Emily White

so ive been running an end-fed random wire since i got licensed about eight months ago and it works okay but the noise floor on receive is pretty rough and i keep reading that a dipole would be a lot better especially for 40m which is where i spend most of my time. decided im just gonna build one myself instead of buying something because honestly how hard can it be and also im cheap.
so the basic math isnt the problem, 468 divided by freq in MHz gives feet, i get that. my question is more about the practical stuff. im planning to hang it as an inverted V from a tree that probably gets me about 30 feet at the apex. feedline is gonna be RG-8X i have a bunch of it leftover. do i center feed it with a 1:1 balun or can i just solder the coax directly to the wire and forget about it for now. ive seen people say both and im not sure what actually matters in practice vs theory.
also the ground here is kind of a mess, clay soil mostly, does that affect anything for a dipole? thought that was more of a vertical thing but not 100% sure.

honestly the exam itself is very passable with just pool memorization, thats the truth. i did it in maybe 6 weeks studying on hamstudy.org every night for like 20 minutes. but heres the thing — i actually found myself wanting to understand the stuff rather than just memorize it because some of those questions dont make any sense unless you get the concept behind them. the impedance matching stuff especially, once it clicked it clicked and then a bunch of other questions just fell into place.
the extra band privileges are real by the way. on 20m cw i work out of the extra segment pretty often and yeah its noticeably less chaotic. whether thats worth the study time is up to you but i dont think its nearly as hard as people make it sound. took me longer to find a test session than it did to feel ready for the test.

yeah what he said about the active low thing, ran into exact same problem with a relay board i bought last year. took me way too long to figure that out lol. just handle it in the script.
one thing id add — make sure you have some kind of interlock logic so it cant switch the antenna while youre transmitting. had a friend fry a relay doing exactly that during a contest. might be worth reading the PTT line or ALC or something to make sure the relay only moves when youre in receive. just a thought

yeah the frequency protection thing is the hardest habit to build honestly. the general rule most serious SO2R guys use is you never abandon a hot run for anything less than a new mult, and even then you have to be fast about it. if your rate on radio 1 is above like 80-90 per hour you're better off just letting that mult go and picking it up later in the contest when things slow down.
the thing that helped me most was setting up a separate mult list view in N1MM that shows me what i still need per band, so when im doing S&P on radio 2 im not just randomly tuning around, im specifically targeting the bands where i have the most unworked mults. changes the whole mindset from reactive to actually having a plan. also worth noting that in sweepstakes specifically the mult structure rewards you for working everything at least once so the calculus is a bit different than say CQ WW where mults stack per band
the RFI stuff you mentioned — did you end up using bandpass filters on both radios? that was the thing that finally made my setup liveable, 4O3A filters on both radios with proper sequencing through the microHAM. before that it was just chaos

yeah the FCC system is not exactly user friendly lol. so the way it works is you file a vanity application through the ULS and you can list up to 25 callsigns in order of preference. the system then goes through a 18 day waiting period — you had the right number — and at the end of that window whoever applied for the same call gets thrown into a kind of lottery if there are multiple applicants, otherwise you just get it. it used to be strictly sequential but they changed that a while back.
as for license class restrictions, yes they do apply. as a general you cant get a 1x2 or 2x1 format callsign, those are reserved for extras. generals can get 1x3 or 2x2 format calls depending on your district. so like W5ABC would be fine for a general but something like W5AB wouldnt be available to you. there are sites like ae7q.com that are way better than the FCC site for searching whats available and tracking applications, i'd start there honestly. makes the whole thing much less headache inducing.

yeah what he said. i started doing the same thing, just logging everything casually and then one day opened up my log and realized i was like 60-something entities in without really trying. that was kind of the moment i got hooked on actually chasing stuff intentionally. get LoTW set up sooner rather than later honestly, some of those early contacts you might be able to match up if the other station uploaded their log too

so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. my 7300 was running fine and then one day i noticed the output was way down, like im getting maybe 20-25w max on HF where i should be seeing close to 100. the ALC looks normal on the display and the radio doesnt throw any error codes or anything. SWR on the dummy load is flat so its not an antenna issue.
i already checked the obvious stuff, power supply voltage is solid at 13.8v under load, no weird smells from the radio, fans seem fine. TX audio sounds normal on a monitor receiver, no distortion or anything. its just the power thats wrong. i was wondering if anyone has seen this before — bad finals maybe? or could it be something in the driver stage? i dont want to just throw parts at it without at least having some idea where to look first.
the radio is about 4 years old, not under warranty anymore obviously. i do have a service manual so i can poke around if someone can point me in the right direction

yeah the frequency protection thing is the hardest habit to build honestly. the general rule most serious SO2R guys use is you never abandon a hot run for anything less than a new mult, and even then you have to be fast about it. if your rate on radio 1 is above like 80-90 per hour you're better off just letting that mult go and picking it up later in the contest when things slow down.
the thing that helped me most was setting up a separate mult list view in N1MM that shows me what i still need per band, so when im doing S&P on radio 2 im not just randomly tuning around, im specifically targeting the bands where i have the most unworked mults. changes the whole mindset from reactive to actually having a plan. also worth noting that in sweepstakes specifically the mult structure rewards you for working everything at least once so the calculus is a bit different than say CQ WW where mults stack per band
the RFI stuff you mentioned — did you end up using bandpass filters on both radios? that was the thing that finally made my setup liveable, 4O3A filters on both radios with proper sequencing through the microHAM. before that it was just chaos

The 10 minute rule is a legal minimum, not a target — in practice on a net most people ID every transmission just because it keeps things clean and net control can track who said what. Short replies are a bit of a gray area honestly but the habit of always giving your call is a good one to build even if strictly speaking a two second acknowledgment might not technically require it.
On the breaking in thing — yeah 'break' can come across a bit abrupt depending on the net. A lot of local nets prefer you just wait for a pause and say something like '[your call] with traffic' or '[your call] please' so net control knows you want in without sounding like an emergency. Some nets have their own procedures for this so worth asking your net control directly after the net closes, most of them are happy to walk newer folks through it. The fact that you're even thinking about this stuff puts you ahead of a lot of people who just wing it.

im kind of in the same boat lol, sitting around 11wpm right now so ill be watching this thread. one thing i did recently was start using LCWO.net instead of just G4FON and the word training mode helped a lot more than random characters for me personally. something about recognizing common words made it feel less like decoding and more like actual reading if that makes sense

yeah the FCC system is not exactly user friendly lol. so the way it works is you file a vanity application through the ULS and you can list up to 25 callsigns in order of preference. the system then goes through a 18 day waiting period — you had the right number — and at the end of that window whoever applied for the same call gets thrown into a kind of lottery if there are multiple applicants, otherwise you just get it. it used to be strictly sequential but they changed that a while back.
as for license class restrictions, yes they do apply. as a general you cant get a 1x2 or 2x1 format callsign, those are reserved for extras. generals can get 1x3 or 2x2 format calls depending on your district. so like W5ABC would be fine for a general but something like W5AB wouldnt be available to you. there are sites like ae7q.com that are way better than the FCC site for searching whats available and tracking applications, i'd start there honestly. makes the whole thing much less headache inducing.

RTTY is another one people forget about — still pretty active during contests and the exchanges are at least a little more interesting than FT8. plus theres something satisfying about watching the tones come in on a waterfall and having fldigi or MMTTY decode it in real time. old school but it works and the contesting side of it is still pretty healthy, CQWW RTTY gets a ton of participants every year.
FT4 i think is kind of the middle ground speed wise but i never see much outside of contests honestly. might be worth trying during FT4 activity days if those still happen.