Stephanie Clark

so ive been messing around with an arduino mega for the past few weeks trying to build an automated antenna switcher for my shack. the idea is pretty simple — i have a 40m dipole, a 20m wire vertical, and a fan dipole for 10/15m, and i want the rig to just... pick the right antenna based on whatever band i dial in on the IC-7300. i figured i could read the CI-V bus output from the radio and have the arduino interpret the band data and trigger the appropriate relay. turns out CI-V isnt quite as plug and play as i thought, at least not with a 5v arduino. had to build a little level shifter circuit because the logic levels dont play nice. got that sorted eventually but now the relay switching is introducing some weird RF into the audio chain and im not sure if its the relay itself or just crappy wiring on my part. using a SainSmart 8-channel relay board which maybe wasnt the best choice in hindsight. anyway the question is has anyone gone down this road and actually ended up with something reliable? or am i better off just buying one of those commercial band decoders. feels like ive learned a lot but im not sure the end result is going to be cleaner than just flipping a coax switch by hand honestly.

Weight difference is huge for portable ops. My 20Ah LiFePO4 weighs what my old 7Ah SLA did. For POTA activations, I can now carry backup batteries easily. Just remember - don't charge LiFePO4 below freezing or you'll damage the cells permanently.

so this has been driving me nuts for about three weeks now. my 7300 started dropping receive audio intermittently, like it just goes completely silent for anywhere from two seconds to maybe half a minute then comes back like nothing happened. transmit seems fine, i can hit a repeater and people hear me no problem, and the s-meter is still moving when it's 'deaf' so it's definitely receiving rf just not passing audio through. already checked the obvious stuff — volume knob is fine, no mute function accidentally on, AF gain is where it always is. i swapped headphones thinking it was the jack but same thing on the internal speaker. did a full reset twice and it came back within a day both times. firmware is current. im starting to wonder if it's thermal — it seems worse after the rig has been on for an hour or more but i haven't been systematic enough about it to say that for sure. has anyone seen anything like this on a 7300 or know what i should even be looking at on the board? i'm decent with a soldering iron but i've never been inside one of these SDR-based rigs before and i'm not sure how much is serviceable vs just swap the board.