Lisa Park

made almost that exact switch a couple years back, was on an FT-897 for years before i got the 7300. the waterfall is genuinely useful not just a gimmick, you actually start to understand what the band is doing in a way you just cant with a meter. the RF direct sampling does make a difference in terms of close-in interference rejection, i noticed it right away on 40m during the evening pile when everyone and their brother is running 100 watts two khz away from you. the AGC behavior is also way better imo. the built in sound card for digital modes is what pushed me over honestly, cleaned up my FT8 setup considerably and i got rid of a bunch of cables going to the laptop. if you can stretch to the 7610 the dual watch and better filters are nice but unless you're doing serious contesting or DXing the 7300 is hard to argue with at current prices. just do it, your 570 will sell pretty easy if you keep it clean

thats awesome man. i did the same thing with sitting on my ticket for months before actually getting on the air. the baofeng is fine to start but once you get the bug youll want something better pretty quick. not a knock just saying. whats your callsign?

yeah the mic gain thing is almost universal with that radio, pretty much everyone who hooks up a dynamic mic has to back it off. icom's defaults seem tuned for their own desk mics which run hotter i think. the equalizer in the 7300 is actually pretty capable once you find settings that work for your voice, i spent probably two hours on a monday night just recording myself on a dummy load and tweaking until it sounded right. the panadapter is the thing that ruined every other radio for me by the way. went back to my old 746 for a portable trip and felt completely blind. cant really go back once you have a decent waterfall in front of you all the time. your OCF at 25 feet will do more than you think, ive worked plenty of dx on worse.

yeah that ARRL handbook is definitely overkill for the tech exam, thats more of a reference thing than a study guide. Gordon West makes a good technician book thats straightforward and its specifically written for passing the exam, might be worth tracking down. i think the library might even have it one thing i will say, dont skip the questions about operating procedures and band privileges even if they seem boring, those actually matter when youre on the air and newer hams sometimes dont retain that stuff because they just crammed it. good luck with it, the test isnt that bad

73 is technically not a Q code but its probably the one youll use the most lol, means best regards basically, people say it at the end of every contact. 88 means love and kisses which is usually sent to women operators but you see it occasionally. and then theres 33 which i honestly had never heard until i joined a local club and one of the older guys used it, apparently means best regards between women operators specifically but its pretty rare these days. oh also if someone says QRT that means theyre shutting down or going off the air, and QSY means changing frequency. those come up a lot during nets and stuff.

so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now coming from an old Kenwood TS-450S that i ran for probably 12 years. figured id share some impressions since i spent way too long reading threads like this before buying. the waterfall display is the thing everyone talks about and yeah it really does change how you operate, like i actually catch openings now that i wouldve completely missed before because id just be spinning the dial hoping to land on something. the built in ATU handles my end-fed halfwave on most bands without complaint, 40m is a little sketchy sometimes but 20 and 17 are solid. audio quality on receive is noticeably better than the old Kenwood, though honestly the 450S was no slouch for its age. the touch screen took some getting used to and i still accidentally fat-finger the wrong menu option sometimes. also the RF gain behavior is a bit different than what i was used to, took me a day or two to figure out where i actually wanted to run it. one thing nobody really mentioned in the reviews i read — the fan kicks on pretty quick when youre running any kind of power and in a quiet shack it's audible. not a dealbreaker just mildly annoying when youre trying to copy weak CW. anyway curious if anyone else made a similar jump from older gear to the 7300, wondering if the things im noticing are just me adjusting or if others had the same experience

i just passed mine like three months ago. went full memorization route using hamstudy.org and it took me maybe 6 weeks of spare time studying. passed with an 88 i think. do i understand all of it? nope, not even close. the op-amp questions and some of the oscillator stability stuff i still couldnt explain to anyone. but the sub bands were immediately useful and i feel like the license means something even if i cheated my way through the theory lol. probably gonna go back and actually read about some of it eventually

yeah the format stuff gets natural pretty quick, after a few weeks on the repeater you wont even think about it. my first contact was a complete mess, forgot to give my callsign at the end and the guy had to ask me to repeat it. we all start somewhere. whats the repeater you were on, local club machine?

honest answer is it depends a lot on whether anyone complains and whether you're causing interference. the FCC doesn't have field agents sitting around monitoring every frequency waiting for someone to be 2 kHz off. most enforcement action i've seen comes from someone filing a complaint, usually because there's a pattern of behavior or the person is being a jerk on the air. one honest mistake where you didn't realize you drifted outside your priv? probably nothing. doing it repeatedly or intentionally jamming someone? that's when the pink tickets start showing up. that said the rules are the rules and ignorance isn't really a defense if it does come up, so worth knowing your band plan cold before you get on HF

so my brother in law has been into ham radio for years and finally convinced me to get my technician license. i downloaded some app and i guess theres an actual question pool you study from? like the real exam questions are in there somewhere? im a little confused because some of the questions seem totally random, like one second its asking about electrical safety and then the next its about like ionospheric propagation or whatever that means. do i need to actually understand all this stuff or is it more just memorize the answers and move on. i dont have a ton of time, maybe like 30-45 minutes a day to study. is that enough or am i kidding myself

so i finally did it after like two years of telling myself i was gonna study for the exam. passed technician last tuesday and my HT showed up thursday and yesterday i just keyed up on the local 2m repeater and said my callsign and some guy came back to me immediately. honestly wasnt expecting it to work that fast lol. we talked for maybe 10 minutes, he was super patient with me fumbling around with the radio trying to remember proper procedure. im still not totally sure i did everything right but he seemed happy to chat. anyway just wanted to say hi to the forum, been lurking here for months reading everything i could find

yeah the 20m drop thing has bit me too, i think sometimes its just the gateway being busy like the other guy said. one thing i do now is check the RMS list and pick two or three candidates before i even start a session so if the first one doesn't connect i can just swap frequencies and try the next without fumbling around. also make sure your clock is synced, VARA is pretty sensitive to system time being off even by like a second or two and ive had weird handshake failures traced back to that.

yeah what he said. i'll just add that when i was chasing WAS i was surprised how hard some states were compared to others. Delaware and Rhode Island gave me fits for like six months even though theyre right there on the east coast lol. anyway WAS is totally separate from DXCC, different application, different fee, you can chase them at the same time though which is what most people end up doing. once you start logging with one eye on entities you kind of automatically start watching for states too

had a 757GX years ago, fun radio. if its putting out evenly low across all bands that does point more to the PA than anything band-specific like a filter or LPF issue. discoloration on the transistor case is never a good sign, id pull it and check it out of circuit. just dont forget to check the bias pot while youre in there, sometimes they drift and thats all it takes to mess up the output.

welcome to the solar cycle 25 party haha. yeah 10m has been waking up pretty steadily over the last year or so. we're climbing toward solar maximum which some folks are saying might hit sometime in the next year or two depending on who you ask. when the SFI gets up above like 150 or so 10m can get absolutely wild, especially in the late morning and early afternoon your local time for north-south paths. for east-west into europe from north america late afternoon tends to be the magic window in my experience. for resources i mostly just check DXmaps.com and the solar weather stuff on hamqsl or whatever that widget site is. PSKreporter is also great because you can literally see where signals are landing in real time even if you're just listening, helps you figure out if a band is actually open or if you're chasing ghosts. dont sleep on 12m and 15m either when flux is elevated, those can be fantastic and way less chaotic than 10.

oh man i totally missed it then, i was out running errands all afternoon. this is why i need to set up some kind of alert or something. do you use any apps for that? someone in my club mentioned pskreporter but i havent really figured out how it works yet. im still pretty new to HF in general and all the propagation stuff kind of goes over my head but i want to learn it

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, sitting around 13wpm and feeling like my head is full lol. one thing that helped me a little bit was switching to head copy instead of writing everything down — like just listening and not even trying to write it out. felt impossible the first few days but after a week or so i noticed short words were just coming to me without thinking. still a work in progress but figured id mention it since nobody told me about that until pretty recently and it made a difference. good luck man its a slow road but worth it from what i hear

yagis are awesome but yeah the directionality thing bites you if all youre doing is local repeater stuff. i put up a 9 element m2 on a rotator a while back for 2m weak signal work and it's great for that but it would be completely overkill and kind of annoying for everyday repeater use. had to remember to rotate it toward the machine which sounds minor but gets old. left the x50 up on the other side of the chimney for exactly that reason, just use whichever depending on what im doing.

yeah that one is brutal today, pile is massive. im using 1kw and beam and still took me about 45 minutes. trick is to listen to their pattern - they seem to be working people calling about 7-12khz up from their transmit freq. dont just call randomly, figure out where theyre listening and call there. also short calls work better than long ones when the pile is this thick

so ive been doing single op for a few years now, mostly on 40 and 20 during sweepstakes and the occasional DX contest, and i keep seeing the top scores from guys running SO2R and i guess im just wondering at what point it makes sense to actually set that up vs just getting better at running a pile on one radio like i get the basic idea, you work a station on radio 1 while scanning for mults on radio 2, but actually implementing that without blowing up your front ends or getting RF into everything seems like a whole project in itself. i have a K3 and an old FT-950 sitting around that i barely use anymore so the hardware is kind of already there, but the filtering and antenna switching side of it sounds like a rabbit hole is there a point where your single radio rate is good enough that SO2R just adds noise (literally and figuratively) to your operating, or does it really make that much of a difference even for mid-tier contesters. my best effort was maybe 800 QSOs in a 24 hour period so im not breaking any records here but i do take it semi-seriously

so ive been running my IC-7300 pretty much stock since i got it a couple years ago and always read about people swapping out the stock oscillator for a proper TCXO upgrade, the kind that gets you down to like 0.5ppm stability or better. finally bit the bullet last month and had my buddy who does board-level work help me pull the stock one and drop in a Golledge unit we sourced from mouser. honestly i wasnt sure i'd notice a difference on SSB but running FT8 for a few sessions after the mod the drift is basically gone, like my offset just sits there. before the mod i'd see maybe 3-4hz of wander over a 30 minute session warming up, now it barely moves. also been doing some JS8Call nets where timing matters and yeah it feels tighter. anyone else gone down this road? curious if people have done the mod on other rigs too, i know the 7100 has a similar situation. also wondering if the AF filters are worth touching or if thats getting into diminishing returns territory for a radio that already has pretty decent DSP.

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and cant really make up my mind. my backyard is maybe 60 feet wide so a full size 40m dipole would basically span the whole thing end to end if i ran it straight, but i could probably get it up about 30 feet or so off the ground. the other option i keep thinking about is just putting up a vertical, maybe a trapped one or i could homebrew a quarter wave with some radials and actually have room to lay out maybe 8 or 10 radials without my wife completely losing it. ive been reading that a dipole at 30 feet on 40m is basically in the near field and wont do much for DX anyway, but then other guys say even a low dipole beats a vertical with a poor radial system. i guess my actual question is — for general ragchewing and some casual DX when conditions are good, which would you go with given that setup? im running about 100w, nothing crazy.

the ground thing gets so many people, i went through the exact same thing on my first install years ago. spent a whole afternoon with a noise canceling filter thinking that was the fix when all along it was just a bad ground path. once you know to look for it its one of the first things you check but nobody really warns you upfront on the fuse holder, i switched to using the blue sea systems marine grade ones after a similar experience. they cost a few bucks more but theyre designed to live in wet environments and ive never had one give me trouble. the radios in the truck see a lot of temperature swings and moisture and cheap fuse holders just dont hold up whats your SWR looking like on that whip? im always curious how those generic dual band mobiles do on 70cm especially, some of them are pretty mediocre up there

im still pretty new to chasing DX seriously so take this for what its worth but i got completely stomped trying to work a recent one on 17m and i think my problem was just not understanding split operation at all at first. i kept calling on the DX frequency like an idiot and probably just made things worse for everyone lol. once someone on the cluster actually explained what 1 up meant i felt pretty dumb but at least i know now.

so i finally did my first ever SOTA activation last weekend, been chasing summits for about 6 months and kept telling myself id get out there and actually do one. picked a pretty modest summit, W4T/SU-056 i think, only 4 points but figured it was a good one to start with since the trail wasnt too brutal and i knew id already be nervous enough without also dying on the way up brought my KX2 and a linked dipole i built from the sotabeams design, threw it up in an inverted V off a painter pole i strapped to my pack. got my four contacts to activate it but man the band conditions were rough that day, 20m was just dead for me, ended up working mostly on 40 which i wasnt expecting. spotted myself on SOTAwatch and got a little pileup going for maybe 10 minutes which was honestly really fun, way more fun than i thought it would be the thing that went wrong was i forgot to pre-program my summit reference into my logging app so i was trying to type it in by hand while also running the radio and it was just chaos. also brought way too much food and not enough water which is a classic mistake i guess anyway planning my second one for next month, thinking about trying a 6 pointer. any tips from people who do these regularly? especially curious how you handle logging in the field without losing your mind