Nicole Martin

what angle are your legs at roughly? like if center is 25ft and the ends are 10ft that means each leg drops 15 feet over 33 feet which is kind of a shallow slope actually, so impedance might not be as low as a steep V. the 2.1 SWR honestly most tuners will handle no problem, i wouldn't chase perfection too hard. my inverted v on 40 sits around 1.8 at the sweet spot and everything works fine

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and im just gonna ask. i currently run a baofeng on VHF/UHF for local stuff but i want to get into HF seriously and build out a real shack. my budget is around $1000-1100 and i keep landing on either a new IC-7300 or a used FT-991A that a guy in my club is selling for about $750. the 991A is appealing because it covers 2m and 70cm too so id basically have one radio for everything, and the price is obviously lower. but ive heard the 7300 is just... better? like the SDR-based receiver and the touchscreen waterfall is apparently really nice to use. the guy selling the 991A says its in great shape but its a few years old and i dont know the full history on it. i mostly plan to do SSB on 40 and 20m, maybe get into JS8Call or FT8 at some point, and potentially some POTA activations down the road. not really a contester. does the 7300 receiver make that much of a real world difference or is that more of a "specs on paper" thing. honestly any input would help at this point im just going in circles

so i just passed my general last month and got my sequential call assigned, which is fine but its kind of a mouthful and ive been looking into getting a vanity call. ive been reading the FCC ULS stuff and honestly it's a little overwhelming. i understand there's like a waiting period after you apply and other people can also apply for the same call during that window and then they do some kind of lottery if multiple people want it? what i cant figure out is whether it matters that im a new general vs someone who's been licensed forever. does license class affect your chances at all or is it just whoever applies and if theres a conflict it's random? also the call i want was held by a ham who i believe is now a silent key, does that change anything about timing or availability? i want to make sure i do this right and dont waste the fee if i can mess it up somehow.

The GP2200i inverter generator features clean, stable power for sensitive electronics and has excellent RFI suppression. I use one for Field Day - virtually no interference on any band when positioned 50+ feet from antennas.

so our county ARES group finally did a proper tabletop simulation last saturday and i wanted to share some of what happened because i think other groups could learn from it. the scenario was a prolonged power outage after a major ice storm, something like 72+ hours, with the EOC needing welfare check traffic from outlying areas and hospitals needing to relay patient info securely. the biggest thing we discovered almost immediately was that like half our operators didnt actually know the net control procedures as well as they thought. when we introduced a simulated HF skip condition that cut out our primary frequency we had a lot of confusion about who was supposed to announce the move to the alternate and nobody could find the laminated frequency card that was supposed to be in the go kit. turns out it was there but buried under a rain poncho and a bag of cliff bars. we also found out that two of our members had let their FEMA IS-100 and IS-700 certifications lapse which matters when you're trying to work alongside actual served agencies. not the end of the world but something to fix before a real event obviously. on the positive side our digital operators on winlink did really well, the backup path through the RMS relay held up and we got simulated health and welfare traffic flowing within about 20 minutes of the exercise start which was honestly better than i expected. the new guys especially surprised me, one of them had only been licensed maybe 8 months and he just quietly set up his station and started processing messages while the rest of us were still arguing about net control. anyway curious if other groups do these regularly and what kinds of scenarios have been most useful for finding gaps in your plans. we're thinking about doing a full field deployment exercise in the spring but i want to make sure we actually fix the tabletop stuff first.

oh man i went through the exact same thing when i was starting out, stared at that baofeng menu for forever. one thing i'd add is double check the repeater offset too — most 2m repeaters are plus or minus 600 khz but occasionally you get a weird one. if you can hear them but they cant hear you thats usually the tone though, so youre probably on the right track. the linked repeaters are a whole other thing once you get into that, some of them are tied into IRLP or Allstar networks and you can end up talking to someone in another state without even realizing it which is kind of wild the first time it happens

ok so i just passed my technician exam last week (still waiting on the callsign to show up in the database lol) and everyone keeps telling me to just get a baofeng to start. but then i see people on here and on reddit basically saying thats a mistake and i should save up for something better. i dont really know what i'd be using it mostly for, probably just local repeaters and maybe some simplex with a couple friends who are also getting into this. budget is probably under $100 but i could stretch to like $150 if it actually makes sense to. is there something specific i should be looking for feature wise? i have no idea what half the specs even mean. someone mentioned a dual band radio but i dont know if that matters for a beginner. any advice appreciated, kinda overwhelmed by all the options honestly

the coax adapters thing is so real, i keep a little ziplock in mine with like every adapter combo i might ever need. PL-259 to SO-239, BNC adapters, a couple barrel connectors. weighs almost nothing and has saved me more than once. other stuff i always forget to mention when people ask -- a small notepad and multiple pens, not pencils, pens. sounds dumb but when youre logging in the field or passing traffic you dont want to be hunting for something to write with. also a headlamp with fresh batteries, separate from whatever you have in your regular gear bag. and honestly a printed copy of your local ARES nets and frequencies because you cannot always rely on having your phone or being able to pull something up digitally when things get weird. for cases i went with a real pelican and yeah it was expensive but ive thrown that thing around enough times now that i dont regret it. the harbor freight ones are fine for home storage but the latches on mine started getting fussy after about a year of actual use. depends how rough you think youll be with it i guess.

oh man i did my first one a few months ago and i was the same way. i think i practiced saying my callsign phonetically like 50 times the night before which is kind of embarrassing to admit. the HAMRS app worked great for me, just double check that you have the park loaded before you start so the contacts log to the right reference. one thing i wasnt expecting was how fast it went once i got spotted, like hunters are out there constantly watching the app and they come out of nowhere. it was actually really fun and way less scary than i thought. you got this

congrats on the first one, 44 QSOs is a solid debut especially on 40m in the afternoon. for the log submission you just upload once to the WWFF logbook of the world basically — go to wwff.us and there should be a log submission link in your account area, it takes an adif file. that feeds into the main database and hunters who are confirmed in that log get their credits automatically. you dont need to do anything separate beyond that, LOTW is just a bonus for people who want it there too. for finding lightly activated refs, honestly just browse the directory and sort or filter by activation count, references with zero or one activation are usually shown differently. theres also a telegram group and a facebook group where people post activation plans and sometimes you can coordinate or find out which refs nearby havent been touched in years. some of those old state game lands are sitting there with zero activations and its genuinely fun to be the first one in the log for a place

had almost the exact same problem last year. turned out my computer was going into some kind of USB power saving mode and dropping the Signalink mid-session. go into device manager, find your USB audio device, properties, power management tab, uncheck the box that lets windows turn it off to save power. fixed mine completely, was driving me crazy for like three weeks before i found that.

rate optimization in general honestly comes down to knowing when to abandon a run before most people would. i see a lot of guys holding onto a dead frequency way too long hoping it comes back and meanwhile there's a whole fresh band opening they're missing. SO2R helps with that but even on one radio just being more aggressive about band changes during the slow hours made a bigger difference for me than any equipment upgrade. that said yeah if you have a spare radio sitting there it's kind of hard to justify not at least trying it, worst case you learn something about your station's RF environment which is useful to know anyway.

check your mic gain first - 50% might be too hot depending on how loud you talk. try backing it down to maybe 30-35% and see if that helps. also make sure youre not sitting too close to the mic, should be about 2-3 inches away. the 7300 has decent processing but it can only work with what youre feeding it

so ive been on SSB for about two years now mostly HF, running an IC-7300 into a pretty decent antenna and for the longest time i just assumed my audio was fine because nobody complained. then i got on a net where the control op actually told me i sounded a little muffled and that kinda sent me down a rabbit hole. started reading about mic gain, compression, the whole ALC thing and honestly it got confusing fast. like everyone says dont overdrive the ALC but then some guys say a little ALC action is fine and others act like any ALC movement is the end of the world. ive been trying to dial things in by ear but its hard to judge your own transmitted signal obviously. what i ended up doing was getting a friend on a nearby repeater... wait no that doesnt work for SSB obviously. had a buddy about 30 miles away listen and give me reports while i messed with the settings. dropping mic gain down and letting the speech processor do more of the work seemed to help but im not sure i fully understand why. also the stock mic on the 7300 is supposedly not great but i havent pulled the trigger on anything else yet. curious what other people have found actually moves the needle on audio quality vs stuff thats kind of overhyped. like does the desk mic really make that big a difference or is it mostly settings?

welcome to the addiction haha. dont be nervous about checking in, net control has heard it all and honestly most of them love having new folks join. the first time i checked in i totally fumbled my callsign exchange and the NC just calmly asked me to repeat and we moved on, no big deal at all. for weeknight nets on HF you might want to look at the 75m and 40m ragchew nets — there are tons of them. the OMISS net is a good one for working states if you're into that. on the local/regional side your best bet is honestly just to ask your local club or check into your regional repeater and ask if anyone knows whats active in your area. net directories go stale fast and half of them haven't been updated since like 2015. for special event stations, the ARRL has a special event station lookup page that's actually kept pretty current, and the QRZ calendar is decent too. if you're into the parks stuff specifically look up POTA — parksontheair.org — there's a whole activations calendar and a spotting page and its honestly super fun to hunt activators on a lunch break or whatever. some weekends theres like 80 or 90 active activations going on at once.

Bring photo ID, your FRN, and $15 cash for the exam fee (some sessions take cards but cash is safer). You'll get your score immediately and can take General on the same day if you pass and feel confident.

honest answer — at 25 feet your dipole is only about 0.19 wavelengths above ground on 40m which is pretty low, so the takeoff angle is going to be higher than ideal for dx anyway. a vertical with a decent radial system will generally beat a low dipole for dx because of that lower radiation angle, your friend isnt wrong about that part. 16 radials will help a lot, 32 is better but theres diminishing returns past that. that said i ran a ground mounted quarter wave vertical on 40 for about two years and the noise floor was noticeably higher compared to my dipole. verticals are great transmitters but they pick up a ton of local noise. ended up going back to the dipole and just rotating it seasonally to favor europe in winter. not ideal but the signal to noise on receive made a real difference in actually pulling out weak stations. if you can get the dipole higher, like 45 feet or more, that changes the math quite a bit. the low angle performance improves and you lose less to ground losses. worth considering before you rip everything out.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly its great for what it is, i get it, weak signal dx, log contacts, move on. but lately ive been feeling like theres something missing and a buddy of mine keeps telling me to try JS8Call for when i actually want to type something more than a signal report and a 73. tried JS8Call last weekend on 40m and the activity was... not great around here. maybe 4 or 5 stations i could see on the waterfall, none of them responding. i know its not as popular as FT8 but i was kind of expecting more. is there like a specific time or frequency where people actually hang out on it or did i just hit a dead period. also running WSJT-X alongside it and my audio routing is kind of a mess right now with virtual cables going everywhere, probably my own fault. for context im on a IC-7300 into a dipole up about 30 feet, nothing fancy. PSK31 used to scratch that itch for chatting but that feels even more dead than JS8Call these days. what are you guys actually using when you want more than just signal reports

so ive been building a simple direct conversion receiver for 40m, nothing fancy just a NE602 mixer with a VFO i wound myself and a basic audio amp stage after it. got it mostly working which honestly surprised me but theres this low frequency hum sitting under everything that just wont go away. doesnt matter if i touch the antenna or disconnect it, hum is still there. ive got the whole thing running off a 9v wall wart right now and im wondering if thats the issue but before i go tear apart the power supply i wanted to see if anyone else ran into this with NE602 builds. the bypass caps are all there, i followed the application note pretty closely. VFO seems stable enough on the scope. its really just this hum, maybe 60hz or a harmonic of it, hard to tell without a proper audio analyzer. could be ground loops i guess but i dont have a ton of experience diagnosing that kind of thing on homebrew stuff.

copper is copper, dont stress about that. stranded vs solid makes basically zero difference at 40m wavelengths, the skin depth thing doesnt really come into play the way people think it does for hf. ive run antennas with all sorts of random wire gauges and the losses are negligable compared to everything else going on. the geometry is a little weird but honestly inverted V dipoles work fine even when they arent perfectly symmetrical. you might see a slight pattern skew but nothing that would noticeably hurt you in normal operation. if youre working midwest from the northeast at 100w and getting good reports thats really all you need to know — the antenna is doing its job. id maybe try to even up the heights at some point just for peace of mind but its not urgent.

gpredict is great for this, i use it too. one thing that helped me a lot was running gpredict with the doppler correction plugin talking to my radio via rigctld, even on a rig that doesnt have a dedicated sat mode you can get it to at least handle the downlink automatically and then you only have to worry about the uplink manually. cuts the cognitive load in half when youre also trying to point an antenna. might be worth looking into if you have a cable to connect the 818.

did the fan mod on mine probably a year ago, used a noctua 40mm fan, had to do a little wiring work to get the voltage right but its dead quiet now. honestly its one of those quality of life things that doesnt show up in any spec sheet but after living with it you cant imagine going back. the rig runs fine thermally, i checked temps during a couple hours of js8call and nothing got scary. the tcxo thing — i mean for ft8 youre probably fine without it, the stock oscillator isnt terrible. where it actually matters is if you wanna do things like wspr beaconing and care about being dead on frequency, or if youre doing any weak signal vhf stuff where frequency accuracy starts to actually matter. for ssb ragchewing and ft8 you wont notice it at all. save the money or put it toward something else honestly.

yeah repeaterbook is your friend for sure. one thing i'd add is sometimes the listing on there is outdated or just wrong so if you program in the tone and still cant get in, try with no tone at first just to see if maybe the repeater is open access. some of them dont require a tone at all. also if theres a club that owns the repeater sometimes their website has the info and its more up to date than the databases. baofeng works fine for getting started btw, dont let anyone give you a hard time about it

1.4:1 is fine honestly, most rigs will tune that no problem and youre not losing meaningful power. the foot difference in leg length at 40m is pretty negligible, youre talking less than 1% difference so i wouldnt stress about that. the bigger thing with inverted-V is that your included angle matters — if the legs are drooping pretty steeply the feedpoint impedance drops below 50 ohms and thats probably where your slight mismatch is coming from rather than any asymmetry in the wire. the choke balun situation is worth revisiting though. 10 turns of coax on PVC is probably getting you some choking reactance but without knowing the permeability of what youre winding over and the actual inductance its hard to say how effective it is at 7 MHz. a type 31 or type 43 ferrite toroid with the same coax wound through it will do a much better job keeping RF off the shield. its not gonna kill your antenna as-is but if youre ever scratching your head about RFI in the shack thats the first place id look.

Currently using N1MM+ for major contests but considering Log4OM for daily FT8 logging and smaller digital contests. Log4OM features very powerful UDP integration supporting unlimited inbound connections from WSJT-X, N1MM, and other programs simultaneously - can even combine QSOs from multiple operators into common logbook. Questions for those who've used both: How does Log4OM's contest scoring compare to N1MM+ for events like ARRL RTTY Roundup or WW Digi? Log4OM contest mode designed for direct logging, not QSOs from external programs like WSJT-X. Does Log4OM handle real-time dupe checking and multiplier tracking as effectively during high-rate periods? Also interested in Log4OM's new FT8/FT4 data reading support with JTDX, MSHV and WSJT-X integration. Worth switching from N1MM+ for mixed-mode contest operation?