Lisa Patel

yeah the buddipole on 40 is kind of a known thing, its workable but you really need to spend time with the tuning and the counterpoise situation matters a lot more than people think when youre on the ground like that. ive basically stopped bringing mine for anything below like 20 meters unless i have a lot of time to mess with it for a parking lot setup with no stakes i've been using a painter's pole - the extending fiberglass ones from the hardware store - zip tied to a traffic cone with some weight in it. ghetto but it works and costs like 12 bucks. throw an endfed or even just a random wire over it and use the car as a counterpoise sorta. not ideal but for emcomm purposes it gets the job done and setup is under 5 minutes which matters when things are already chaotic

so ive been licensed about 4 months now (general class) and i mostly just listen on the local 2m repeater and sometimes HF. i joined a couple of nets but honestly im still not totally sure what the right thing to do is in different situations. like theres this weekly SSB net on 40m i check into sometimes and last week the net control asked if there was any emergency traffic and i wasnt sure if i should say anything or just stay quiet since i obviously didnt have emergency traffic but i panicked and keyed up anyway and just said my call which i think was the wrong move? also separate question kind of - when is it appropriate to just call CQ on your own vs waiting for a net or finding someone already in QSO and asking to join? i dont want to step on anyone or be that guy who breaks into a conversation at a bad time. i know the basics from my technician study but actually doing it feels really different

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and figured id just ask here. i've got a pretty small backyard, maybe 60 feet end to end if im generous, and im trying to figure out whether to put up a proper dipole (inverted V probably) or just go with a vertical. the vertical is obviously easier to fit but everyone i talk to has a different opinion on whether the low angle radiation actually makes up for what you lose in gain or whatever. my main interest is 40m DX, not really local contacts, so i know low angle radiation matters a lot. ive got decent ground conditions i think, not particularly rocky, pretty normal suburban soil. the thing is if i go vertical i need to put down radials and i honestly dont know how many i realistically need to get decent performance out of it. ive seen everything from 4 to 120 radials mentioned and that range is just kind of paralyzing. current setup is literally nothing, just been running a random wire into my tuner which works but i know im leaving a lot on the table. anyone been in this situation and actually done a comparison somehow?

yeah 40m at night is something else. i do the same thing sometimes, just tune around and see whats happening. caught a guy last week running a net i didnt even know existed, been listening to it every tuesday since. beats doomscrolling for sure

i had almost the exact same issue with my first 40m dipole, drove me nuts for a weekend. turned out one of my legs was like 4 inches longer than the other because i measured wrong off a spool that had kinks in it. once i actually straightened the wire out properly and remeasured i was way off on total length. might be worth double checking your physical measurements with the wire stretched straight before messing with the formula. also 14 gauge stranded from the hardware store is totally fine btw, thats basically what most people use

congrats on the first activation, 12 contacts is totally solid especially for a first time out. yeah the pile drying up is completely normal, once the hunters who saw your spot work you theres not a huge pool waiting around unless youre at a rare or popular park. what a lot of activators do is wait maybe 15-20 minutes and then re-spot yourself, a fresh spot bumps you back to the top of the list and you'll usually get another small wave of callers. some guys spot on multiple bands too which helps, and yeah you do have to manually re-spot each time you change bands, the app doesnt do that automatically. some people use the self-spot feature built into the KX2 if they have the right cables set up but honestly just doing it from your phone works fine one other thing that helped me early on was trying to get on the air a little earlier in the morning on weekends, seemed like more hunters are active then. good luck with the next ones, once you get a few under your belt it becomes kind of addictive

that story about the guy in the truck is exactly why i love doing these activations. ive had more conversations about ham radio at parks than anywhere else, something about the outdoors setting makes people curious instead of just walking past. had a whole family stop once and the kids thought the antenna was wild. anyway welcome to the pota rabbit hole, fair warning it gets addictive pretty fast and youll start eyeing every green blob on the map wondering if its an activated park or not

the band scope span thing — go into the SET menu, Display, and there should be a Scope Range Hold option or something close to that, i forget the exact label. mine was off by default and it drove me nuts for like the first month. once you set it per band it sticks. or at least mostly sticks, i swear mine occasionally forgets when i power cycle but that might be operator error. anyway yeah the 7300 is a genuinely good radio for the price, been running mine for almost 3 years now and still happy with it. the front end isnt quite up there with the higher end SDR-based rigs when you have a really noisy band or you're trying to work weak signal next to a 59+20 station, but for general HF use its hard to argue with. what antenna are you running it into?

check the DC power connector at the radio itself, not just the cable. ive seen the barrel connectors on icom gear get a tiny amount of corrosion or just work slightly loose over time and under load they drop enough voltage to trigger protection. 100 watts is pulling like 20 amps and a bad connection that looks fine at low current will show up real fast. put a meter on the terminals at the radio while someone keys it up and watch what the voltage actually does during a dropout. if it dips more than like half a volt under load you found your problem.

mode B drives a lot of people crazy when they're coming from straight key, honestly you might just want to switch to mode A and forget about it. the difference only really matters if you're doing true iambic squeeze sending and most people aren't even doing that properly. mode A is a little more forgiving because it doesn't add that extra element at the end of a squeeze. on the tension thing — yeah lighter isn't always better. i actually run mine a bit heavier than most people would recommend because i tend to tense up when i'm concentrating and i'd overshoot dashes. just fiddle with it at whatever speed you're comfortable at and find what doesn't cause mistakes. give yourself a week with mode A and see if the extra dits go away.

so ive been doing FM sats for about a year now, mostly SO-50 and the PSAT2 stuff, and i finally decided to give AO-73 a real shot last weekend. got a decent pass, around 35 degrees max elevation from here in ohio, and i could hear the transponder beacon no problem. pulled up gpredict and had it running doppler correction through hamlib to my 817. heres where i got confused though — i was tuning around the passband and i could hear a few stations but when i tried to transmit i could never find myself in the downlink. i know you have to work the doppler on both uplink and downlink independently which is different from FM birds, and im pretty sure i was doing that, but honestly i might have been doing it wrong. is there a good way to verify youre actually hitting the transponder without someone else telling you? also does the 817 have enough drive for this or should i be running a small amp on the uplink side i was using a pair of Arrow yagis by the way, handheld, which worked fine for FM so i figured itd be ok

so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. picked up an 857D off a silent key estate sale, price was too good to pass up even knowing it might need work. guy's family said it was working fine but who knows how long it sat in that garage. anyway when i got it home and fired it up the S meter just sits at zero, no noise floor, nothing. squelch all the way off and still dead silence. but here's the weird part — i can key it up and my other radio hears it just fine on the other side of the room, so RF is getting out apparently. tried it on multiple bands, same thing across the board. also tried different antennas and a dummy load just to rule that out. i pulled the covers and dont see any obvious damage, no burnt components or anything that looks fried. voltages on the main board look reasonable to me but i only have a basic DMM so im not catching anything subtle. anyone dealt with this specific failure mode on the 857? wondering if its the RX frontend or something in the IF chain. service manual is not super helpful for actually diagnosing this kind of thing, at least the way i read it.

No need to apologize, everyone goes through this exact same confusion at first. Short answer is you dont have to be on all of them, but each one has its purpose so its worth understanding what youre getting into. LoTW is the big one for ARRL awards like DXCC and WAS, pretty much any serious DX chaser or contester will expect you to be on there. eQSL is kind of its own thing, some people swear by it and some ignore it completely — it counts for a few different awards but its not universally accepted the way LoTW is. For FT8 in particular a lot of people upload to both automatically through WSJT-X and the logging software so its not much extra work once you set it up. The bureau is basically a slow cheap way to exchange paper cards internationally. Your national organization (ARRL if youre in the US) handles it and your local club can sometimes help too. It can take months or even over a year for cards to move through the system so dont expect anything fast. If someone mails you a card directly yeah its nice to send one back, just basic courtesy. You can get cards made pretty cheaply from a few places online, vista print or some of the ham-specific printers. Doesnt have to be fancy when youre just starting out.

so ive been running Log4OM for about a year and a half now for general logging and i really like it for day to day stuff, tracking my QSOs, looking up callsigns, all that. but every time a contest rolls around everyone in the club is talking about N1MM and i feel like im the only one not using it. the thing is i dont really want to maintain two separate logs. i know you can export and import between them but that always feels like a disaster waiting to happen, duplicate QSOs, missing fields, whatever. and then theres the whole WSJT-X situation where i have that piped into Log4OM via UDP and it actually works pretty well most of the time. not sure how that would interact if i had N1MM running at the same time or if i even could. has anyone actually got a clean workflow going between all three of these? or do most contesters just accept that contest logs live separately and they manually merge stuff later? genuinely curious how people handle this because it seems like the kind of thing nobody talks about until you're in the middle of a contest weekend and suddenly nothing is talking to nothing.

so this has been driving me nuts for about a week now. my position beacon is going out, i can see it hitting the local igate (W5XYZ-10 shows me in its heard list) but aprs.fi just shows me sitting at my home QTH from like 3 days ago even when im mobile. tried clearing browser cache and all that. running a TM-D710G into a Byonics TinyTrak4 — wait no actually the 710 has its own built in TNC so i bypassed the TinyTrak a while back. SSID is set to -9 for mobile. symbol is car. path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. smartbeaconing is on and set to corner pegging at like 5mph minimum. the weird thing is if i pull up findU it shows the recent packets just fine with correct coordinates. so the data is getting to the APRS-IS network... aprs.fi is just not updating for some reason? or am i missing something obvious here. been on HF a lot lately and feel like maybe i forgot how this is supposed to work lol

yeah the inverting transponder thing tripped me up for a long time too. the way i think about it now is -- if your signal sounds too high pitched in the passband, tune your TX frequency DOWN, not up. opposite of what feels natural. after a few passes it becomes muscle memory but until then it's genuinely confusing especially when you're also juggling the antenna and trying not to fall over a lawn chair. for doppler on a linear bird like AO-73 what i eventually started doing is locking the downlink and only correcting the uplink. gpredict actually has a mode where it handles this -- if you have it connected to your radio via CAT it'll move the RX to keep your signal in the passband. but if you're manual like you are right now, just try to get in the habit of moving the TX in bigger steps less frequently rather than chasing it constantly. the passband is wide enough that you have some breathing room, you dont need to correct every 30 seconds at mid-pass. also AO-73 specifically goes linear only when its in eclipse i think? worth double checking the current mode status on amsat's site before a pass because sometimes its FM and you'll be sitting there confused why your SSB isnt doing anything.

the tension thing is totally personal but yeah a loose paddle will absolutely cause you to accidentally trigger extra elements especially when youre still building muscle memory. tighten it up just enough that you feel a little resistance before the contact closes — you dont want it flopping around. took me a while to figure that out with my first paddle. for the iambic mode stuff, a lot of beginners actually do better starting in mode A instead of mode B. mode B on most rigs will insert an extra element at the end of a squeeze which can really mess with your head when youre learning. check your 7300 menu and see which iambic mode its set to, that might explain some of the weirdness youre hearing. also honestly dont stress too much about sounding perfect right now, just get on the air and try. people on the CW watering holes are generally pretty patient with slower ops

yeah i caught the tail end of that opening, was only on for maybe 20 minutes but managed to snag a PY station running what sounded like a kilowatt into a beam, signals were genuinely S9 here in the midwest which you just dont see on 10 anymore. solar flux has been creeping up lately so im hoping this is a sign of things picking up as we head further into the cycle. i remember cycle 23 and honestly if we get anywhere close to those conditions again im going to be a happy man. on the icom thing, i think youre thinking of the IC-705 mkII or something along those lines, there were some rumors floating around but i havent seen an official press release yet. might be worth checking the usual spots, dx-world and eham usually pick that stuff up pretty quick.

so i finally did my first summits on the air activation saturday, been putting it off for like a year because i kept thinking id need a ton of gear or some crazy antenna setup. ended up just throwing my kx2 in a small pack with a 9:1 unun and about 35 feet of wire up in a tree and made 12 contacts in maybe 45 minutes. one of the chasers was in germany which i was not expecting at all on 20 meters with maybe 10 watts. the hike up was the hardest part honestly, the radio stuff was almost relaxing once i got set up. already looking at which summit to do next

yeah the LM386 is a pain, its almost a rite of passage dealing with that thing. the trick that finally worked for me was the bypass cap on pin 7, like a 10uF to ground, and keeping the gain jumper at minimum (pins 1 and 8 open) until you actually need more volume. also putting ferrite beads on the power leads helped a lot. that said if you're still on breadboard you're going to fight hum no matter what, RF and sloppy layouts dont get along. the BFO offset thing on the 602 is just tuning, you want to be somewhere around 700-800hz off the carrier frequency to get SSB sounding decent, fiddle with your VFO until voices stop sounding like donald duck. its all a bit of a fuss but once you get it dialed in its pretty satisfying. what frequency is your local osc running at?

yeah the vanity system is a little confusing at first but once you get it it makes sense. basically when you apply for a vanity call you pick specific callsigns you want and submit them in order of preference, the FCC processes all the apps that came in during the same filing window at the same time so it's not really first come first served within that window. if multiple people apply for the same call it comes down to a priority system based on license class and relationship to the previous holder of that call. 2x1 calls like W6X or K5Y are Extra class only, so if you're General you can only get calls in certain formats. most of the short desirable ones require Extra. and yes there is a fee now, i think its $35 same as the licensing fee but you'd want to double check on the FCC site or the AE7Q website which is really useful for looking up what calls are available and when they come out of the cooldown period. calls do go through a 2 year wait period after the previous licensee lets them expire before they're eligible for vanity. your club buddies with clean short calls almost certainly went through vanity, sequential process these days spits out KD9 and KE8 type calls mostly

so ive been trying to figure out if the hamfest over in the Dayton area is still happening, heard some rumors it got moved to a different venue this year and the club website hasnt been updated in like 6 months which is super helpful obviously. last year i went and picked up a barely used 706 for way less than i expected so im hoping the swap meet tables are as good this time around. anyone have actual info or know someone in that club who might know whats going on with it

so ive been checking into a few local 2m nets lately and im honestly still not 100% clear on when youre supposed to give your full callsign vs just saying youre here. like on the weekly rag chew net the net control just has everyone say their call once when they check in and thats it but then on the traffic net it seems like every single transmission you gotta ID even if youre just saying "no traffic" or whatever i know the FCC rule is every 10 minutes and at the end of a transmission but in a net context it gets confusing. like if net control says "any stations with traffic" and i say "none here" do i need to give my call? i usually do just to be safe but some of the older guys on the net seem to just say negative and move on and nobody says anything also slightly related — is there a right way to handle it when net control misses you during roll call? do you just wait and hope they come back around or is it okay to just jump in? i waited like 20 minutes one time and they never called me so i just gave up lol

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and honestly i mostly just use my HT for local stuff, 2m repeaters and the occasional APRS stuff. but ive been hearing people talk about HF and 40m and it sounds really interesting especially the idea of actually talking to people further away than just my county lol anyway i started looking at the General exam pool and honestly it seems pretty overwhelming. like theres stuff about propagation and feed lines and operating procedures i dont really know and some of the electrical theory questions are kind of rough. i did fine on the tech exam but that felt more manageable somehow is there a good way to study for this or do i just grind through the question pool? i downloaded hamstudycom and been doing the practice tests but im only getting like 65-70% right now which i know isnt passing. does the actual exam have the same questions from the pool or what? any tips from people who recently upgraded would be great

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. okay so the Technician exam is honestly not that bad, especially if you put a week or two into studying. the question pool is public — like the actual questions that can show up on your test are all published online, nothing is hidden. most people use HamStudy dot org or the ARRL study guide book, i personally just used HamStudy and drilled practice exams until i was consistently passing and then went and took the real one. the test is 35 questions, multiple choice, you need 26 right to pass. for scheduling you want to find a VE session near you, the ARRL website has a lookup tool for that. some clubs do walk-ins but most want you to register ahead. you dont need any morse code anymore either in case you read something old that says otherwise