Christopher Davis

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 i just got licensed about three weeks ago, technician class, and ive been too nervous to actually key up on anything. been sitting on 2m with my baofeng just listening forever. last night i just said screw it and answered a CQ on the local repeater and the guy was super patient with me when i fumbled through my callsign like four times. we talked for maybe 10 minutes about nothing really, just where i was located and my radio setup but man it felt incredible. like i know its just a repeater contact and not some DX thing but it still got me. anyway just wanted to share since nobody in my family understands why im excited about this

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.

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

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

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

73 tripped me up too when i first started, i kept thinking it was someones ID number or something. one thing that helped me was just making a little cheat sheet and keeping it next to the radio for a while. honestly after maybe a month of operating you wont even think about it anymore, they just become natural. oh and if someone sends you 88 thats love and kisses, usually used when talking to an YL operator, just so you know and arent confused when that comes up

just passed mine last month actually. the filter stuff is annoying but once you get butterworth vs chebyshev into your head its not that deep. the oscillator questions tripped me up more than anything tbh. i used gordon west's book and supplemented with hamstudy. took me like 6 weeks of cramming on lunch breaks
the extra subbands are honestly kinda quiet which is either great or boring depending on what youre trying to do lol