Brian Mitchell

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.

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 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.

yeah this is one of those arguments that never really dies on forums lol. i modeled a bunch of variations in 4nec2 last winter when i was bored and the takeaway i got was that apex height matters way more than the shape, like whether its V or flat. get the center up as high as you can and dont stress the rest too much. also ladder line into a tuner is already doing you favors so id just leave it alone if it's working

totally been there, dont get discouraged. the net directory can be hit or miss honestly, a lot of those listings are outdated by years. best thing i ever did was just ask at my local club meeting which nets the members actually check into regularly — turns out there was a 2m net running tuesday nights like 10 miles away that wasnt even in the directory anymore because the net manager never updated it.
for special event stations that's kind of a separate world from regular nets. you can find those on the ARRL special event station page, they list them by date and they're usually one time things for like lighthouses, historical sites, anniversaries of battles, that kind of thing. the lighthouse weekend in august is a big one if you havent heard of it. you work em and sometimes get a certificate or QSL card. its pretty fun once you do your first one, not scary at all. just call their callsign and give your call and signal report and youre done basically.

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.

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.

Had the RSP1A for about two years and coming from the rtl-SDR dongle the difference on HF is pretty significant, especially below 10 MHz where the dongle just kind of falls apart. The direct sampling mod on the v3 dongle is ok but its not the same. The RSP1A has proper HF coverage and the preselection filters make a real difference when youre near strong AM broadcast stations.
SDRuno works fine but honestly i mostly use it with SDR++ now which has come a long way and handles the RSP devices well. On linux you can use SoapySDR with the RSP drivers and then most software just works through that layer. gqrx will see it no problem that way.
The HackRF transmit thing sounds appealing but the receive performance is actually worse than the RSP1A in my experience — the noise figure isnt great and the 8-bit ADC hurts it. If you mostly want to listen id go RSP1A without much hesitation. If you eventually want to get into stuff like replay attacks or portapack experiments then maybe HackRF but thats a whole different direction.

i was in the exact same spot about 8 months ago lol. ended up getting the UV-5R because i wasnt sure i'd even stick with the hobby and didnt want to drop real money on it. honestly no regrets for where i started, got me on the air same day basically. now that im more into it im saving up for a Kenwood TH-D74 which is a completely different world obviously but as a starter radio the baofeng did its job.
one thing nobody told me — get a better antenna for it right away. the rubber duck that comes with it is pretty mediocre and a nagoya NA-771 or similar is like $12 and makes a noticeable difference on weaker repeaters.