Amanda Wilson

the solar thing is doable but yeah 60% sky is gonna cut into your output pretty hard. i ran a 200w panel at a similar exercise last fall and was getting maybe 6-7 amps on a partly cloudy day, which was enough to keep pace with my radio draw but not really charging the battery back up. its more like a slow drain vs a fast drain situation. if the exercise is 8-10 hours id honestly just bring the generator as a backup even if you dont think youll need it, nothing worse than going QRT two hours before the exercise ends because you ran out of juice and look like you didnt plan ahead. what radio are you running by the way? that changes the math on battery runtime quite a bit.

yeah lcwo is good, also check out the ham morse app and just w1aw practice files if you want something more old school feeling. i remember being totally lost at first too and the thing that actually made it click for me was just turning on a cw net and listening even when i couldnt copy anything. after a few weeks i started recognizing cq and rst and callsign patterns even before i could decode every letter. dont stress too much about a perfect method just pick one thing and stick with it for at least a month before deciding it isnt working

yeah the doppler thing trips everyone up at first. you actually want to keep your downlink tuned to where you hear the signals and let the uplink drift with the bird — basically correct on both but in practice most people just ride the downlink frequency to keep the audio sounding normal and adjust uplink to compensate for the shift there. AO-73 has an inverting transponder so when you tune up on uplink your signal goes down on the downlink, just to make it more confusing. 2.5w should be workable if your antenna is halfway decent and you're getting the polarization close enough. the handheld yagi is fine for starting out but pointing it accurately by hand while also tuning and operating is basically a three handed job, most of us have been there. try to print out a pass plot beforehand so you have a rough idea of where to point without staring at the phone the whole time. once you get a setup that can do both uplink and downlink tracking at least roughly automated it gets way easier to actually make contacts instead of just chasing your own tail the whole pass

so ive been working on this little crystal controlled 40m transmitter for a few months now, just a simple 7MHz thing based loosely on the QRP-Labs style circuit but i didnt just copy it, wanted to understand what i was doing so i built it mostly from scratch on a piece of copper clad board. anyway got it all assembled last week and it keys fine, the sidetone sounds good, the crystal is oscillating at exactly where it should be according to my frequency counter. problem is im only seeing like 200mW out when i was expecting to be closer to 1W maybe a bit more. ive got a BS170 as the final and im running it off 12V. the gate bias seems right, ive checked the drain current and its sitting around 80mA which feels reasonable but honestly im not totally sure what im aiming for there. the low pass filter after the PA stage is a 7 element chebyshev design i wound myself, toroids are t50-2 cores. wondering if my winding is off or if the problem is something upstream, hard to tell without a proper spectrum analyzer which i dont have. anyone been through this kind of thing with a similar build? i can post the schematic if that helps

the runaway dits thing is almost certainly a contact gap issue on the paddle — if the gap between the paddle and the contact is too small even a light touch holds it closed longer than you want. most paddles have a little setscrew or adjustment nut on each side, worth spending 10 minutes with a business card or a folded piece of paper just getting the gaps even on both sides. took me forever to figure that out when i started. as for mode A vs B, honestly your elmer gave you good advice, just use A for now. the difference is subtle and mostly matters when you're sending fast and squeezing the paddle for certain letter combinations. you'll know when you care about it. right now it won't make or break anything at 8 wpm. the G4FON software is great by the way. just keep at it, there's no real shortcut, but one thing that helped me was shadowing — like listening to a QSO at a comfortable speed and just copying in my head without worrying about writing everything down. feels less stressful than trying to pass a test.

yeah the accidental touchscreen taps drove me nuts for the first couple weeks, i almost changed a filter setting mid-QSO once which wouldve been embarassing. you kinda learn to be deliberate about where your hand goes when you reach across the panel. not a huge deal but worth mentioning to anyone coming from a purely knob-based layout.

oh man i did the exact same thing my first few times on a net lol. the stepping on people thing is rough because you genuinely cant tell if you caused the problem or if it was just two people keying up at the same time which happens all the time anyway. honestly most people on nets have been there and get it. the NCS on our local net actually told me once that he'd rather have nervous new hams fumbling through a check-in than not checking in at all so just keep showing up and it gets way easier pretty fast.

yeah FT8 is kind of a hollow experience after a while isnt it. i still run it for contests and chasing DXCC but i went back to PSK31 for actual conversations honestly. old mode i know but theres still plenty of activity on 20m and you can type in real time, the other person sees your words as you type them which feels way more like a conversation than any of the WSJT modes. never really got into JS8Call but maybe ill give it another shot. last time i tried it i couldnt figure out the directed messaging stuff and kind of gave up after an hour

omg same thing happened to me last week, i was just scanning around on 10m kind of not expecting anything and suddenly there were signals everywhere. im pretty new to hf so i wasn't even sure what i was hearing at first lol. ended up working like 6 or 7 countries in maybe 45 minutes which is more DX than i'd done in the previous month combined. definitely going to keep an eye on the solar flux numbers more now, didnt even know that was a thing you could track before reading this thread.

the two-way igate thing is almost certainly your problem. most igates out there are rx only, they just dump packets to the internet but dont gate anything back to RF. so your message goes up, maybe even reaches the destination through APRS-IS, but the ACK never makes it back to your radio and so the D710 just keeps resending thinking it failed. honestly a lot of areas have pretty sparse two-way igate coverage. you might want to look at setting up your own if you have an always-on machine at home, direwolf with the right config isnt that complicated and then you solve your own problem and help the local network.

yeah 10 meters has been really good this week, worked a ZL station Tuesday morning which honestly surprised me, wasnt expecting that kind of path at that hour. running barefoot into a vertical so nothing special on my end either. as for the Icom thing i saw that thread on reddit too. somebody posted what they claimed was a blurry photo of something on a bench but honestly could be anything. i'd love to see a proper replacement or update to the 7300, its a great radio but its been out for a while now and the competition has caught up in some areas. yaesu's been doing interesting stuff lately too so icom probably feels some pressure. either way these pre-hamfair rumor seasons are half the fun of being in the hobby i think, even when nothing pans out

honestly the question pool memorization approach works fine for passing the test, a lot of people do it that way. hamstudy.org is probably the best free tool for this, it tracks which questions youre getting wrong and keeps drilling those. i passed in like 2 weeks just using that site for maybe 20-30 minutes a day. that said the electrical theory stuff will actually help you later when youre trying to figure out why your antenna isnt working or whatever, so its not totally useless even if you can skip it for the exam. the ohms law questions come up a fair amount so dont completely ignore that section

congrats on getting it up, 1.4 on your first trim is pretty solid honestly. on the feedline length question — for a coax fed dipole you dont really need to worry about specific lengths the same way you would with ladder line or open wire. the coax shields it from that kind of interaction. what you DO want is a choke balun or at least a few turns of coax wound into a coil at the feedpoint, not because youll notice it right away but because without one youre basically using the outside of your coax shield as part of the antenna. that can pull RF into the shack and cause weird SWR readings that change when you touch things. I built a simple ugly balun with about 8 turns of the coax itself on a 4 inch diameter form and it cleaned up some noise I was getting on receive. doesnt have to be fancy. the inverted V at 28 feet is totally workable for 40m, your angle of radiation will be higher than a flat top but for domestic contacts and general ragchewing its fine. if you ever want to try DX you might notice it, but dont let anyone tell you its not a real antenna because it absolutely is.

had something similar on mine about a year ago, turned out to be a cold solder joint on the driver board. the 7300 runs pretty warm in that area and over time some of those joints can develop hairline cracks. i found mine by gently flexing the board with a wooden stick while transmitting and the crackling changed character when i pressed on a specific spot. reflowed about a dozen joints in that area and its been fine since. not saying thats definitely your problem but worth looking at before you start replacing components. also check the internal antenna tuner relay contacts if you have the tuner enabled. those relays can arc internally and cause noise that sounds like its in the audio chain. try disabling the tuner entirely and see if it changes anything.

oh man i went through this like 6 months ago. one thing i'll add is that the 18 day window thing can feel like forever when you really want a specific call lol. i kept checking AE7Q every day like a crazy person. ended up getting the one i wanted since nobody else applied but those two and a half weeks were annoying also make sure the call you want is actually available and not just expired recently — there's a waiting period before a deleted call goes back into the pool, i think it's around 2 years after the previous licensee's expiration but dont quote me on the exact timeframe, worth double checking that on the FCC site or just asking here again