Daniel Taylor

yeah the TCXO is the one mod i'd tell anyone to do first on that radio, no question. i did mine maybe 18 months ago and it made a genuine difference for ft8 and other digital modes where your frequency accuracy actually matters. never bothered with the fan swap though, mine doesnt seem that loud to me but i also run a fairly noisy shack so maybe i just dont notice. the audio mods i'm more mixed on. tried something similar on my 7600 years ago and ended up reverting it because i felt like i was clipping on peaks in a weird way. probably did something slightly wrong but i got gun shy about messing with TX audio after that. if yours is working and people are noticing a real improvement then you did it right i guess.

went through this exact same thing last year, the AE7Q site the other person mentioned is really the way to go. I spent like two evenings on the FCC site getting nowhere and then found AE7Q and figured everything out in like twenty minutes. one thing I'll add — if you want a 1x2 or 2x1 call you need to have the right license class for it. extra class opens up a lot more options. with general you're looking at 1x3 or 2x3 format calls depending on your region, which are still way better than some of the longer sequential calls they hand out now. my sequential was a 2x3 anyway so when I got my vanity it wasnt a huge change format wise but it meant a lot to me personally since I got my dad's old call.

yeah the chameleon MPAS is nice but honestly for ARES work where speed matters i think the efhw route the other guy mentioned is hard to beat. i use a 49:1 unun i wound myself and just a roll of wire, total cost maybe 15 bucks in parts and its been more reliable than anything i bought prebuilt. on the power thing — have you looked at solar at all? im not saying go full off grid prepper mode but even a 100w panel feeding your lifepo4 during the day can basically eliminate the battery capacity problem if the sun cooperates. obviously useless at night or under heavy overcast but for a lot of the activations i do its enough to keep the battery topped off while im operating

had both at the same time for a while and honestly for pure RX the RSP1A isnt even close, its noticeably cleaner especially on HF. the HackRF is a great tool if you want to do signal analysis or transmit experiments but the receive performance is kinda mediocre, everyone who uses one seriously knows this. the 8bit ADC really does hurt when youve got strong signals nearby. i was running mine with SDRangel and even with good filtering in software you can just tell the noise floor is higher. if you already have a real radio for TX just get the RSP1A and dont look back. the SDRuno software that comes with it is a bit clunky but it works, and it plays nice with other stuff like HDSDR too. also the built in notch for MW and FM broadcast is genuinely useful, not just a spec sheet checkbox.

the RMS Relay thing confused me too when i first started. basically a relay is kind of an intermediate node that passes traffic between other RMS stations, not necessarily one that has a direct internet connection itself. for what you're doing - just connecting as a client to send emails - you dont really need to worry about that distinction, just look for ones marked as RMS Gateway on the map and those are the ones you actually connect to as an end user. the timeout issue on 2m is almost always either frequency offset or the squelch/audio levels being wrong in the Signalink. what does your waterfall look like in Winlink Express when you're trying to connect, are you actually seeing any audio coming back from the gateway? also double check that the gateway you're targeting has been heard recently - the RMS map shows last heard timestamps and some of those listings are stations that haven't been on the air in months. sort by last activity and pick one that was active in the last day or two. and yeah emails to regular addresses show up totally normal on the other end, recipient has no idea it came over radio. attachments work but keep them tiny on a slow packet link, like under 10-15k if you can, otherwise the session just drags on forever or times out.

so ive been sitting on this for a while but last saturday i finally pulled the trigger and did the mars/cap mod on my FT-857D to open up the TX range. not planning to transmit outside the ham bands obviously but i wanted the flexibility for some EMCOMM stuff where we might need to hit certain MURS or business freqs in an actual emergency and our EC has been pushing everyone to do it. anyway the mod itself wasnt bad, just the one diode removal on the main board if i remember right, took me maybe 45 minutes including the time i spent second guessing myself with the iron. but now im down a rabbit hole because someone in my local club mentioned theres also an internal mic gain mod that can help with the 857's somewhat mediocre audio on SSB and i cant find a consistent writeup on it. some guys say adjust R1015 or whatever it is, others say just get an external mic preamp and call it a day. also thinking about doing the fan mod at some point, the thing runs warm and the fan curve seems pretty conservative from the factory. has anyone actually measured temps before and after on that one or is it one of those mods where you just feel better but nothing actually changes

so our ARES group did a full-scale simulated exercise this past Saturday, basically pretending a major storm had knocked out infrastructure across the county and we had to set up an emergency net from scratch. i've been part of a few of these over the years but this one was different because we actually had the county EOC involved and they were sending us real-style traffic to handle. the thing that surprised me the most wasnt the radio stuff at all — it was message handling. we had people just totally freezing up when they got an ICS-213 form they weren't familiar with, and a couple of the newer operators were trying to improvise the format which kind of broke the whole chain. we also had one station that had a brand new HT and hadnt programmed in the backup simplex freqs beforehand, so when the repeater went "down" (simulated) they were just kind of... stuck. honestly the lesson i came away with was that we spend a lot of time practicing the radio part and almost no time practicing the paperwork and procedures side. and in a real event thats probably where things fall apart first. curious if anyone else has run exercises like this and what caught you off guard

yeah 40m evenings are underrated. i went through a phase where everything had to be about awards or logging new grids and burnt myself out pretty fast. now i just turn on the radio when i feel like it and if someone interesting is on great, if not i tune around for a bit and go watch tv. way more fun that way tbh

RTTY contests are great for beginners because the exchange is usually simple. Make sure you have your logging software set up properly for Cabrillo format submission. The bands will definitely be busy but that's part of the excitement!

honestly the panadapter on the 7300 ruined me for any radio without one. i know that sounds dramatic but once you can see whats happening across the band you just... operate differently. you spot openings faster, you can see if a frequency is actually clear before you park on it, and for finding DX stations its genuinely useful not just a gimmick. that said if youre coming from the 590SG the receiver difference isnt gonna blow your mind. the kenwood is no slouch. the icom is a little easier to live with day to day i think just because the interface is more intuitive once you get used to the touch controls. for FT8 and JS8 the 7300 is kind of the go-to at this point just because the USB audio is built in and the setup with WSJT-X is pretty painless compared to messing around with signalink or whatever. that alone might be worth it depending on how patient you are with that stuff

yeah the sideband thing is the part that trips up a lot of new generals. on LSB your actual transmitted signal extends several kHz below your dial frequency, so if your radio says 7.125 and thats the lower edge of your general phone privs, your signal is actually splashing down into the extra/tech CW portion below that. the rule is you need to keep your entire signal within your allocated frequencies, not just the carrier. so in practice most people stay at least 3 kHz inside the band edge just to be safe. its not just courtesy, the FCC regs say your emission has to be within the band, so transmitting at exactly the edge with a wide SSB signal is technically a violation even if your dial reads the right number. the ARRL band plan is voluntary but the part class license privileges are the actual legal limit.

ok so ive been listening on 40m a lot lately and people keep throwing around all these weird abbreviations and i cant figure out what half of them mean. like i know QSL means like confirmed or whatever but then someone said QRM and someone else said QSB and i had no idea what was going on. is there a list somewhere or do you just kind of pick it up over time? also whats the deal with 73 at the end of every conversation, is that a Q code too or something different. sorry if this is a dumb question im still pretty new to all this

omg yes i just got my general like two months ago and i had no idea 10m could do this. i thought it was like a dead band from everything i read when studying. set up JS8Call on it last weekend just to try and was getting decodes from Europe which blew my mind. nobody told me propagation could just randomly be this good lol

man that first QRP contact when you realize 5 watts actually works is kind of a revelation isnt it. i remember being genuinely surprised the first time i worked someone 800 miles out running 3 watts on a whip, like the whole radio thing clicked differently after that. for antennas out in the field i've had really good luck with an end fed half wave cut for whatever band im planning to use most. you can tune it on adjacent bands with a small tuner but it really sings on its primary band. mine for 40m is just about 66 feet of wire, coils up tiny, weighs almost nothing. i use a 9:1 unun at the feedpoint and feed it with maybe 15 feet of coax back to the rig. nothing fancy but it consistently outperforms my random wire by a noticeable margin. the mountain topper is a really nice little rig if you end up going that route. i dont have one but a buddy of mine uses one for SOTA and swears by it. the ubitx is a different animal — more of a project than a finished product if that makes sense, but you learn a ton building and tweaking it.

so ive been at this for about 8 months now and i'm stuck. when i first started learning CW i was thrilled just to copy anything at all, got up to 5wpm pretty quickly using the Koch method with the G4FON trainer and thought okay this is going to be smooth sailing. yeah no. the jump from 5 to maybe 10-12wpm felt hard but doable. but now im sitting somewhere around 13-14wpm on a good day and i just... hit a wall. i can copy fine when im relaxed and the sender is clean but the moment i fall behind on even one character my brain locks up and i lose the whole word and then the next one and suddenly im just listening to noise. ive read that you're supposed to just listen at speeds faster than you can copy and let your brain adjust but honestly that just makes me feel dumb and i turn it off after 5 minutes. has anyone actually broken through this plateau? what did it take? did you just grind daily sessions or was there some technique that clicked? i do about 20-30 minutes a day which i thought was enough but maybe not

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general class) and I keep hearing people talk about checking into nets and I finally found a local 2m net that runs tuesday nights on the repeater I've been monitoring. I listened last week and everyone just kind of announced their callsign and gave a signal report and that was mostly it? but im not sure if there's like a specific format I need to follow or if I'll mess something up and embarrass myself. the net control guy seemed pretty organized about it. also I saw something online about a special event station for some kind of anniversary at a national park next weekend and it said you could work them for a certificate. is that something worth doing? do those count for any awards or is it just a novelty thing. I have an IC-7300 so HF isn't a problem I just wasnt sure if they'd be on a specific band or how you'd even know where to find them.

so i've been wanting to do QRP for probably two years now and kept putting it off because i wasnt sure where to start. finally just ordered a QCX mini kit from QRP Labs back in the spring and spent a weekend putting it together. my soldering is mediocre at best but i got through it with only one cold joint that i had to go back and fix. anyway the thing works and i made my first contact on 40m running 5 watts into a end fed half wave i threw up in the backyard. the other station was in ohio, im in new england, and he gave me a 579 which honestly i wasnt expecting at all. i kind of sat there for a second before responding because i was so surprised it actually worked. the efficiency thing is what really got me hooked. my whole setup draws maybe 800mA at 12v when transmitting so i can run it off a small lipo for hours. took it out to a park last saturday with just a backpack, a folding chair, and a wire antenna i tossed over a tree branch and worked three stations in about an hour and a half. one guy in florida which seemed insane to me for 5 watts. anyone else here doing a lot of portable QRP? curious what antennas people are actually using out in the field because im not sure my end fed setup is as efficient as it could be. also wondering if the QCX is worth upgrading to something like an X6100 or a KX2 eventually or if i should just stick with the simple stuff for now.

I've run both and honestly for 40m the answer is kind of "it depends on the path." The vertical wins on DX paths where you need that low takeoff angle but the dipole will smoke it on regional stuff and like you said 25 feet is actually pretty good for NVIS on 40 during the day. If I had to pick one setup and couldn't change it I'd probably keep the dipole and just raise it as high as possible rather than mess with a radial field. But if you have the real estate for the radials it might be worth the experiment just to see. You could always keep the dipole up and just add the vertical as a second antenna and switch between them — that's what I eventually ended up doing.

so ive been a tech for about a year and a half and keep seeing people talk about cw and honestly it sounds kind of cool but also completely impossible to learn at this point in my life. im not young anymore lol and i feel like its one of those things where either you grew up with it or you just cant do it. but maybe im wrong? i guess my question is more like... how do you go from knowing nothing to actually being able to use it on the air. i downloaded one of those morse apps a while back and just stared at it not knowing what to do. is there like a method people actually recommend or is it just grind it until it clicks

so ive been doing a fair bit of portable VHF operation lately, mostly 2m with some 70cm thrown in when i can get someone on the other end, and im starting to wonder if lugging a yagi up a hill is actually worth it compared to just using a decent collinear on a mast. right now i have a Diamond X50 which is fine for the local repeaters and general ragchewing but when i try to work some of the weaker stations in the next valley over it just doesnt cut it. ive been looking at a 5 element yagi for 2m, nothing crazy, just something that gives me a decent amount of gain without being a pain to carry and set up. the thing is i do a lot of solo hiking so i need something that breaks down reasonably small and doesnt take forever to assemble when im already cold and tired at the summit. my mate uses a homebrew tape measure yagi for foxhunting and swears by it but im not sure thats really what i want for general comms work. has anyone run both setups back to back and actually compared them? like real world not just spec sheet numbers. the X50 is rated for something like 6dBi and even a modest 5el yagi would beat that by a fair margin but obviously you lose the omnidirectional coverage which matters if you dont know exactly where the other station is. just wondering if anyone has opinions on this

yeah i'll be there, dragging my kid along hoping maybe it sparks something in him lol. we went two years ago and he thought it was pretty cool when the guy let him key a cw contact. anyway i got a bunch of coax and some connectors im looking to offload if anyone wants to split a table, lemme know

I'm still old school with DXWatch's web-based cluster service on my laptop next to the rig. Nothing beats having it on a big screen where I can see more spots at once. Though I admit the mobile notifications would be handy when I'm away from the shack.

so i've been licensed about 8 months now, mostly just listening and lurking on local repeaters, but i finally started jumping into some simplex contacts and last week something happened that kind of threw me off and i've been thinking about it since. i was about 10 minutes into a ragchew with a guy a few counties over and somebody broke in with just their callsign. i wasnt sure what to do — like do i stop mid-sentence and let them in? do i finish my thought first? i ended up sort of stumbling over my words and then gave my call and let the other station in but it felt really awkward and the other guy i was talking to kind of just disappeared after that. also just generally wondering about when you're SUPPOSED to give your callsign. i know it's every 10 minutes and at the end of a contact but does that 10 minute clock reset every time you transmit or only when you actually give your ID? i've gotten three different answers from three different people on this and im just confused at what point

APRS messaging is honestly kind of hit or miss depending on network conditions and yeah the path matters a lot. WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 is fine and pretty standard but the real question is whether the digipeaters in your area are running IGate as well. if theres no IGate in range then messaging to someone whos connected via the internet side just wont work at all, the packet stays RF-only and never touches APRS-IS. also worth checking if the other guy had message capable firmware or if hes just running a tracker. some setups beacon fine but dont actually have message ack turned on. the TM-D710G should be doing acks automatically but ive seen weird configs where that got turned off somehow. try messaging someone you know for sure is running a full igate setup and see if that changes anything. also aprs.fi will show you the raw packets if you look at the station info, can tell you a lot about whats actually hitting the network

so ive been trying to work some 20m stuff in the evenings like i always do and its just been all over the place this past week or two. some nights its wide open and i'm pulling in stations from europe no problem, other nights its like the band just died at 7pm and theres nothing. checked a couple of propagation sites and the solar flux has been decent so i dont really know what to give. maybe its just me or my setup but figured id ask if anyone else is seeing the same thing