Brian Mitchell

yeah the stereo audio thing is exactly how most people do it, left ear on run radio right ear on the mult/S&P radio. takes a while to get your brain to sort it out but honestly after a few contests it starts feeling pretty natural. the bigger issue early on is accidentally transmitting on the wrong radio which... dont ask me how i know thats a problem lol. the filter situation depends a lot on your antennas and how much band separation you have. if youre running same-band SO2R thats where it gets brutal and you really need the rx filtering sorted properly, but if youre just doing like 20m run and 40m search and pounce the isolation is usually manageable without going full SO2R filter box immediately. i started with just a dueling cq setup on two different bands and it was a big improvement over what i was doing before, like maybe 15-20% more qsos in a typical cw sweepstakes. whether its worth it really depends on how serious you want to get. if youre competing in a regional or trying to place in your call district then yeah it moves the needle. if youre just having fun and happy with a respectable score it might be more stress than its worth honestly.

so ive been doing single op contests for a few years now and my rates are decent, usually pulling 150-180/hr on a good run during something like CQ WW but i keep hitting a wall somewhere around hour 4 or 5 where the run dries up and i just sit there calling CQ into nothing waiting for the band to come back or whatever. a buddy of mine who does pretty well in the SOAB HP category keeps telling me SO2R is what fixes that problem and youre basically throwing away time if youre not at least S&Ping on a second radio while your run frequency sits idle. thing is ive got a spare TS-590 just collecting dust and my station could probably support a second antenna without too much heroics, but every time i start looking into the interstation interference side of it i get kind of overwhelmed. like filtering, bandpass filters, the whole 2BSIQ thing if you really want to do it right. feels like a rabbit hole that never ends. anyone here actually run SO2R from a modest suburban station, like not a contest superstation or anything, and find it genuinely improved their scores? or is this one of those things that sounds great in theory but the setup headaches eat up whatever time advantage you gain

so i've been putting off building a kit for probably two years now, always told myself i didn't have the soldering skills or whatever. finally just ordered a QCX mini from QRP Labs last month and sat down with it over a weekend. honestly it wasn't as bad as i expected, took me about 6 hours total including all the alignment stuff. got it up on 40m and made my first contact with a station in Ohio running like 4 watts, i'm in Vermont so that felt pretty good to me. the thing that surprised me is how much fun the whole process was, like actually building it was half the point. i have a few HTs and a mobile rig in the car but there's something about using something you put together yourself that's just different. anyway i'm already looking at the ubitx for my next project, maybe something with SSB capability. does anyone have experience with both? curious how the ubitx compares in terms of the build complexity and on-air performance for someone whos not super experienced yet.

so ive been putting this off for way too long but last weekend i finally just went ahead and built a simple half wave dipole for 40m out of some 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had in the garage. cut each leg to about 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula, used a SO-239 chassis connector as the center feedpoint mounted in an old PVC junction box, and ran some RG-8X down to the shack. the whole thing is in kind of an inverted-V config with the apex at maybe 25 feet off the ground tied to a tree and the ends staked pretty low, like 4 feet on one side and maybe 6 on the other because of the yard slope. anyway the swr at 7.150 is reading around 1.8:1 which i guess isnt horrible but i expected it to be closer to 1.5 or better given i followed the formula pretty carefully. also its resonant point seems to be down around 6.9 something, lower than i wanted. my question is do i just trim the legs or is the inverted-V shape messing with the resonant frequency and making it act longer than it should. ive read conflicting stuff about this. also one leg is running more or less over a chain link fence for about 10 feet and im wondering if that could be part of the issue or if im overthinking it.

i had basically the same issue with a similar build last year. turned out one of my toroids in the LPF was wound with a couple fewer turns than it should've been, just miscounted while i was winding in a hurry. the output looked rough and a buddy let me borrow his SDR to sweep it and yeah there was a spike at the second harmonic that was way too high. rewound the inductor and it cleaned right up. might be worth double checking your turn counts and measuring the inductance if you have an LC meter or even just a bridge.

Welcome to the rabbit hole, there is no escape haha. I was in the same spot about two years ago and now I have a spreadsheet that my wife thinks is deeply unhinged. One thing I'd add that nobody told me early on — dont sleep on getting your LoTW confirmations sorted for the ones you already have. I had like 30 QSOs sitting unconfirmed for months just because I hadnt uploaded my log properly. Also some DXpeditions upload to LoTW way faster than others, some take literally a year or more so dont panic if stuff doesnt show up right away. For WAZ specifically, zone 3 and some of the pacific zones can be tricky depending on where you're located and what antennas you're running. whats your setup like? that makes a big difference in how aggressively you can chase the rarer ones.

nice, ive been wanting to do SOTA but keep putting it off because im not sure my antenna situation is good enough for portable. did you just use the internal tuner on the kx2 or did you bring a separate one

the latency thing on RemoteHams is mostly gonna come down to your buffer size in RCForb — theres a slider in the audio settings and most people set it way too high by default thinking it helps stability but it just adds delay. i run mine around 60-80ms buffer and yeah it drops out occasionally but SSB is actually usable. if you cant get the RTT under about 150ms to your home site though youre gonna have a bad time no matter what you tweak. on the SDR panadapter idea over remote — ive tried this and honestly 6 up is probably workable if you throttle the sample rate on the dongle way down. like 250k samples/sec instead of the default 2.4M, and use something like OpenWebRX instead of SDR# because it handles the compression server-side and just sends you a rendered spectrum view in the browser. way less bandwidth than trying to pipe raw IQ data. its not as snappy as having it local but its functional enough to spot signals before you tune the main rig. the echolink bridging question — yeah dont try to tie the audio from your remote session into echolink on the same machine without a virtual audio cable setup that youve really thought through. Ive seen guys create feedback loops that were just brutal. i would run the linking completely separate personally, like a dedicated node machine that doesnt touch the remote audio chain at all.

the guy who disappeared probably just had somewhere to be, i wouldnt read too much into that part. happens all the time on simplex, people just drop off. one thing that helped me when i was new was just listening to a busy net for a while before jumping in. like an actual directed net where there's a net control, because they call on people in order and do all the ID stuff out loud and you start to just absorb how it flows. the ARRL has some stuff written down about ID rules but honestly hearing it in practice is way faster than reading about it

so ive had my IC-7300 for about two years now and just last weekend i finally got around to doing the MARS/CAP mod to open up the TX range a bit. mostly wanted it for some EMCOMM stuff where we occasionally need to operate just outside the normal ham allocations during drills, and also just to have the flexibility honestly. the mod itself was pretty straightforward, just the jumper on the board, took me maybe 20 minutes once i had the case open and could actually see what i was looking at. the icom service manual is pretty clear about which jumper to clip. transmit power seemed basically identical across the board after, no real change there, and the ALC is behaving normally as far as i can tell. what im curious about is whether anyone has gone further than that — like the firmware stuff some guys talk about, or any other internal tweaks that are actually worth the trouble. ive seen some posts about modifying the noise blanker behavior but i cant tell if those are just placebo things or if there's real improvement. not looking to turn it into something it isnt, just curious what mods people have found genuinely useful vs. the stuff that sounds cool online but doesnt really do anything in practice.

went through basically the same thing last year. one thing that helped me a lot was just trying Telnet mode first — like, connect over the internet just to verify your setup and make sure messages are actually flowing through your account before you throw the radio path into the mix. once i knew the client side was working right i felt a lot more confident debugging the RF connection separately. also VARA HF has a waterfall display, keep an eye on what youre seeing when you try to connect, sometimes you can see another station already using that freq which explains the busy signal

yeah i had basically the same problem when i was starting out. what helped me was slowing way down, like embarrassingly slow, maybe 10 or 12 wpm, and just sending the same stuff over and over until my hands stopped thinking about it. your brain can copy faster than your hands can send for a while and thats totally normal i think. the Winkeyer is a solid choice btw so its probably not the gear its just time and reps honestly

oh man i just did my first WWFF activation a few months ago and it was genuinely one of my favorite operating experiences. ended up at a wildlife refuge about an hour from home, set up a simple linked dipole in the trees and just worked the pile for a couple hours. the 44 contact thing does feel daunting at first but the WWFF community is really active on the cluster and once youre spotted people start calling pretty fast. one thing i wasnt expecting — some of the chasers are specifically hunting flora and fauna references and they get really into the nature angle of it. had a guy ask me what birds i could hear in the background lol. its a different vibe than POTA sometimes, a little more relaxed maybe. bring bug spray though, learned that the hard way

honestly the HamStudy app is what got me through it, i just did like 20-30 questions a day for maybe two weeks and by the time i sat for the exam i was scoring in the high 90s on the practice tests. the tech pool isnt that huge and a lot of questions repeat concepts so once you see the patterns it clicks. that said i did read through the ARRL book once just to get a rough idea of why things are the way they are, especially the electrical stuff with ohms law and the antenna sections. you dont need to be an engineer but knowing the reasoning behind even a few of the answers makes it way easier to remember them. the questions about operating procedures and band privileges are pretty easy if youve been listening around on a scanner or anything like that before.

im pretty new to HF so this is all still kind of mysterious to me honestly. i just got my general a few months back and i keep hearing about solar flux and propagation but im still learning what it all actually means in practice. like i understand the basic idea that the sun ionizes the ionosphere and that's how signals bounce around, but figuring out when and where to listen is still confusing. is there a good tool or app people use to predict openings? or is it mostly just experience and checking a few websites

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now with a TM-D710G and its been mostly fine for tracking, i can see myself on the map no problem. but lately when people send me messages through aprs.fi or via their own rigs i just dont get them. the beacon goes out every 5 minutes, digipeater picks it up, i show up on the map with correct position... but the message indicator on the radio never lights up. what i cant figure out is whether this is a radio config issue or something with how my path is set. im running WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. i did mess around with the TNC settings a few weeks ago trying to fix a different issue and im wondering if i borked something. anyone run into this before? the manual for the D710 is honestly not super helpful for troubleshooting message acknowledgement stuff.

im kind of in the same boat honestly, just got my general last spring and have been trying to get into DX chasing. the solar flux stuff feels like trying to read tea leaves sometimes. i did stumble onto a site called prop.kc2g.com that shows real time ionosonde data and that helped me a little bit more than just looking at the SFI number alone, might be worth checking out if you havent already. still figuring it out myself though so take that for what its worth

So ive been trying to get Winlink Express working properly for about two weeks now and im losing my mind a little bit. Background: im running a IC-7300 into a SignaLink USB for the audio interface, using Vara HF as the modem. I can connect to some gateways no problem, messages go out, everything looks great. But there are three or four gateways in my region that I keep wanting to use because theyre closer and have better signal paths to me, and those ones just drop the connection partway through the handshake or sometimes right after it starts sending. I dont know if its a timing issue or my audio levels are off or what. Ive been through the Vara calibration thing and my waterfall looks reasonable. The gateways that work tend to be farther away which makes no sense to me. Also im a little fuzzy on how the RMS relay stuff works when youre not near a gateway — like does it actually store and forward through the network on its own or do I need to configure something on my end for that to happen. Running Windows 10, current version of Winlink Express and Vara HF 4.7.4 I think. Any ideas welcome because ive been going in circles.

the partial connect and drop thing with Vara FM is almost always either an audio level issue or a PTT timing problem. what are you using for PTT keying? if youre on VOX that can definitely cause the handshake to fall apart because Vara wants tight control over when the radio keys up. i'd switch to CAT or a proper RTS/CTS PTT method if you havent already. also check your Vara FM audio levels - the input level meter in the Vara window should be peaking somewhere in the middle range, not slamming into the red and not barely registering. people overcook the audio thinking more signal is better and it just distorts everything at the gateway end. on your question about where the email handoff happens - the RMS gateway is basically just a radio-to-internet bridge. your message goes RF to the RMS, the RMS pushes it up to the Winlink CMS servers (there's a few of them, they sync with each other), and then the CMS handles the outbound delivery to regular email. so the RMS itself doesnt really have an email engine, its just the on-ramp. the CMS does the actual work of routing to the internet. thats why if you check your account on the Winlink web interface you can sometimes see messages sitting in your mailbox even if delivery to the outside email address failed for some reason.