Sarah Garcia

so ive been chasing decent SSB audio for probably two years now and i feel like i finally have a handle on what actually matters vs what people just say matters. figured id share and see if anyone disagrees because im sure someone will the mic gain thing is way more important than people give it credit for. i spent months thinking my audio sounded thin because of the radio or the mic and it turned out i was just running the mic gain too hot and clipping the front end of the tx chain. ALC should be barely moving on voice peaks, not slamming. once i got that sorted everything downstream sounded better basically for free compression is the other one that people seem to either crank all the way up because they want to sound loud or leave off entirely. somewhere in the middle is where the usable range is. too much and you sound like youre calling from inside a tin can, too little and you just disappear into the noise on a marginal path. i run mine at maybe 3-4 on the rig's built-in processor and that seems to work the thing i still havent totally figured out is whether an outboard processor like a box from Behringer or whatever actually does more than the built in stuff on something like an IC-7300 or if its just snake oil for most contacts. anybody actually done a proper comparison on this not just going by what sounds good to yourself in a monitor

i made my first EME contact last spring on 2m with a single M2 2M9SSB yagi and a TE Systems amp running about 400w, so it can be done but like the other guy said your partner has to be a big station. worked W5UN which is kind of cheating because those guys have like 16 yagis but still, it counts. the EMElogger software and WSJT-X setup is pretty straightforward honestly, getting everything mechanically pointed right at the moon is where i spent most of my debugging time. i was off by more than i expected the first few tries. get a good moon tracking program and double check your antenna elevation range before you commit to anything because some fixed-mount antennas wont go high enough when the moon is near zenith depending on your latitude

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now, general class, and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is for weak signal stuff and dx and whatever else. i get it, i want to learn. but every time i try to figure out how to actually start learning it i go down some rabbit hole and end up more confused than when i started. like some people say learn the alphabet first with flashcards or whatever, other people say no you have to do the koch method, and then theres the whole thing about whether you should learn at slow speeds or fast speeds with longer gaps. i tried one of those apps for like a week and it felt like nothing was sticking at all. im not sure if i was doing it wrong or if im just bad at this. does anyone have experience actually going from zero to being able to have a real qso? how long did it take and what did you actually use to practice. any advice would help honestly

so ive been listening a lot lately and people throw around all these abbreviations and im kind of lost. like i know QSL means like a confirmation card thing but then i hear people say QRM and QRN and QSB and honestly i have no idea what half of them mean in context. someone said QRP to me and i thought they were asking me something but apparently its about power levels? i dont know is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just kind of pick up on it over time. also whats the difference between saying 73 and just saying goodbye, is there a situation where you wouldnt use 73

yeah the D710 internal TNC thing is something I fought with for a while too. one thing that bit me was i had the wrong baud rate set somewhere deep in the menu — it was doing 9600 when the network expects 1200 on VHF APRS. probably not your issue if you were ever decoded but worth a look. also are you using the APRS mode through the front panel UI or did you hook up a computer and use APRSIS32 or something over the serial port? because if both are trying to key the radio at the same time that can cause weird one-off behavior like what you described.

yeah what he said about the inversion is the big thing, caught me out too when i first tried it. gpredict will do doppler on both vfos if you set it up right but you have to tell it which mode the transponder is using otherwise its just guessing. theres a transponder database file you can load in and that helps a lot. also i found it easier to start with a high elevation pass, like 40 degrees or more, because youve got more time and the doppler rate isnt as crazy right at AOS and LOS when the bird is low on the horizon

so ive been playing around with cluster spotting for the past few weeks and honestly its kind of overwhelming how many different tools there are. i mostly use QRZ for callsign lookups obviously but i just noticed they have that live bandmap thing built into the logbook and i didnt even realize it was pulling from cluster spots until my friend pointed it out last week anyway i also started using DXwatch on a second monitor and i kind of just watch both at the same time now which probably isnt the most efficient way to do this. my question is really whether theres some smarter way to filter the spots because right now i get slammed with like 200+ spots when 20m opens up in the afternoon and i cant tell which ones are actually workable from here in the midwest vs stuff thats only showing up because someone in europe spotted it also does anyone use the phone apps for this? i downloaded Ham Radio Deluxe a while back but never really dug into the cluster features. theres also that DX Toolkit app i keep seeing mentioned but i dont know if its worth paying for or whatever

yeah pskreporter is definitely more of a propagation/wspr/ft8 tool, you're right about that. for actual dx cluster stuff i bounced around a lot before landing on DX Summit which pulls from the same underlying network as dxwatch but the filtering on summit feels a bit more reliable to me personally. that said dxwatch is fine and most guys at my club use it no problem. the two-tab thing is pretty much what everyone does honestly. i know some of the fancier logging programs like log4om or even dx4win can pull spots directly into the software so you dont have to switch windows, but thats more setup than most people bother with when theyre just starting to chase dx casually. if you ever get into contesting the integrated spot browser becomes way more useful but for regular hunting it probably doesnt matter much. one thing i'd say — dont sleep on the telnet cluster access if your logging software supports it. connecting direct to a node like gb7mbc or one of the na nodes gives you spots a few seconds faster than the web interfaces which actually does matter sometimes when a rare one pops up and the pileup fills in fast

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state wildlife management area near me, KFF-something i'll have to look it up again. i've been doing POTA for about a year and a half and someone at our club mentioned WWFF so i figured why not try it out since the reference was literally like 20 minutes from my house. brought the KX3 and a random wire up in a tree, nothing fancy. the activation itself went fine, i made way more than the 44 contacts needed which honestly surprised me because i wasnt sure how many chasers were out there for WWFF vs POTA. spotted myself on the WWFF spotter network and the pileup came pretty quick actually. couple things i'm fuzzy on though -- do you log WWFF and POTA separately if the reference overlaps? i think this particular WMA might qualify for both but i'm not 100% sure how that works on the backend. also is there a preferred exchange for WWFF or do people just do signal report and reference like in POTA? i kind of winged it and just gave my signal report and the KFF number and everyone seemed fine with it but wondering if theres a more standard way people do it.

No rule that says you have to use phonetics every single time, it's more situational. On a clear quiet net with a strong signal you can just say your call and everyone hears it fine. But when conditions are rough, there's QRM, or your signal is marginal, phonetics make a huge difference because letters like B, D, E, P, T, V all sound almost identical in noise. The real purpose is making sure the other station copies your call correctly so they can log it right. As for making up words when you forget the NATO one, honestly most people don't care that much on casual ragchews. You'll hear guys say things like "Nebraska" instead of November or whatever. In a contest or during emergency traffic handling that's a different story, you want standard phonetics because the person on the other end is copying fast and the standard words are chosen specifically because they sound distinct from each other. Just keep practicing and it'll become second nature pretty quickly.

so ive been a Tech for about a year and a half now and mostly just been doing local VHF/UHF stuff, some APRS, helped out with a couple ARES nets. but lately ive been really curious about HF and everyone keeps telling me to just go upgrade already. my question is basically how hard is the General exam compared to Tech? i remember the Tech exam being not too bad but i also studied for like 3 weeks. im mostly worried about the electronics theory stuff and the regulations questions because ive heard those can be tricky. also does it matter which study guide i use or is the HamStudy website thing enough? i dont really have a lot of time to sit down with a book right now with work being crazy but i want to get this done before summer so i can actually use HF when propagation is decent

nice, i did almost the exact same thing last spring except i used a 1:1 ugly balun instead of winding a proper choke. been meaning to redo the feedpoint with a real balun but it works well enough that i keep putting it off. what toroid did you wind yours on, the FT240-43 or a mix 31? ive seen both recommended for HF and never really understood the difference for this application

the 7300 is probably the right call for what you described but dont sleep on used either. ive seen 7300s go for like 850-900 in decent shape on qrz classifieds lately which makes it an easier decision. one thing i'll throw out there — if you ever think you might get more serious about contesting or weak signal stuff down the road the gap between the 7300 and something like a 7610 is pretty significant on the receive side, but that's also like double the money so maybe not relevant for casual operating. my shack has a 7300 as the main rig and honestly for FT8 and general HF poking around its hard to beat at the price. just make sure your PC's USB drivers dont do anything weird when you set up wsjt-x, theres a known thing with some windows 11 builds that causes audio droputs, easy fix but annoying if you dont know to look for it.

i got my first EME contact last spring with a 4x9el array and 1kw, took me forever to actually get it working right but it happened. the preamp thing is 100% true what the other guy said, i had mine in the shack initially and it was a mess. moved it to the mast and suddenly I could actually decode stuff. dont underestimate how much the azimuth and elevation accuracy matters too — i spent a weekend just getting my rotor calibration right because i was consistently off by a few degrees and that was killing me on narrow beamwidth

so ive been on SSB for about a year now and honestly my audio reports are all over the place. sometimes people say i sound great, other times i get told i sound like im underwater or too bassy or something. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 through the headset adapter and i thought that combo was supposed to be basically plug and play but clearly im missing something. ive messed with the TX bandwidth settings a little bit, tried going from 2.4k down to 1.8k thinking it might clean things up but honestly cant tell if it made a difference. somebody on a net told me to check my ALC and make sure its not peaking too hard but i dont really know what level its supposed to sit at. ive also got the mic gain probably too high now that i think about it, i cranked it a while back and never touched it again. anyone have a rough starting point for mic gain and ALC on the 7300 for SSB voice? or just general tips for getting cleaner audio. i feel like theres a whole art to this that nobody explains upfront when youre getting into HF

so ive been licensed about two years now and i keep hearing people talk about DXCC and WAS and all these awards but i never really understood how the whole credit system works. like do you have to send in paper QSL cards or can you do it all through Logbook of the World? my elmer back when i first got licensed mentioned LoTW but kind of glossed over how it connects to actual award credit. i've worked what i think is maybe 40 or 50 countries so far just messing around on 20m SSB and a little FT8 and someone in a pileup last week told me i should start logging more carefully if i want to chase DXCC. i guess i have been a little sloppy about confirming contacts and i dont even know how many of those 50 countries have actually confirmed back. is it too late to go back and get confirmations for older contacts or does it have to be done within a certain window? also how does WAZ work, is that totally separate from DXCC or do the same contacts count toward both? feels like theres a whole universe of award chasing i never knew about and im not sure where to even start

so i finally got activated for real last weekend, not just a drill. there was a pretty bad storm system that knocked out power across a few counties and our EC called everyone in around 10pm. i've been doing the monthly nets and the SET last fall but this was the first time it was actually real and i have to say the adrenaline is something else compared to just practicing. we were stationed at the county EOC and i was handling HF traffic to a neighboring county while two other guys ran VHF simplex to some of the served agencies. honestly went smoother than i expected but there were a few things that caught me off guard. one was how long we ended up being there -- i packed for maybe 4 hours and we ended up doing almost 11 hours in shifts. nobody told me to bring food which sounds dumb but i just assumed it would be shorter based on the drills. the other thing that tripped me up was ICS stuff. i know we did ICS-100 and 200 online but when the actual incident commander started talking about resource requests and check-in procedures it got a little confusing fast. i kept up but i felt like i was half a step behind the whole time. anyway just wondering if others have tips for being better prepared for longer activations and also whether there are any ICS courses beyond 200 that are actually worth doing for an ARES member who isnt going to be an EC or anything, just a regular operator

im kind of in the same boat, been licensed about 8 months and still catch myself going blank when someone throws out something i havent heard before. QRN got me for a while too. what helped me was just spending a lot of time listening before i tried to talk much, like just tuning around 40m in the evenings and following conversations even if i wasnt jumping in. you start to pick up context pretty fast that way. also the ARRL has a pretty decent operating manual that breaks down the common ones without burying you in the obscure stuff, might be worth checking out if you havent already

the UDP thing with WSJT-X tripped me up too for a while. make sure in WSJT-X settings under reporting you have the UDP server set to 127.0.0.1 and the port matches what Log4OM is listening on, i think its 2237 by default but check the Log4OM config because sometimes it gets set different on install. also Windows firewall was silently blocking it on my machine and i spent like two hours staring at it before i figured that out. as for switching, i still use N1MM for any serious contesting because honestly nothing touches it for that, the SO2R stuff and the rate display and just the overall speed of it during a run is hard to beat. but Log4OM as my everyday shack log has been really solid, the award tracking and the LoTW sync is way nicer than trying to do it manually. i just export an ADIF from N1MM after each contest and import it, takes five minutes. not that different from what youre doing except i actually do it right away instead of letting it pile up

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for the tech license. i downloaded like three different apps and bought a study guide book from amazon but honestly im kind of overwhelmed. like there's a lot of stuff about electrical theory and regulations that i dont really understand and im not sure how much of it i actually need to know vs just memorizing the answers to the question pool. is it better to just do the practice tests over and over or actually try to learn the material? some people told me just memorize the pool and youll be fine but that feels kind of wrong? i dont know. also how long did it take you guys to feel ready for the actual exam

yeah im planning on it, went last year too and honestly the swap meet tables outside were way better than the main floor. got there early like 6:30 before it even officially opened and the serious sellers were already set up. if you wait til noon half the good stuff is gone or the prices go back up because people figure out what they have. bring cash, some of these older guys dont do venmo or whatever

yeah the windows driver thing with HackRF is real, you basically have to use Zadig to swap in the WinUSB driver and then some software plays nice and some doesnt. its not terrible once you do it once but if you reinstall windows or plug it into another machine you gotta remember all that again. SDRplay honestly just works, their driver installer is pretty painless. one thing nobody mentioned — if youre doing HF seriously you might also want to think about what antenna youre feeding it. even the best SDR front end gets hurt by a bad noise floor at the antenna side. i was chasing my tail with front end comparisons for weeks before i realized half my problem was RF coming in on the USB cable. ferrite on the USB helped more than i expected actually.

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and i think im just spinning my wheels at this point. currently running a half wave dipole for 40m fed with coax, its up about 25 feet in an inverted V configuration with the apex tied to a tree. works okay but i feel like im leaving something on the table especially for DX, most of my contacts are stateside which is fine but i keep hearing these guys working EU and JA with no trouble and im just not getting through. someone at the club meeting suggested a vertical with radials would give me better low angle radiation and help with DX. that makes sense to me in theory but then i also read that a dipole at low heights is more of a cloud warmer anyway so maybe i just need to get it higher. my lot isnt huge so getting it much above 30 feet is going to be tough without a real tower situation which im not ready for financially. does the vertical actually make that big a difference or is 25 feet just always going to be a compromise on 40m regardless of antenna type

the koch method is definitely the way to go, forget the dit-dah chart stuff, it really does create bad habits and you end up counting instead of just hearing the characters. the whole idea is you learn at full speed from the start, like 15 or 20 wpm character speed even if the words come slow, so your brain learns the sound not the pattern. LCWO dot net is free and thats what most people use to actually do the Koch lessons, you just work through the letters one at a time and dont move on until you can copy at like 90% accuracy. as for the key question, honestly start with whatever you have. a straight key is fine for learning the rhythm and getting a feel for it, some people swear by it for building timing. paddles are nice later on but they require a keyer and theres a bit more to think about at first. dont overthink the gear side of it, the learning is all in your ears anyway. expect the first few weeks to feel totally useless, thats normal, somewhere around week 3 or 4 it usually starts clicking.

QRN vs QRM tripped me up forever too lol. the way i finally remembered it was N for natural, M for man-made. static from a thunderstorm = QRN, some guy running a plasma tv near the repeater = QRM. thats it, thats the whole trick. also worth knowing QRP means low power operation, youll see that a lot in threads here