David Brown

so i've been wanting to do this for a while and last weekend i finally got out there with my homebrew 40m DSB transceiver that ive been slowly putting together over the past few months. ran it off a 3ah lipo and a random wire up in a tree and honestly i was not expecting much but i worked 6 stations in about 2 hours which for 5 watts felt pretty incredible to me.
the rig itself is based on that W7ZOI design i found in the ARRL handbook, nothing fancy, just a VXO for the oscillator which means i'm kinda stuck around 7.030 give or take a bit but thats fine for CW. the whole thing fits in an old altoids tin basically, well the main board does, the PA stage and LPF are in a separate little enclosure i made from some scraps of aluminum i had laying around.
biggest thing i noticed is how much more you pay attention to propagation when every single db matters. like i was actually watching the greyline and thinking about where my signal might be going in a way i never really did with 100 watts. also realized pretty quick that my antenna situation matters WAY more than i ever appreciated before. had to retune like 3 times because the wind kept moving the wire around.
anyway just wanted to share because im pretty stoked about it and also curious if anyone else builds their own stuff and what bands you find most useful for portable QRP. thinking about doing a 20m version next but not sure if the extra complexity is worth it vs just sticking to 40m for parks stuff.

i was in the same boat about six months ago lol. what finally clicked for me was realizing LoTW and eQSL are totally separate systems with no connection to each other, so yeah you kind of do have to maintain both if you want the coverage. i use Log4OM and it can upload to both at the same time which helps a lot.
the confirmed count thing — once matches happen on LoTW they show up in your account and when you eventually go to apply for something like WAS or DXCC it pulls from that. so the confirmations are just sitting there waiting for you to use them basically. i was surprised how many i had built up without realizing it.

yeah what he said about third party traffic is the big one people mess up on. i actually got into an awkward situation a while back where a friend wanted to say hi to someone i was working DX with and i had to explain i couldnt just hand over the mic because the country we were talking to wasnt on the third party list. the guy thought i was being weird about it lol but its a real rule.
honestly for day to day stuff on vhf/uhf you probably dont need to stress too much about part 97 as a tech, just dont do anything obviously stupid and youll be fine. the rules exist more to prevent actual interference and misuse than to catch normal hams making honest mistakes

honestly the theory is not as bad as people make it out to be once you sit down with it. yeah there are questions about things like pi network matching and reactance calculations that look scary on paper but a lot of it clicks if you just watch a few youtube videos on the subject rather than trying to read through a dry textbook. i used the HamStudy app for like three weeks and passed no problem. the math questions that actually require calculating something are pretty rare and they tend to repeat, so once you drill those a dozen times you just remember the answer anyway.
as for the privileges being worth it on HF, absolutely yes in my opinion. getting access to those extra portions of 75, 40, and 20 especially is great when things get crowded. during a contest weekend youll notice real fast how packed the General segments get. took me a while to appreciate it but now i use those Extra-only segments pretty regularly.

the question pool being public is totally fine and legal, thats just how amateur radio licensing works in the US, the pool gets updated every few years and the actual exam questions come straight from it so yeah memorizing answers does work. that said i get what you mean about wanting to understand it. what i did was use hamstudy.org which is free and it shows you the questions in a kind of flashcard style but it also tracks which ones you keep getting wrong so you can focus on those. the electrical theory on the tech exam is honestly pretty basic, ohms law and some basic antenna stuff, nothing too crazy. gordon west is fine but i found the hamstudy site faster for actually retaining things. give yourself like 2-3 weeks of 20 minutes a day and you'll be fine, the test really isnt that hard

yeah speech processor being off is probably fine for now tbh, i ran mine off for about a year when i started and it really helped me learn what clean audio sounds like before i started messing with compression. once you add processing on top of bad fundamentals you just get a consistently bad sound instead of a variable bad sound lol
one thing that helped me a lot was actually recording myself — just plug a cheap usb audio interface into the radio acc port and record a few seconds of yourself talking, then play it back. its kind of embarrassing at first but you hear exactly what other people hear. changed everything for me when i realized i was way too close to the mic and getting a ton of proximity effect buildup in the lows

so i've been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. i looked it up and apparently you have to take a test? i dont really know where to start. like do i need to already know morse code or is that not a thing anymore. and what's the difference between the license levels, do i need to get them all or can i just get one and actually use a radio.
i've been looking at some websites but honestly a lot of them assume you already know stuff and i get kind of lost. is there like a straightforward way to study for this without buying a ton of books. also how hard is the test actually, i work full time so i dont have a huge amount of time to dedicate to this but i do want to actually do it

yeah i went through the same thing when i upgraded. one thing that helped me was just downloading the ARRL band plan pdf and keeping it open when i was getting started. its not the law but pretty much everyone follows it so if you stick to it you wont accidentally land in the middle of the DX window or whatever and have people annoyed at you. 40m can be kind of a zoo especially at night so just listen for a while before you transmit and youll get a feel for where stuff happens

yeah this hits close to home, we did something similar through our county ARES group about two years ago and the dead battery thing is SO common it's almost a running joke at this point except it really isn't funny when you think about why we're doing this. our EC basically instituted a rule after that drill where everyone has to do a comms check including battery verification before any activation, even for routine stuff, just to build the habit.
the ICS forms handoff problem you mentioned is a real one. we found that having a laminated quick reference card specifically for the message log format helped a lot for operators who don't use it regularly. muscle memory stuff. also we started doing 15-minute mini drills, like just net control handoffs, not a full exercise, just practice the one thing that keeps failing. that helped more than I expected honestly. the big multi-hour sims are important but sometimes drilling the one weak link is more efficient.
one thing nobody talks about enough in these exercises is the mental load on net control when traffic volume spikes. we simulated that by having a bunch of people all try to check in at once and our NC just kinda froze for a second. not a criticism of him, it just revealed something we hadn't thought about training for.

honestly the exam itself is very passable if you just grind the question pool, most people do it that way and there's no shame in that. but here's the thing — some of that theory actually does stick, especially the antenna stuff and the filter design questions, because once you start understanding why certain things work you start noticing it on the air. like i finally understood why my old tuner was acting weird on 80m after i actually worked through the impedance stuff. wouldnt have connected those dots before.
the privileges on the lower end of the bands are real though, thats not nothing. 40 meters especially there's a chunk below 7.175 thats general/extra only and on a crowded weekend that matters. i'd say just do it, the worst that happens is you learn some things and have to retake it once.

yeah this hits close to home, we did something similar through our county ARES group about two years ago and the dead battery thing is SO common it's almost a running joke at this point except it really isn't funny when you think about why we're doing this. our EC basically instituted a rule after that drill where everyone has to do a comms check including battery verification before any activation, even for routine stuff, just to build the habit.
the ICS forms handoff problem you mentioned is a real one. we found that having a laminated quick reference card specifically for the message log format helped a lot for operators who don't use it regularly. muscle memory stuff. also we started doing 15-minute mini drills, like just net control handoffs, not a full exercise, just practice the one thing that keeps failing. that helped more than I expected honestly. the big multi-hour sims are important but sometimes drilling the one weak link is more efficient.
one thing nobody talks about enough in these exercises is the mental load on net control when traffic volume spikes. we simulated that by having a bunch of people all try to check in at once and our NC just kinda froze for a second. not a criticism of him, it just revealed something we hadn't thought about training for.