James Thompson

so the FCC part is actually pretty straightforward once you see it laid out. for 40m phone, generals get 7.225 to 7.300 MHz. that's it for voice. so 7.200 is actually not in your phone privileges as a general — that's the lower edge of the extra class phone segment. easy mistake to make because a lot of older charts floating around online still show the pre-2007 allocations which were different.
as for band edges, the concern is basically that if you're running USB on 7.300 your signal's upper sideband components extend above that. so you could technically be putting energy outside the allocation even if your carrier is right at the edge. most people just give it a few kHz of breathing room. 7.295 or so and you're fine. same thing applies at the bottom of your segment, 7.225 — don't park your carrier right there. your radio won't stop you, which is kind of the whole point of actually knowing this stuff before you key up

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

i went from an FT-991A to the 7300 about two years ago and honestly the waterfall spoiled me within like the first week. cant imagine going back to hunting by ear now. the JA on 17m thing is exactly the kind of moment that makes you realize how much you were missing.
one thing — check your noise blanker settings if you havent already. out of the box mine was set kind of aggressively and it was doing weird things on 40m near some local powerline noise. once i dialed that back the audio cleaned up quite a bit and i dont know if thats related to what you're hearing but it might be worth checking.

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 blowing everyone out of the passband thing is classic too-much-power problem. with linear transponders you really do want to run the absolute minimum you can get away with, like seriously back off until you can just barely hear yourself and thats probably about right. 5 watts on a yagi might actually be too much depending on your antenna gain and the satellite's AGC behavior. AO-73 in particular is pretty sensitive.
on the doppler question -- for a linear transponder the way i think about it is the downlink is your reference. you tune your downlink so you can hear yourself (or hear the passband clearly) and then correct the uplink to put yourself where you want to be in the passband. in practice what that means is you tune downlink for doppler all the time as it changes, and you tune uplink to find your signal. once you hear yourself, you mostly leave uplink alone unless you're drifting out of the passband, and keep chasing the downlink frequency as the bird moves. gpredict can actually drive your radio directly via hamlib if you want to try that, makes the doppler chase way less frantic during a short pass.

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

so ive had this thing for about three weeks now and figured id post something since i spent forever reading other peoples impressions before buying. coming from an old ft-857d that i was using as a base which... yeah i know, not ideal but it worked.
the waterfall alone was worth it honestly. i know everyone says that and it sounds like marketing speak but when youre actually sitting there tuning around 40m at night and you can just see whats going on across the whole band its genuinely different. found a couple dx stations i would have completely scrolled past before.
main thing i wasnt expecting was how much i had to mess with the settings out of the box. the default TX audio profile did not sound great on my voice, had to spend a couple evenings tweaking the parametric eq and the bass/treble to get reports that werent just 'you sound a bit muffled'. not a complaint really just wasnt expecting it to need that much work upfront.
RF direct sampling is interesting, still trying to fully wrap my head around what that means practically vs what i had before. receiver sensitivity seems noticeably better on 17 and 12 meters compared to the 857 but im not sure how much of that is the radio vs my antenna situation changed slightly when i remounted stuff last month.
anyway if anyones on the fence and been running something older, it feels like a real upgrade. not groundbreaking in any single area but the whole package is just... cleaner. shack looks tidier too which my wife appreciated

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

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

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

totally get the confusion, i went through the same thing when i started. so the short version is that LoTW is basically the gold standard if you care about DXCC or other ARRL awards because those only accept LoTW confirmations now, eQSL has its own award system but it's separate and not universally accepted for the big ones. the certificate setup for LoTW is a bit of a pain the first time but honestly once you get your TQSL configured and your certificate sorted it's pretty much just drag and drop your ADIF log file and you're done. worth doing sooner rather than later because your log credits go back to your first QSO once you're set up.
for the bureau — yeah it goes through ARRL for US hams, you basically get a small box of incoming paper cards from other countries once or twice a year depending on how active your section is. outgoing bureau means you send your paper cards to a sorting address and they route them to the right country's bureau. it's slow, like months or even over a year sometimes, but its basically free compared to sending direct. for rare dx stations that require a paper card for some awards or just for the wall, direct mail with a self addressed envelope and a couple bucks or a few IRCs used to be the way, though honestly a lot of dx stations now accept LoTW or have a manager who does
i'd say get LoTW set up first since that's where the awards credits live, keep running eQSL because a lot of casual operators use it and it doesnt hurt, and do paper cards for the ones that matter to you personally. some people love the physical card, some people dont bother at all anymore

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.

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