start getting confirmations but it can take a while — some operators only upload logs every few months or even once a year after a big contest or expedition. if you want cards eventually, you can get a batch printed pretty cheap through places like KB1OIQ's card printing thing or a bunch of other services. but don't stress about it right away, get your logs clean and LoTW sorted first and the rest kinda falls into place as you go.

yeah the rx-only igate thing is almost certainly your problem, or at least part of it. a lot of igates especially the ones run by people who set it up once and forgot about it are receive only — they'll pass packets from RF to IS all day long but they won't do the reverse. for a message to get back to you over RF you need a two-way igate in range and there just arent that many of them. you can check on aprs.fi, click on the igate station near you and see if it says RF-IS or bidirectional. if its one-way thats your wall right there. the D710 messaging config is probably fine honestly, that radio is pretty solid for APRS out of the box. i would double check that you have the correct SSID on the destination callsign though, people mess that up more than you'd think and the message just goes nowhere if the SSID is wrong.

so ive been running SO2R for maybe three years now, mostly on CW, and every time a sprint comes around im second guessing whether the second radio is actually helping my rate or just adding mental overhead that tanks my score anyway. during a regular 48 hour contest it makes total sense, you're running on one radio and S&P on the other and the multipliers kind of fall into your lap. but sprint is already so chaotic with the QSY rule that im not sure my brain can handle monitoring two bands simultaneously while also keeping track of who i just worked and figuring out where to move next. last sprint i had the K3 on 40 and the 756 Pro on 80 and i think i spent more time futzing with the audio switching than actually making contacts. ended up with a decent score but honestly not sure the SO2R setup contributed much vs just hurt me. anyone actually running SO2R effectively in sprints or is this one of those cases where the juice aint worth the squeeze

congrats on passing the exam. okay so the baofeng hate is a mix of both honestly — some of it is snobbery but some of it is legit. the RF filtering on the cheap ones can be pretty poor which means they can sometimes transmit on frequencies they shouldn't, and the build quality is just not the same as a yaesu or kenwood. that said plenty of people start with one and its totally fine for learning and basic repeater use. if you can stretch to the FT-60 i would just do it. its a tank, the receiver is much better, and youll probably still be using it ten years from now. i have one thats been dropped, rained on, and generally abused for like 8 years and it just keeps going. the menu system is a bit clunky to program but nothing you cant figure out with an afternoon and chirp. the other option in the middle range thats worth a look is the Radioddity GA-510 or the BF-F8HP if you're set on the baofeng ecosystem, a bit more power and slightly better build, but honestly for the price difference just go yaesu.

yeah i saw something on the reflector about it, i think its the third weekend of the month but dont quote me on that. our club is supposed to have a table there too, been meaning to unload some stuff ive had sitting in the shack for like two years. if you're going maybe we can carpool, im over off route 40

first hamfest for me if i end up going, dont really know what to expect. is it worth bringing cash or do most vendors do cards now

Make sure your brass contacts are clean and properly adjusted - even tiny amounts of oxidation can cause timing issues. Most keyers have fine timing adjustments for dah-to-dit ratios in the menu. Start there before blaming the paddle!

SOTA and contesting are pretty different in terms of mindset but i do think activating summits makes you quicker with exchanges yeah. when you've got 20 chasers lined up and your battery is dying you learn to be concise real fast haha. that said the pileup dynamics are different because in SOTA everyone wants you specifically, in a big contest like CQ WW youre usually the one hunting and calling into stations who are barely listening. if you havent done a SOTA activation yet that might actually be a fun fall project too, the SOTA program has some activations and events that get more traffic this time of year. either way dont overthink it, just turn the radio on saturday morning of CQ WW and start calling.

welcome to the dark side haha. yeah once it clicks it really clicks. CQ WW is kind of the superbowl of HF contesting so starting there and doing well barefoot is honestly impressive, most people get humbled their first time Field Day is weird because technically its not scored the same way as a regular contest, its more like a emergency preparedness exercise that turned into a giant party. but its absolutely worth doing with a club especially your first time, the setup chaos and middle of the night operating and bad food is all part of it. some clubs are super serious about the score and some just use it as an excuse to camp and get on the air which is fine too for SOTA thats really its own world, different mindset entirely. youre activating summits to get the contacts rather than just racking up multipliers. some people do both, like theyll activate a summit during a contest weekend to get points going in two directions at once which is clever. check out the WA7BNM contest calendar, its basically the bible for this stuff, covers everything from local sprints to the big international events

oh man i had this exact same problem when i first got my begali paddle. turns out i had it wired backwards and didnt realize the keyer had an auto-reverse feature that was trying to "fix" it. ended up being a double negative situation. try turning off any auto paddle sensing if your rig has it, then wire it the normal way - tip is dit, ring is dah. also some of those hamfest keyers are just weird, might be worth investing in something decent like a vibroplex or WB9LPD unit if you're serious about getting back into cw

congrats on the build, thats awesome. i'm still kind of nervous to build my own rig, been doing kits (built a KX1 kit last year) but scratch building feels like a different level. ontario from a park with 5 watts though... that's making me want to try harder with my little setup. what state were you in if you dont mind me asking? i always wonder how distance maps onto signal reports with QRP.

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, general class, and i keep hearing people throw around stuff like QSL, QTH, QRM and honestly i have no idea what half of them mean. i know QSL is like confirming a contact because everyone talks about QSL cards but beyond that im kinda lost. someone on 40m last week said my QSB was bad and i just said uh yeah thanks and moved on because i didnt want to sound dumb. is there like a master list somewhere or do people just memorize these over time? also what does 73 actually stand for, i know its goodbye but where did that come from

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now mostly just did VHF/UHF stuff with a couple handhelds and a cheap chinese dual band mobile but i finally want to get into HF properly. been saving up and im basically down to either the IC-7300 or the FT-991A and i cannot make up my mind. the 991A is appealing because it does VHF and UHF too so theoretically i could use it for everything in one box, but i keep reading that the HF performance on the 7300 is just better overall especially the waterfall which everyone seems to love. my shack is basically just a desk in the corner of my bedroom so space isnt a huge issue but id rather not have five radios eventually either. i dont really care about contesting or anything like that, mostly interested in just making contacts, maybe some digital modes down the road like FT8. has anyone actually run both of these side by side or switched from one to the other? genuinely curious if the 991A HF receive is as good as the 7300 or if thats just a meme at this point

hey welcome to the hobby, dont stress about the baofeng thing everyone starts somewhere. so CTCSS is basically a sub-audible tone that your radio transmits along with your voice and the repeater uses it to filter out interference and random noise — without the right tone the repeater just ignores your transmission even though you're technically on the right frequency. it wont hear you at all which is exactly what it sounds like is happening. if repeaterbook doesnt list a tone for that machine it could genuinely be open access meaning no tone required, but honestly a lot of listings are out of date or just incomplete. best thing to do is look up the repeater's club or trustee info on the listing and either find their website or just email them and ask. or sometimes if you listen long enough someone will ID and you can just reach out to them directly. some guys also do a thing where they transmit all the standard CTCSS tones one by one to figure out which one opens the repeater but thats a bit of a pain. as for calling out — most people just say their callsign and that theyre listening, something like "[your call] monitoring" or if you want to chat you can say "[your call] for any station." nothing super formal, just identify yourself. you're doing fine just keep at it.