Daniel Rodriguez

Can someone explain how to measure these parameters? I see mentions of spectrum analyzers and storage scopes in the literature but most of us don't have access to such equipment. Are there software solutions for monitoring our own signal quality?

I had almost the exact same problem when I started with Winlink a while back. Turned out my issue was the VOX delay on the Signalink was set too short so the radio would drop TX before the handshake finished. There's a tiny trimmer on the Signalink board for that. It's not obvious but worth checking. Also if you haven't already, go into the Winlink Express settings and look at the VARA modem settings if youre using VARA — there's a bandwidth setting and if your license class or band conditions dont support the wider bandwidth it'll cause inconsistent connects too.

yeah you basically got it right haha. SOTA is its own thing, not really a contest in the traditional sense — its more of an awards program where activators go up summits and chasers work them from home or wherever. its super fun and honestly a great way to practice making quick efficient contacts but its a different vibe entirely from sitting in a chair for a weekend grinding out QSOs. for actual contesting as a beginner, Field Day already happened yeah but dont worry it comes back every june. for fall i'd say look at the ARRL Sweepstakes in november — SS is great for newer operators because youre only working US and Canada stations so the pile ups arent quite as brutal as CQ WW where youre suddenly hearing a station in Kazakhstan calling CQ and trying to figure out how to break in. CQ WW is amazing but it can be a bit chaotic if its your first rodeo. that said theres nothing stopping you from jumping in for a few hours just to see what its like, you dont have to go the full 48 hours

short answer is no, theres no FCC rule that says you have to use NATO phonetics specifically. the regs just say you have to ID with your callsign, they dont say anything about how you have to pronounce it or whether you use phonetics at all. the NATO alphabet just became the standard because it was designed specifically to be understood across different languages and accents, each word sounds distinct enough that even in bad QSB or QRM you can tell them apart. the old "america boston chicago" stuff you sometimes hear is like holdover from older operating habits, its not wrong exactly but it can cause confusion because some of those words sound similar under noise. personally i always use standard NATO on any call where i think theres a chance of confusion, which on 40m is basically always. when conditions are good and its a casual ragchew with someone i know, i might not phonetically spell anything out at all. just use your judgment honestly

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and i get it, its great for weak signal contacts and filling the logbook but honestly it feels like pushing buttons more than operating. somebody in my club mentioned JS8Call and said its like FT8 but you can actually talk to people and i finally installed it last weekend. first impression is that its... a lot. like theres a lot going on in the interface and im not totally sure im configured right because i see decodes coming in but nobody seems to respond when i call. running about 50w into a dipole on 40m, same setup i use for FT8 with no issues there. JS8 seems to decode okay, i can see stations, just not making contacts. also been messing with PSK31 a little bit which i actually kind of love because it feels more like a real QSO but the band seems pretty dead for it these days compared to even a few years ago i think? or maybe im just on at the wrong times. anyway curious if anyone uses JS8 regularly and whether theres a trick to actually getting responses or if its just a smaller pool of operators

not a dumb question at all, this stuff trips up a lot of new hams. so for HF as a tech you do get some privileges — 10m is the big one where you can do phone (SSB) between 28.300 and 28.500, and yeah you also get CW on parts of 15, 40, 80, and a couple others. the ARRL has a license privileges chart that lays it all out way better than trying to read raw part 97, honestly i'd just bookmark that page. as for mexico, thats the IARP thing — international amateur radio permit. you apply through ARRL and it covers most of the ITU region 2 countries including mexico. but you'll want to double check what modes and bands the mexican regs allow for your license class equivalent because its not always a straight 1 to 1. your HT should be fine for 2m/70cm stuff, just make sure you have the permit paperwork with you.

honestly the keyer in the 7300 is fine for learning, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. the issue you're describing with the cheap paddle though is real — a mushy, inconsistent action makes it way harder to develop good muscle memory because your hand is constantly compensating. doesnt have to be a $200 beginner paddle either. look at the Vibroplex or even a used Bencher BY-1, they show up on ebay pretty regularly for 40-60 bucks and the difference in feel is night and day. on the speed thing — 15 wpm sending when youre still learning is probably too ambitious. most people do better dropping to like 10 or even 8 for practice sending and then gradually bringing it back up. your ears might be ahead of your hands right now which is actually pretty normal. keep at the cwops stuff, those folks know what theyre doing

yeah i caught the tail end of that opening, was around 28.400 and heard a few Brazilian stations but my antenna situation is kind of a mess right now so i couldnt get anyone to come back to me. frustrating but at least it means the cycle is doing something. its been ages. on the Icom thing, ive seen that same blurry photo going around and my take is its probably just a refresh of something existing. they tend to do that every few years and rebrand it. but i'll admit if it comes in under 1500 bucks with decent filtering i might actually pay attention. the 7300 is still a great radio but its getting a little long in the tooth for some of the newer digital mode stuff people are doing.

yeah the check-in chaos thing is basically universal, every group hits it. what helped our section a lot was running a separate check-in net on a secondary frequency while NCS handles traffic on the primary. kind of like a staging area — you check in with the secondary net manager, they batch you up and pass a consolidated list to NCS every few minutes. takes some coordination to set up but it really smoothed things out for us after a pretty rough exercise a few years back where we had almost the same situation you're describing. the phone thing is trickier honestly. i think part of it is just muscle memory, people reach for the phone when they're stressed. one thing our EC did was explicitly add a rule to the exercise that any off-net communication counted as a failure for that station, not punitive just tracked. made people think twice. though it also surfaced the real problem which is sometimes the radio path genuinely wasnt working and they had no other option — which is actually useful to know during a drill rather than a real event. tabletop first is absolutely the move if you havent done one. we do a tabletop every january and then a field exercise in spring. the tabletop is where you find out that half the group hasnt read the ICS forms in two years and someone's repeater coverage assumptions are completely wrong.

oh man yes slow down, like way more than you think you need to. 12-13 wpm with mushy characters is just practicing bad habits over and over. drop it to maybe 8 or even 7 and just work on making each character sound clean and crisp before you bump the speed back up. the keyer on the 7300 is actually pretty decent so its probably your paddle grip and squeeze timing more than the radio settings. one thing that helped me a ton was the Farnsworth method — you set the character speed high, like 18-20 wpm, but the spacing between characters and words is much slower. that way your fingers are learning the rhythm of each character at full speed but you have extra time to think. koch method combined with farnsworth is what most people swear by. also check that your paddle tension and contact gap are adjusted right, if the gap is too small you get a lot of accidental contacts especially when youre tense. took me about a year to feel comfortable but once it clicks it really does click

aprs.fi showing your position doesnt really tell you much about the message path tbh. position packets and message packets can take totally different routes through the network depending on whats around you. i'd fire up aprsdroid or something on your phone connected to an APRS-IS server and see if the messages are actually hitting the internet backbone at all. if they're not getting to IS then theyre dying somewhere in the RF chain and its probably a path issue or the local digi doesnt have messaging enabled. some older digis are configured to only pass certain packet types and message packets occasionally get dropped, seen it happen in a few areas where the digi hasnt been touched in years

so its like 9pm and ive just been spinning the dial on 40m for the past hour, catching bits of conversations here and there but nothing really pulling me in. heard a couple guys ragchewing about their antennas which honestly i tuned out of pretty quick. not really sure why im even posting this, i guess just curious if anyone else does this kind of aimless listening thing or if thats just me being weird. feels kinda meditative sometimes honestly. anyway if anyones on tonight maybe throw out a call somewhere around 7.250 or so, id be happy to chat about literally anything

In mobile installations you need an antenna counterpoise, not necessarily a ground. You're actually 'bonding' pieces together, not grounding unless you're dragging a chain! One layer of paint won't greatly interfere with RF energy flowing into the car body for an efficient counterpoise.

so i finally got off my butt and did my first SOTA activation last weekend, summit was only like a 2 mile hike so i figured no big deal. packed the KX2 and my end fed and a lightweight tripod thing for the mast. everything seemed fine until i got up there and realized i forgot the freaking counterpoise wire at home sitting on my workbench. spent like 20 minutes trying to figure out if i could use a tree branch or something before i just said forget it and tried without it. got a few contacts on 20m but the swr was all over the place and i think i was just lucky the radio didnt complain too much. made the 4 contacts to qualify which i was happy about but man it was stressful. also wind was insane up there, knocked my mast over twice. anyone else have a disaster first activation story because i cant be the only one

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i mostly do 2m FM on the local repeater and some HF on 40m when conditions are decent. i know the NATO phonetics, like alpha bravo charlie etc, i had to learn them for my tech exam anyway. but i notice some guys on the repeater just say letters normally and other times people go full phonetic for everything and im not really sure when youre supposed to do which one like if someone asks me to say my callsign again do i spell it out phonetically every single time or is that overkill in a normal conversation. and on HF it seems like everyone always uses phonetics but even then i hear people mixing in random words that arent the NATO ones, someone said "whiskey" for W which i think is correct but then another guy said "washington" which i dont think is right? or is it? im just confused about whether theres a hard rule or if its more of a feel thing sorry if this is a dumb question just trying to figure out the norms

mic distance is almost certainly part of it. with a dynamic mic like the HM-219 that comes with the 7300 you really want to be like 2-3 inches away, maybe even closer. too far back and you lose all the presence and the radio ends up amplifying room noise and reverb instead of your actual voice, which is probably where the tin can thing is coming from. for the eq on the 7300 i'd honestly start by resetting everything to flat and just listening to recordings of yourself before tweaking anything. the icom does have a voice recorder built in, use it. record yourself talking normally, play it back, and then adjust from there. most people end up cutting some low mids around 200-400hz to clean up the muddiness and boosting a little around 2-3khz for presence and intelligibility. the tx bandwidth setting matters too — for rag chews something like 100-2800 or even 100-3000 is fine, you dont need to go super narrow unless the band is packed. also make sure your ALC is behaving, if it's slamming all the way up on every syllable your audio is going to sound compressed and harsh no matter what the eq looks like.

oh man we have all been there, dont even stress about it. your first few check-ins are always a little awkward and honestly stepping on someone briefly or fumbling the timing is just part of learning. i've been licensed 12 years and i still occasionally key up at the wrong moment. to answer your questions though — nets vary a lot by club but most follow a pretty similar structure. the net control will usually announce when theyre moving from directed traffic to general check-ins or open discussion, so listening for that announcement is the key thing. if youre ever unsure just wait and let someone else go first, youll pick up the rhythm quick. the directed traffic part is basically when specific stations are called by the NCS to pass formal messages, usually stuff like health and welfare traffic or ARRL radiograms. if you dont have any traffic to pass you just stay off unless youre called. as for the gap thing — that happens constantly. people leave a little space between overs for a reason, sometimes to think, sometimes because theyre writing something down. good rule of thumb is wait for them to say 'go ahead' or 'over' or hear the squelch tail before you key up. some nets are faster-paced and you have to feel it out but better to wait a beat too long than to step on someone. sounds like you did fine honestly.

so ive been using Log4OM for general logging for maybe two years now and honestly i like it for day to day stuff, the interface makes sense to me and the cloudlog sync works fine but every time contest season rolls around i feel like im fighting it. switched over to N1MM last cqww and the difference for actual contesting is pretty obvious, the rate meter alone is worth it and the bandmap just works the way you expect it to. my issue is WSJT-X. i run FT8 during some of the contests that allow it and getting WSJT-X to talk to N1MM has been kind of a headache. i got it working eventually using the UDP broadcast thing but every now and then it just stops logging to N1MM mid-contest and i have to restart something, not always sure what. Log4OM handles the WSJT-X connection way more gracefully in my experience but then i lose all the contest-specific stuff. anyone else running this kind of hybrid setup or did you just pick one and commit. feels like theres no perfect solution here and im probably missing something obvious

Setting up my HF base station and debating antenna tuner options. Most modern rigs like the new transceivers come with built-in antenna tuners, but I keep reading about external tuners being better. You'll want an antenna tuning unit ($100+) to work multiple bands. Auto-ATUs save hassle but usually cost more than manual ones. Is there a real performance difference, or is it just convenience? Planning to use a multiband end-fed antenna covering 8 bands from 10m to 80m.