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.

the D710 is solid so probably not a hardware thing. one thing that catches a lot of people is the message ack cycle — APRS messaging requires your station to actually hear the acknowledgment packet back from the destination, and if there are any gaps in the path coverage in either direction it just silently fails. its not like email where the server holds it, both ends need to be able to hear through the network at that moment. so even if your beacons are getting out fine, if your buddy's station cant get an ack packet routed back to you the message shows as undelivered and the radio just keeps retrying until it gives up. worth checking aprs.fi and looking at the raw packets, you can filter by your callsign and see exactly whats being heard and by which stations. sometimes the picture thats obvious on the map doesnt tell you the full story about two-way path coverage.

yeah the 6m opening last week was something else, i was only on for about an hour but managed to snag a few new grid squares which i wasnt expecting at all. had the amp running at about 500w into a 5 element yagi and the signals were genuinely loud, not the usual marginal stuff you get when the band is barely open. definitely worth keeping an eye on the DX clusters right now if you havent been. as for the 7760 i looked at the specs when they first announced it and it seems like its really aimed at guys who want to run a remote setup or have a cleaner shack since the control head separates from the RF unit. cool concept but for what most of us actually do day to day i dont think its a huge leap over the 7300 or 7610 honestly. price is going to be the deciding factor for me and from what ive seen its not going to be cheap

the tension thing is really personal and yeah it takes a while to dial in. what i always tell people is start with more tension than you think you need, like crank it up until it feels almost stiff, then back it off slowly until it feels comfortable. if its too loose your fingers tend to bounce and you get extra dits you didnt mean to send, which is probably what your mushy issue is. also the weight setting in Winkeyer — i run mine at about 50 which is the default and honestly i never touch it. where i would look first is the ratio, some people go slightly higher than 3:1 on the dah to dit ratio and it can help things sound cleaner especially if youre still building muscle memory. but honestly the biggest thing is just slow down. set it to like 12 wpm and make yourself send clean code, sloppy fast code is so much harder to break than clean slow code on the other end.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, got my general back in the spring and been mostly just doing some local nets and messing around on 40m. a buddy of mine mentioned the local ARES group meets at the fire station on the third tuesday of the month and he thinks i should come check it out. i guess im just not sure what they actually do at those meetings or if im too new to be useful. like i know the basic idea, emergency communications backup for when normal stuff goes down, but i looked at the ARRL page about it and honestly it was a little overwhelming. EC, RACES, ICS, all these acronyms and i dont really know where any of it fits together. is RACES totally separate from ARES or are they kind of the same thing? i see people talk about both and never figured out the difference. also wondering what kind of gear i should have before showing up. right now i just have a baofeng and my old kenwood mobile in the truck. would that be enough to at least get started or should i get something more before i introduce myself to the group?

honestly the SDR sync is the part that sold me on it too but i will say the audio latency on the RemoteHams client can be annoying if your internet isnt super stable. i had it running over a connection that had like 80ms average ping and it was totally fine but a friend tried it over a satellite link and said it was nearly unusable for SSB, just too much delay to have a real conversation. CW was okay apparently. never dug into the internet linking docs myself, got curious now though

the math works out okay if you're not going crazy on tx. ic-7300 at 100w is pulling maybe 20-22a on transmit but if you're doing NVIS traffic handling you're probably not keying up continuously - realistically maybe 30-40% duty cycle depending on the net. receive is way lower, like 2-3a. a laptop adds maybe another 3-4a depending on what it's doing. so rough average might be somewhere around 8-10a depending on activity. 100ah lithium you dont want to drain past maybe 80% so you've got effective 80ah... call it 8 hours comfortable, maybe 10 if things stay slow. for a 12 hour activation with that load i'd say bring the panel. even if the positioning isnt perfect you'll be adding something back in during daylight and it takes the edge off the anxiety. the generator is the right call if you're vehicle-adjacent the whole time but you already know that. one thing worth looking at is the bioenno or dakota lithium slim profile packs, they're easier to strap to a cart than the chunky boxes.

yeah the ARRL website has a frequency allocation chart that breaks it down by license class, way easier to read than the actual part 97 text. techs do get some HF privileges — 80, 40, 15, and 10 meters for CW in specific sub-bands, and then 10 meters you also get SSB phone and some data modes above 28.3 MHz. the 40 meter thing your club friend mentioned is real, its 7.025 to 7.125 MHz CW only for techs. honestly just download the ARRL band plan and keep it somewhere handy until it becomes second nature. you wont get in trouble if you're genuinely trying to stay compliant and just made an honest mistake, but yeah its good that you're being careful about it.

honestly PSK31 scratches that itch better for me than JS8 does, theres still a small but dedicated group on 14.070 and you can have a real back and forth without all the weird store and forward stuff. but i get that weak signal performance matters depending on where you are. JS8 does work, just set your expectations — its more like texting across the radio than having a conversation in real time

i did the trunk lip mount on my tacoma for about two years and honestly it worked fine for what you're describing. yeah the pattern isnt perfectly omnidirectional but in practice hitting repeaters around town i never noticed any real difference from when i borrowed a buddy's mag mount. the convenience factor is hard to ignore especially if you're not planning to keep the radio in that truck forever. that said if this is going to be a permanent install and you want to do it right, roof mount with a good NMO hole saw is the way to go. i eventually did that and sealed it properly and havent had a leak in three years. the coax routing isnt as bad as it sounds, most people run it down the A pillar and tuck it under the door sill trim. takes maybe an afternoon if you're not in a hurry. for a trail radio setup id probably just do the trunk lip and not overthink it honestly.

congrats on your first potential activation, thats exciting even if its nerve wracking. the honest answer is it depends a lot on how your local ARES group is set up and what the EOC has for equipment. some counties have really well stocked comm rooms with dedicated radios already programmed and you basically just show up and operate. others... not so much. my advice is bring your own HT programmed with all the local repeaters and simplex freqs you use on your nets, just as a backup. dont assume the gear there is ready to go. also bring a notepad and pen because message handling is a lot of writing down who said what and when, and your logging needs to be clean enough that whoever relieves you can pick right up. the other thing I'd say is dont be afraid to tell your EC if youre unsure about something. better to ask a dumb question in the first five minutes than make an error in a real emergency. most EOC emergency managers appreciate hams who know their limits and communicate clearly, thats kind of the whole job honestly