James Thompson

so ive been using one of those cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongles for about a year now, mostly for listening to aircraft and poking around the VHF/UHF stuff, but lately ive been wanting to get into HF a bit more seriously. the upconverter route is kind of annoying me with the extra cables and the noise it adds, and someone at the club last month was going on about how the RSP1A just handles HF natively and the dynamic range is way better than anything you'll get out of a $30 dongle. the price jump to around $120 or so for the RSP1A feels significant but not crazy if it actually performs that much better. my main thing is i dont really do transmitting with SDR, this is all receive-only, mostly for monitoring and learning, some WSPR decoding, maybe trying to actually copy some shortwave stuff. i run SDR# mostly and a little gqrx when im on linux. anyone made this jump and actually noticed a difference in real world use or is it one of those things where the specs look better on paper but day to day its kinda similar? not really interested in the HackRF angle right now since i dont need TX and the price is higher, but open to hearing about it if theres a reason it makes sense for pure receive too.

so ive been thinking about getting my ham license for a while now and finally decided to go for it. im pretty good with electronics stuff from work but not sure what the best way to study is. heard there are apps and books and online stuff but dont know whats actually worth it. also is the test really that hard or are people just being dramatic about it

so ive been chasing DX for about 8 months now and just started getting into the whole cluster spotting thing and honestly its a bit overwhelming how many different tools there are. right now i have QRZ pulled up on one tab, DXwatch on another, and im also trying out DX Summit which someone mentioned on a different thread here. the problem is they all seem to show slightly different spots and im never sure which one to trust or if theyre even pulling from the same networks. like yesterday i saw a spot on DXwatch for a station in 3B8 that i really wanted to work and by the time i found them on QRZ to check their info and then tuned around, the spot was already like 10 minutes old and whoever it was had moved on. do most people just pick one and stick with it or is there some way to filter these better so youre not jumping between tabs constantly. also is there an app that does this better on android because sitting at the desktop the whole time isnt always practical

FT8 through remote is doable but you have to be a little creative about it. what most people do is run WSJT-X on the remote machine itself rather than trying to do it from the client end -- that way the timing is local to where the radio is and the internet latency doesnt matter for the decode/transmit timing. you just need a way to kick off transmissions remotely which some people handle with scripts or just leaving a remote desktop session open alongside the RemoteHams client. its a bit clunky but i worked about 40 countries last winter doing exactly that on 17m so it definitely works. the audio latency thing i have no good answer for honestly, mine does it too sometimes and i never figured out why

So I finally got my general license back in the spring and ive been mostly just doing some casual ragchewing on 40m and a little bit of digital stuff but my elmer keeps telling me i need to try a real contest at least once to see what all the fuss is about. He specifically mentioned CQ WW coming up and said it would be a good one to start with because of how many stations are active. I guess my question is kind of twofold — one is like, where do I even start with the exchange and logging and all that, and two is honestly just whether its worth the effort for a relatively new operator who doesnt have a great antenna situation. Im running a G5RV in my backyard which is fine but nothing special. Also been hearing people talk about SOTA activations being a good low pressure alternative to big contests if youre not ready for the craziness, is that true? I looked it up and it seems like a completely different vibe. Anyway any advice from people who have done CQ WW or Field Day or any of the big ones would be appreciated. I dont want to feel like a total idiot when i get on the air.

so ive been running an IC-7300 for about three years now and honestly its been a great radio, no real complaints. but ive had this nagging feeling lately that im leaving performance on the table especially when the bands get crowded during contests or even just a busy saturday afternoon on 40m. a buddy of mine picked up a 7610 last fall and wont stop going on about the dual watch and the improved dynamic range. i did some reading on the receiver specs and yeah the 7610 numbers look better on paper but i honestly cant tell if that translates to anything meaningful in a typical suburban shack with a modest antenna setup. my antennas are nothing special — a trapped vertical for 80-10 and a wire dipole for 40 that i mostly use for ragchewing. im not a serious contester, maybe do a few hours of field day and the occasional cw sprint. so the question is whether someone in my situation would actually hear or feel any difference or if the 7610 is really for guys running stacked yagis and doing serious SO2R work. the price difference is pretty significant and i could spend that money on antenna improvements instead which might actually make more sense.

so ive been running my TM-D710G with the built in TNC for a few months now and i set the beacon rate to every 30 seconds because i wanted good position resolution when i was mobile. started getting some passive aggressive comments on the local APRS frequency about flooding the channel and now im second guessing myself. the thing is im actually moving most of the time when i key it up, driving between job sites, so it feels like 30 seconds actually makes sense from a tracking perspective. but i also know the digipeaters in my area are pretty active and i dont want to be that guy clogging up 144.390. whats a reasonable rate for mobile use? i thought the whole point of SmartBeaconing was to handle this dynamically but i havent fully configured it yet. does anyone actually use SmartBeaconing and does it work well in practice or is it more trouble than its worth to tune properly

went through this last year when I upgraded to Extra and grabbed a 1x2 call. the ae7q site that the other guy mentioned is really the go-to, i basically lived on it for a few weeks while i was searching for available calls i actually liked. one thing i'll add is don't get too attached to any specific call before you check how much activity it has had — some calls that look available have actually been held or are in some weird limbo state and you wont realize until you dig into it. also worth knowing that the $35 fee is nonrefundable so if you apply for something and lose the window draw you're out that money and have to apply again for something else. not a huge deal but something to keep in mind if your on a budget.

so i've been building this 40m direct conversion receiver from scratch, mostly following the W7ZOI designs from Experimental Methods but adapting a few things because i couldn't source the exact toroids and ended up winding my own on T50-2 cores. anyway the thing actually receives signals now which is honestly more than i expected given how many times i reflowed the NE602 pads. the problem is theres this hum riding on everything. not horrible but noticeable enough that its annoying on weak signals. im pretty sure its 60hz or maybe 120hz, i havent scoped it yet but it kind of pulses at that rate. the power supply is a little wall wart i had laying around, regulated 12v but who knows how clean it really is. audio chain is just the NE602 into an LM386 with a cap on pin 7 to knock down the gain a bit. anyone dealt with this on a DC receiver before? i added a 100uf across the supply rails already but im wondering if i need to do more filtering or if the issue is more likely ground loops or something in the AF stage. the whole thing is built ugly style on a chunk of copper clad so grounding should be decent but maybe not.

i'd throw a vote in for looking at the HackRF too if you want something that does TX eventually, totally different use case but just worth knowing its in that same price neighborhood. for pure receive though the SDRplay stuff does have a better front end than a stock dongle, no question. dump1090 will keep working fine obviously since thats 1090 MHz and any of these handles that easy.

one thing nobody told me when i built my first kit was to actually TEST it before you need it. like actually deploy the whole thing in your backyard or wherever and run it for a few hours. i found two broken coax connectors and a power cable that had a bad crimp just doing that. would've been a nightmare if i found that at an actual event also consider a checklist that lives in the bag. every time you deploy and pack back up you go through it. its the kind of thing that feels like overkill until the one time you leave your mic at home

this is actually really helpful to read, im still pretty new to ARES stuff and honestly was a little intimidated going into our first activation-level drill next month. good to know even experienced groups hit snags with the basics. makes me feel better about not having everything memorized yet haha question though — how do you handle operators who show up and are kind of out of practice? do you pair them with someone or just let them figure it out during the drill so they know what to work on?

yeah that hollow phasey sound is classic direct conversion stuff, its just the nature of the beast honestly. youre hearing both sidebands at once so audio kinda folds back on itself. not much you can do about that without going phasing or weaver architecture. the rumble though, that does sound like a grounding issue or maybe the LM386 oscillating at low freq. those chips are notorious for that, you got a 10uF from pin 7 to ground? and a 0.047uF from pin 1 to 8 if you want more gain? if those bypass caps arent there it will do exactly what you're describing. also check how close your audio wiring runs to the oscillator section. even a centimeter or two of unshielded wire near the LO can inject hum harmonics into the audio path in a weird way that doesnt look like hum on the scope but sure sounds like it.

so ive been noticing for the past couple weeks that 20m seems really inconsistent. some days i can work europe no problem in the afternoons, other days i cant even hear anything past maybe 1000 miles. checked the solar flux index a few times and it seems like its been bouncing around a lot, like anywhere from low 140s up to 170 or so. not sure if thats normal for this part of the cycle or what. i'm running about 100w into a dipole up about 30 feet, nothing fancy. worked my first JA station last thursday which was exciting, then the very next day the band sounded completely dead by 2pm local time. buddy of mine said there was a geomagnetic storm or something? i dont really understand how all that ties together honestly. like i get the basic concept of the ionosphere bouncing signals but the details of what affects it day to day still kinda confuses me. anyone have a good way to track this stuff or know what the flux has to look like before 10m actually opens up

the gordon west book is fine but i'd honestly just use the hamstudy or hamexam sites, that's what most people do now. the book feels a bit dated. thing is the actual exam questions come straight from the published pool so if you can consistently pass practice tests you're going to pass the real thing, that's just how it works. one thing i'd say though, dont just memorize and move on if you actually want to use HF. like understanding why a dipole cut for 40m is about 66 feet will actually help you when you're trying to set something up in your backyard and nothing is making sense. same with impedance matching, if you ever run into SWR issues it helps to not be totally lost. the license is one thing but actually getting on HF and having it make sense is a different project. 20 and 40 meters is where i'd start once you're on the air, lots of activity and pretty forgiving bands to learn on.

so ive been messing around with remote station control for about 6 months now and i finally got a somewhat stable setup but im not totally happy with it. running a K3 at the home QTH with a raspi handling the audio routing and using RemoteHams client software on the laptop end. works okay on 40m and 20m but anything above like 15m gets choppy audio and i cant figure out if its a latency thing or something in my codec settings. what got me curious is i started looking at adding an SDR receiver in parallel — i have an old RTL-SDR dongle sitting around and was thinking i could feed that into the remote setup so i have a wider panadapter view while operating. seen some stuff about RemoteHams having SDR support but the docs are kinda sparse and half the forum posts i find are from like 2017 so who knows if any of it still applies. also curious if anyone has done internet linking through this kind of setup, not talking about echolink or anything like that, more like bridging two remote stations so a buddy of mine who runs a remote in vermont could relay through my station. maybe thats overthinking it but the idea has been rattling around. anyone done something similar or know if the latency just kills it?

hamstudy.org is honestly all you need for the tech exam, I wouldnt even bother buying a book unless you really want to understand the theory behind everything. the question pool is public so you're basically just learning the 400-some questions that could show up. spend maybe 20-30 minutes a day on hamstudy for a couple weeks and watch your practice scores creep up, once you're hitting 85% or above consistently you're probably ready to go sit for it. the exam itself is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass. most of the questions are pretty straightforward once you've gone through them a few times, there's some basic electrical stuff but nothing that should trip you up too badly. the antenna and propagation questions can be a little weird at first but they click eventually. find a local club doing a session through arrl.org and just go do it, worst case you pay the fee again and try once more. honestly its not that hard, most people I know passed first try.

Had something similar on my D72 a while back. Check whether the messaging is actually enabled on the radio — on the 710 there's a separate toggle for APRS messaging vs just beacon mode, it's easy to have one on and the other off. Also worth checking if your buddy's station is set up to ACK messages properly, because without the acknowledgment packet coming back the radio might just be silently dropping them. The message queue on those Kenwoods can also fill up and stop accepting new ones if you've got a bunch of unacked messages piled up in there, which happens more than people realize.

so i finally got my general last spring and joined the local ARES group about two months ago. been going to the monthly nets and did one tabletop exercise but now our EC is saying theres a real activation coming up, county emergency management wants us on standby for a severe weather event this weekend and im kind of nervous about it. like i know the basics, ive got my go-bag mostly sorted out, HT plus my mobile rig, extra batteries, the ICS forms we went over. but theres a difference between doing a drill and actually being deployed right? i dont really know what the flow is like once you show up to the EOC. do they tell you what to do or are you kind of expected to just... know? our EC is great but i havent had a chance to ask him before posting this anyone been through their first activation and have any advice? or things you wish you had brought that werent on the standard checklist

i just passed mine like two months ago so it's still pretty fresh. the filter stuff and the Smith chart questions were the ones that got me the most, i wont lie. but honestly once you just accept that youre gonna memorize some of it without fully understanding the deep theory behind it, it gets less stressful. some of the questions i can now explain from first principles and some i just knew the answer from seeing it a hundred times in the practice tests. both work fine for passing. the extra HF segments have been nice for 40 and 80 meter phone when things get crowded on a weekend. not a huge deal but its there.

ok so i just got my technician license last month and ive been trying to figure out exactly what i can and cant do. i know technicians are limited but the band plan stuff is confusing me. like i was reading part 97 and i think i can use some HF but only certain modes on certain bands? and then someone at my club said something about phone privileges and i got even more confused. my main question is whether i can talk on 10 meters with just a tech license or do i need to upgrade first. also is there somewhere that explains all this in plain english because the actual FCC document is kind of hard to parse

yeah the band plan stuff trips up a lot of new generals, dont feel bad. the short version is that on most HF bands the lower portion is reserved for extra class and general gets everything above that. so on 40m for example the bottom chunk of the phone segment is extra only and you have to stay above a certain frequency for phone. CW is a bit different because the whole CW portion is usually open to all license classes but there are still sub-band edges you need to know. best thing i can tell you is go straight to Part 97 on the FCC website and look at section 97.301 and 97.305 — those two together lay out exactly who can operate where and what modes. the ARRL also has a printable band plan card that color codes it pretty well, way better than random websites. honestly once you stare at it for a while it clicks, its not as bad as it seems at first

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and i keep reading about how CW is this whole other world and people seem to really love it. i upgraded to general last month partly so i could actually use the HF bands but i still have no idea where to even start with morse. like do people still learn the dit dah chart by memorizing each letter or is there a better way now i downloaded one app that just showed me a table of all the characters and i sat there trying to memorize it like flashcards for a few days and it wasnt really sticking. someone at my club mentioned something called the koch method? i looked it up a little but im not totally sure i understand how its supposed to work in practice. is that what most people use or is there something else thats worked better for you also not sure what speed to start at, some stuff i read says go slow so you can hear each dit and dah clearly but other stuff says start fast so you learn the sound of the whole letter not the individual parts. honestly pretty confused. any advice appreciated

yeah that edge of the passband thing is real and it works way more often than people think. the DX op is usually sweeping across his listening range and if 80% of the callers are stacked at the bottom he might only spend a second or two there before moving up. if youre sitting at the top of his range youre getting more of his attention per sweep basically. on 160 its a whole different animal though. timing matters a lot more because propagation windows can be really short and the noise floor is brutal on both ends. i try to listen to the DX signal for a few minutes and figure out if he has a pattern — some ops work strictly low to high, some jump around, some work by region. if you can figure out the pattern youre ahead of 90% of the pileup. also on top band i find that sending your callsign once clearly beats sending it three times in a row because the ops copy better when theyre not trying to dig through a wall of noise. less is more. i run about 500w into a full size vertical with a decent radial field and that helps but ive worked some tough ones at lower power too when the timing was right