Jessica Turner

yeah the CTCSS thing trips up a lot of new folks. so the tone you need to transmit is what lets the repeater open up - without it the repeater just ignores your signal, which explains exactly what youre describing. on the baofeng you want to go into the menu and set the T-CTCS (that's the transmit tone) to 100hz. the R-CTCS is for your radio to filter out signals that dont have the tone, which is optional and most people leave it off for repeater work since you want to hear everyone using it. and yes on the breaking in question - waiting for a pause and just saying your callsign is literally the correct way to do it. the net control or whoever is talking will usually acknowledge you and give you a chance to jump in. dont overthink it, everyone was new once and most repeater regulars are pretty welcoming.

wednesday nights our local club does a net on 7.255 so maybe thats pulling some people away from just hanging out. im usually on after the net if you want to try and make contact, should be done by like 830

so the Tri-County hamfest is saturday and im thinking about making the drive but its like 90 minutes each way and i dunno if its worth it. went last year and it was decent, picked up a nice MFJ antenna tuner for cheap but there wasnt a ton of tables. anybody been to it recently or know if the swap meet part has gotten bigger? also i think the local club is doing a fox hunt sunday but havent seen anything official posted yet

so ive been going back and forth on this for probably two months now and i just need someone to talk me off the ledge or onto it, whichever makes sense. my situation is a suburban lot, maybe 60x100 feet, neighbors on both sides who are tolerable but i dont want to push my luck with a big structure. i've been running a vertical for 40m — a trap vertical actually, covers 40 through 10 — but the noise floor on receive is just brutal. like S5 to S7 on a quiet night which isnt quiet at all. someone at the club meeting last month said a dipole would help with the noise because of the rejection off the ends and i get that in theory but my yard doesnt really lend itself to a good horizontal dipole at any useful height. i could maybe get it up 25 feet at the apex which i know isnt ideal for 40. been thinking about an inverted V instead, dropping the legs down at maybe 45 degrees. anyone actually done a comparison between a trap vertical and an inverted V at low height on 40? im wondering if im just going to trade one problem for another.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and i keep hearing about moonbounce at hamfests and every time someone explains it to me i nod along but honestly i still dont fully grasp what the minimum viable setup looks like. like i understand the basic concept, you bounce a signal off the moon and someone on the other side of the world hears it, but the path loss on that has to be absolutely brutal right currently running a modest station, got a yagi up for 2m EME work someday maybe, IC-9700 in the shack which i know is capable. ive been reading about JT65 and the newer Q65 mode being basically the only realistic way to do this without a dish the size of a small house but im still fuzzy on what the antenna requirements actually look like in practice. seen people talking about single yagi EME contacts being possible but also seen people say you need at least 4 yagis to even hear anything. which is it also how do you even schedule contacts, is there like a dedicated cluster or net for this or do people just post on dxcluster and hope

congrats on the ticket first of all. okay so here's my honest take — the baofeng will absolutely get you on the air and let you figure out what you actually want to do with the hobby. i started with a UV-5R like eight years ago and it worked fine for hitting repeaters. the menus are a bit annoying to navigate and the software to program it is a little quirky but once its set up you mostly just use it. that said if you've got the extra $40-50 the FT-65 really is noticeably better built, the receiver is cleaner and you're less likely to have it start picking up all kinds of garbage on busy RF environments. dual band is worth having even as a beginner just because most active repeaters around here are on 2m but some areas are more 70cm heavy, you wont know until you scan around. either way dont overthink it too much, get something and start using it, thats the real lesson

yeah the privilege chart in part 97 is not exactly light reading the first time. basically as a tech you do get some HF access, specifically on 10 meters you can operate phone between 28.300 and 28.500 MHz, and you also get CW privileges across a wider chunk of the band. so 28.300 would be fine for voice as long as youre using an authorized mode and keeping your power in check. the phone vs CW thing just means voice vs morse code essentially, though technically phone includes SSB and AM too not just FM. most HF voice on 10m is going to be upper sideband (USB) so if your radio does SSB you'd use that. the baofeng is FM only i think so you probably wouldnt be able to use it on HF anyway, youd need a different rig for that. for a simpler reference the ARRL has a frequency/privileges chart that condenses the part 97 tables into something much more readable, worth bookmarking. also the technician question pool for your exam actually covers most of the key rules so reviewing that isnt a bad idea either even though youre already licensed.

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. okay so CQ WW and sweepstakes are pretty different animals even though yeah they both involve piling up contacts. CQ WW is huge, like worldwide huge, you're working everyone and the exchange is just signal report plus your CQ zone number. sweepstakes is north america only but the exchange is this long thing with a serial number and precedence and your ARRL section and it trips everyone up the first time. dont stress about memorizing it, just use N1MM or whatever logging software and it'll prompt you. your 590 and a dipole at 30 feet is honestly totally fine to get started. you wont be competing for top scores obviously but you'll make contacts, plenty of them, especially on 40 and 20 during peak hours. just pick a frequency thats not being used, throw out your call a few times, and see who answers. or just search and pounce which means you tune around and answer other peoples CQs. thats way easier to start with. SOTA is kinda its own separate world, its about activating summits and the contacts count toward SOTA awards not really toward contest scores, though some SOTA activators do operate during contests from a peak which is kind of a fun combo. worth looking into separately once you get the contest bug sorted out.

im also pretty new to this, only done three activations so far, but i can say the HAMRS app made the logging thing pretty painless once i figured out how to set the park reference before i started logging. messed it up on my second activation and had to manually edit the ADIF file afterward which was kind of a pain but not the end of the world. one thing i didnt expect is how much hunters appreciate it when you call CQ POTA and keep it slow and clear, especially if youre on a frequency that has some noise. had one guy thank me over the air for being patient which was a nice moment. people in this hobby are generally really cool

so ive been licensed about 14 months now (general class) and i keep hearing people talk about CQ WW like its this huge deal and honestly after watching some of the scores people post it really does seem like a massive event. ive done a little bit of Field Day with my club the last two summers but that was more just showing up and logging for people rather than actually running a station myself. im wondering if CQ WW SSB in october would be a good first real contest to try on my own or if its just going to be total chaos for someone who doesnt really know what theyre doing yet. i have a decent HF setup, ic-7300 into a resonant dipole for 40 and a fan dipole that kinda works on 20 and 15. live in a suburban lot so antennas arent great but its what i have. also curious if anyone has thoughts on how SOTA activations count toward anything contest-wise or if thats totally separate. i know theres some crossover with certain award programs but im fuzzy on the details. anyway any thoughts appreciated, i dont want to jump in and embarrass myself too badly lol

yeah i caught the tail end of it from ohio, got on around 3pm and worked a few spanish and portuguese stations before it closed up. wasnt as good as what you described but still pretty solid for a tuesday afternoon. ive noticed that when the flux gets above 170 and the geomagnetic field stays quiet like that, 10m can really surprise you. the F2 propagation just goes nuts sometimes. the CT3 would have been a nice one, thats a decent DX catch. i keep missing the azores and canaries, they show up on the cluster and then by the time i get to the radio its gone. someday

man i want to see pictures of this thing when youre done. im in the middle of a similar project, direct conversion on 20m, much simpler obviously but still. the point to point wiring on copper clad approach is something i keep going back to because etching boards feels like too much commitment when im still changing stuff every other day. one thing i ran into with my diode ring mixer was getting a ground loop hum i couldnt shake for like two weeks, turned out one of my winding connections wasnt actually making contact, just touching. might be worth going over all your transformer joints with a meter before you power up just in case. probably not your issue but it drove me absolutely nuts and wouldve been a lot easier to catch early.

made exactly this jump about two years ago and yeah the difference on HF is pretty substantial, not subtle at all. the direct sampling hack on the v3 is clever but the noise floor is just noticeably higher and weak signals that are readable on the RSP1C kind of wash out in the mud on the rtl. 14 bit dynamic range matters a lot more than i expected, especially if you're anywhere near a strong local broadcaster because the rtl will get absolutely hammered by intermod. SDRuno took me maybe an hour to figure out but once its set up i dont really touch it. the workspace thing is a bit different from SDR# but its not bad. only gripe is it does feel a bit heavy on CPU compared to SDR# with the same dongle. if you do go RSP route i'd honestly suggest also trying it with HDSDR or even SDR# with the mirics plugin some people prefer that over SDRuno for everyday use.

I went last year with a buddy from our club. We ended up leaving earlier than planned because there wasnt a ton of HF gear but I did score a pretty clean MFJ tuner for cheap so cant complain too much. Bring cash, half the vendors dont do venmo or anything like that in my experience.

yeah i did something similar last year with a 7600 and a pi 3B+. the debounce thing is exactly your problem, what i ended up doing was just adding a short timer on the python side — basically dont actually trigger the relay until the band has been stable for like 300ms or so. if a new CI-V packet comes in during that window you just reset the timer. works pretty well in practice, spinning the VFO fast doesnt cause the relays to go nuts anymore. the other thing i ran into was the relay module itself pulling enough current that it was browning out the pi when multiple relays fired at once. ended up powering the relay module from a seperate 5v supply instead of off the pi's GPIO pins. might not be your issue but worth checking if you see any weird resets.