Christopher Davis

ha i did the exact same thing my first net check-in, stepped right on somebody and wanted to just shut the radio off and pretend it never happened. net control just moved on like nothing happened which honestly made me feel better. one thing that helped me was pulling up the net's audio on echolink a couple times before i actually tried checking in, just so i could hear how people were doing it and how fast the pacing was. not all nets do echolink but some do. anyway you'll get comfortable with it fast, after like two or three check-ins it starts feeling pretty natural

so i heard the Tri-County club is doing their annual thing this saturday, supposed to be at the fairgrounds again. havent been in a couple years, last time i went the swap meet tables were pretty picked over by the time i showed up around noon. thinking about getting there early this year if i can drag myself out of bed lol. anyone else planning on going? wondering if its worth the drive, its like 45 minutes for me

so i finally did my first serious contest run during CQ WW SSB last month and i dont even know where to start. ive been licensed about two years and mostly just rag chewed on 40m with the locals, maybe did a couple SOTA activations which were great but very chill, nothing like this. my buddy kept telling me to try a real contest and i kept putting it off because it seemed like a lot of stress and honestly kind of overwhelming just listening to a busy band during a contest is intimidating enough. anyway i sat down saturday morning with my IC-7300 and a wire dipole, nothing fancy, and just started calling CQ on 20m. within like the first hour i had worked stations in 12 different countries which is more dxcc entities than i had in my entire logbook up to that point. the rate was insane at times, like 60-70 contacts per hour which for me felt like i was barely keeping up. log4om was open on the other screen and i was still figuring out the macros midway through. total chaos honestly. by sunday i was exhausted but had something like 380 contacts in the log and managed to hit every continent except Antarctica which i guess is just always going to be hard. already looking at the ARRL DX contest coming up in february and thinking about trying some CW runs which terrifies me but in a good way. anyone else remember their first big contest? does it always feel this addictive or does it calm down eventually lol

the single biggest thing i can tell you is dont learn it visually. like dont sit there memorizing dot dash dot for R or whatever. you want to hear the rhythm and just know the letter, same way you dont sound out every letter when you read a word. the Koch method is what most people recommend and honestly it works, you start with just two characters at full speed like 20wpm and you dont add a new one until you can copy the ones you have at 90% accuracy or so. sounds slow but it actually builds the right habits. LC Morse Trainer and LCWO dot net are both free and do the Koch method. i used LCWO and it took me maybe 4 months of like 15-20 minutes a day before i could pull calls out of a pileup at around 12 wpm which felt like a huge deal at the time. 6 months is totally doable for a basic QSO if you stay consistent, thats the hard part honestly, doing a little bit every single day beats doing an hour once a week by a lot

so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. my 7300 started acting up after a pretty bad storm came through, nothing got hit directly but there was a lot of static and i had been running it during some of the lead-up before i realized how close things were getting. anyway ever since then the rig will only push maybe 20-25 watts on HF no matter where i set the power control, used to do a solid 100 no problem. TX audio sounds fine from what people tell me, receive seems totally normal, SWR reads fine on a dummy load so its not the antenna side. ive already reseated all the internal connectors i could get to without going too deep, checked the PA bias voltage which looks a little low honestly but im not 100% sure what it should read on this specific model. ALC looks like its not going crazy or anything, sits pretty normal during TX. i really dont want to send it in to icom if i can avoid it, the turnaround time from what ive heard is brutal right now. anyone dealt with low power output on one of these that wasnt just the drive setting being messed up or ALC going haywire?

oh nice didnt know that one was coming up. ive only been to one hamfest before and it was kind of overwhelming honestly, didnt really know what i was looking at half the time. is it worth going even if youre pretty new and not really looking to buy anything specific

thats really cool you got activated so soon after joining, some groups it takes forever before anything actually happens. we had one guy in our ARES group who trained for like 3 years and never got called out for a real event. makes it harder to stay motivated honestly. i'm still just doing the weekly nets and waiting for my EC to sign off on my ICS-100 and 200 so i can even be on the callout list. did your group require any specific certifications before they'd deploy you or was it more informal

not sure if this is related but I had random audio drops with RCForb that turned out to be a buffer size thing on the server side, not bandwidth at all. the client was just misconfigured and kept starving the audio buffer. worth poking around in the server settings before you go crazy chasing the DSL theory. sometimes the obvious culprit isnt actually the problem.

so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now mostly because of the emergency comms stuff and also just the idea of being able to talk to people without relying on the internet or cell towers. my neighbor has been licensed for like 20 years and he keeps telling me to just go for it but honestly the whole process seems kind of overwhelming from the outside like i know theres a test involved but i dont really know what the test covers or how hard it is or how long i should study before i try to take it. someone mentioned hamstudy.org to me but i havent really dug into it yet. is there anything else people use? and is the technician exam actually as hard as it looks when you first see the question pool or does it kind of click after a while also i have no idea what happens after you pass, like do you just get a call sign right away or is there a waiting period or something

was in the exact same spot like a year ago lol. the baofeng menu is genuinely terrible but once you figure out the CTCSS transmit setting it should work. one thing that tripped me up was i had set the tone correctly but i had the radio in a weird VFO mode instead of memory mode so it wasnt saving anything. worth double checking that your programmed channel is actually saving the tone and not just showing it temporarily. the etiquette stuff is real but honestly people are generally pretty forgiving with new hams. just dont kerchunk the repeater a bunch of times in a row (like keying up without saying anything) and youll be fine. some guys hate that. just give your callsign and say youre listening or testing and most people will come back to you

might be worth throwing a small RC filter on those band data lines too, like a 100 ohm resistor and a 100nF cap to ground before the arduino input. cleans up transition noise real quick and i find it pairs nicely with a short software delay. dont overthink it though, these icom band decoders are pretty well documented at this point and people have been building exactly what youre doing for years. look up the RemoteHams forums, theres some good schematics floating around

had something similar happen with my old icom. turned out to be a loose connection inside the radio itself where the mic cable plugs in. you might want to check if wiggling the mic connector makes it cut out. also check your swr - high swr can cause radios to go into protect mode and cut power

not to derail but this is why i always bench test after any final replacement, like actually run it at full power into a proper dummy load for 20-30 minutes and watch the current draw the whole time. if the bias drifts as it heats up you'll see it. sounds like whoever did the repair just swapped parts and called it done without really digging in.

so ive been running a 40m dipole at about 25 feet for the past couple years and its been decent, works europe from the midwest on good evenings, but im starting to wonder if im leaving a lot on the table. a neighbor down the road has a gap titan vertical and swears by it, says he works dx all day long with it. i went over and watched him work a few stations and yeah the signal reports seemed decent but i dont know how much of that is just propagation luck vs the antenna. the thing is my lot isnt huge and getting the dipole any higher would mean a pretty serious tower situation which i cant really afford right now. so im thinking maybe a vertical makes more sense for my situation. but then i keep reading that a dipole even at low heights beats a vertical because of the ground losses on the vertical unless you have a really good radial system. which i definitely dont have room for either. anybody actually done a side by side comparison of these two situations, like roughly similar heights and radial setups? im going to the hamfest next weekend and trying to decide if its worth picking up a vertical or if i should just try to get the dipole up another 10 feet somehow.

honestly the "dipole vs vertical" debate has been beaten to death but here's my take from actually running both for a few years. at 25 feet your dipole is going to have a fairly high radiation angle, probably somewhere in the 45-60 degree range depending on ground conductivity under it. that's great for regional stuff, not so great for long haul. a vertical with a good radial system absolutely will beat a low dipole for dx on 40, thats just physics. but here's the thing about the 6BTV your buddy has — those traps are lossy and if he hasnt done the capacitor hat mod on the 40m section the efficiency is kind of meh. a purpose built 40m vertical with even 32 or so quarter wave radials will smoke it. i ran a simple 33 foot vertical with about 30 radials on 40 for a couple years before i got the space for a beam and worked all continents pretty easily. the key really is the radials, dont cheap out on that part.

Three weeks is nothing, honestly. I messed around with paddles for probably two months before anything felt natural and even then there were letters that gave me trouble for a long time. The squeeze keying thing especially takes a while because your brain has to stop thinking about individual elements and start thinking in terms of characters, which is a completely different muscle memory than straight key work. One thing that really helped me was turning the speed DOWN further than felt comfortable, like embarrassingly slow, maybe 8 wpm, and just drilling individual characters over and over without worrying about making QSOs. Also check your paddle tension and contact gap — if they're too loose or too tight it makes squeeze keying really inconsistent. There's no shame in spending a few sessions just sending the same word a hundred times. I used to send my callsign over and over until it felt automatic. The transition from straight key can actually make it harder at first because you keep wanting to control each dit and dah manually instead of letting the keyer do the work.

73 means best regards basically, like a friendly sign-off. youll hear it all the time. also 59 is a signal report, 5 is readability and 9 is signal strength so he was saying he heard you loud and clear which is great for an HT im also pretty new, got my ticket in march so i know exactly what that first contact feels like haha. if you get on HF at some point try 40m in the evenings theres usually a lot going on

check the PA bias too while youre in there. sometimes a near strike will shift the bias voltage on the final transistors just enough that they wont conduct properly for TX even though they arent blown outright. not a dead short, just... wrong. i've seen guys replace finals that didnt actually need replacing because they never checked bias first.

so ive been a General for about 3 years now and honestly i use the privileges fine, work HF pretty regularly, got a few DXCC entities under my belt and enjoy the hobby. my elmer keeps nudging me to go for the Extra but every time i look at the question pool i kind of freeze up. the stuff about transmission lines and resonant circuits and all the filter theory... its a lot. i guess my question is does anyone feel like the extra theory actually made them a better operator or is it mostly just memorizing stuff to pass the test and then forgetting it. also is there anything on the exam that actually shows up in day to day operating because i cant tell from just reading the pool

so we finally got enough people together to run a proper tabletop exercise for our county ARES group. we've been talking about doing one for like two years and it finally happened. the scenario was a prolonged power outage during a winter storm, EOC is up and running, shelters need net check-ins, the usual kind of thing. what surprised me honestly was how quickly things broke down in ways that had nothing to do with radio. like we had three people who didn't know who they were supposed to report to, and one guy kept going net on a frequency we hadn't pre-coordinated with the county. the radios all worked fine. it was the procedural stuff that got messy. we also realized our ICS forms training is... not great. half the group had never filled out an ICS 213 under any kind of time pressure and it showed. i think we're so focused on whether our gear works that we forget the whole point is to pass information clearly to people who need it. anyway if anyone else has done these exercises I'd love to hear what surprised you or what lessons you took away. especially curious if anyone has done a full-scale activation vs just tabletop and what the difference felt like.

so this has been bugging me for a few days now. I can see my station showing up on aprs.fi just fine, beacon is going out every few minutes, path looks reasonable (WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1), but when I try to send messages through the TNC to another station they just dont seem to arrive. the other guy can see my position but he says he never gets the message packets. im running a TM-D710G into a Mobilinkd TNC3 on the side port actually no wait, its just the 710 by itself using its built in TNC. been a while since I messed with the settings and honestly I might have something configured wrong in the radio. symbol is set correctly, SSID is -9 since im usually mobile. has anyone run into this where the beacon works but messaging is just broken? wondering if its a path thing or maybe the 710 has a setting I forgot about