Nicole Martin

been using JS8Call pretty regularly on 40m evenings and yeah theres definitely people on there, its not dead. its a different vibe than FT8 for sure, more like a slow IRC chat almost. i had a 45 minute conversation with a guy in Montana last winter during a period where 40m was basically unusable for voice and it worked fine the whole time. the latency is weird to get used to, you send a message and then wait, but thats kind of the point one thing that tripped me up at first was the heartbeat beacon thing it does automatically, worth reading up on that before you just let it run or youll be beaconing on a frequency without realizing it

yeah what he said, also watch out near the band edges in general. like 7.300 is the top of the US allocation and if your voice or sideband signal bleeds over that you can get in trouble even if your dial shows 7.300 because the actual signal occupies some bandwidth. most people say stay at least 3khz inside the edge to be safe so like 7.297 or lower for SSB. i learned that one the hard way when someone pointed it out to me lol

the UV-5R menus are a nightmare honestly, i spent way too long on mine before i just downloaded CHIRP and programmed it from my laptop. way easier, you can see everything laid out and set the CTCSS tone without digging through 30 menus. just a thought if youre still fighting with it also about the etiquette thing — totally fine to key up and say your call, thats literally how people find out youre there. some repeaters have nets on certain nights too so worth checking if the club has a schedule, easier to jump in when theres already a conversation going

yeah SSB over remote is workable but you kind of have to adjust your operating style a bit. i run a remote setup about 200 miles from home and once i got used to the delay it became second nature to just wait a beat longer before transmitting. not ideal but you adapt. CW is definitely easier for this reason, and FT8 is totally fine obviously since the timing is all software controlled anyway. one thing that helped me a lot was setting up a second audio path with lower quality just for monitoring so i could hear the band in near-realtime and use the main high quality stream just for actual QSOs. probably overkill but it works for me

Built a 40m dipole using 14AWG stranded wire and calculated total length at 66 feet using the 468/f formula. Using 468 divided by 7.2 MHz center frequency gives me 65 feet total. I'm getting high SWR (3:1) across most of the band with my LDG Z-100 tuner. Question: I made my own center insulator from a small PVC junction box and SO-239 connector. Could the insulator design be affecting my impedance match? Also, should I be using a 1:1 balun?