Gregory Adams

so this has been driving me crazy for about three weeks now. my 7300 will be putting out full power, i'll be mid-qso and then it just... drops. like sometimes it'll go from 100w down to maybe 20-30w and just sit there. SWR looks fine on the meter, dummy load reads the same, antenna hasnt changed. it comes back on its own sometimes after a few minutes or if i cycle the power. i've already checked the obvious stuff - ALC levels look normal, nothing weird in the menus that i can see. thought maybe it was thermal throttling at first but the fan seems to be running fine and it doesnt feel particularly hot. i did have it on a shelf that maybe wasnt the best for airflow but i moved it and same issue. anybody seen this before? im wondering if its a PA board issue or maybe something with the ALC feedback loop going wonky. hate to send it in to icom because theyre backed up and its not cheap. just want to narrow it down before i do anything drastic

yeah the priority system is basically gone now, its pretty much first come first served these days with a few exceptions. the main thing left from the old system is that if a call just became available — like if the previous holder passed away or let their license lapse — there's a 30 day waiting period before anyone can snag it. that window is supposed to give close relatives a chance to apply for it first if they want to keep it in the family. after that 30 days though its open season. and your elmer is right about the district thing, you can absolutely hold a 1x2 from the 2nd district while living in Florida or wherever. the geographic restriction on call districts hasnt been a thing for a long time. i have a W6 call and i live in the midwest, nobody cares. timing wise in my experience and from what ive seen on the forums it usually processes within 2-3 weeks if everything is clean on your application. sometimes faster. the ULS can be a little unpredictable but its not the nightmare it used to be. just make sure your mailing address in ULS matches exactly before you apply or it can kick back on you.

I had the same experience Tuesday, heard a pile up on 28.495 and jumped in not really expecting much and worked a PY station on the third call. my antenna situation is nothing special either so i was pretty stoked. I've just been setting a timer to check 10m around 2pm local and more often than not theres something happening lately

so i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 mins from the house and wow there is way more to it than i thought watching youtube videos lol. i brought my FT-891 and a wire antenna i threw together, got there early thinking id have plenty of time to set up before the picnic tables got crowded with families and yeah that did not happen the way i planned. spent like 40 minutes just finding a decent spot with some tree clearance for the wire, then my feedline connector was acting up and i lost probably another 20 minutes fiddling with that. by the time i was actually on the air i only had maybe 90 minutes before i needed to pack up. ended up getting 12 contacts on 40m which i know is enough to count as an official activation but i really wanted to hit 20 or 30. the hunters were so patient with me though, i kept fumbling the exchange and forgetting to say the park reference and people just waited or asked me to repeat, nobody was rude about it. i think i heard one guy call me like 4 times before i finally pulled him out of the noise. anyway it counts and im already thinking about where to go next time. anybody have tips for speeding up setup? im thinking i need to practice the antenna situation more at home before i just show up somewhere

So ive been trying to get my APRS setup working for the past couple weeks and im just going in circles at this point. Running a TM-D710G with the internal TNC and ive got my callsign and SSID set correctly (pretty sure anyway), path is WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1, and the beacon interval is set to 2 minutes. I can hear other stations beaconing on 144.390 no problem so the radio is clearly receiving but when I check aprs.fi my station just isnt there. Tried keying up on the frequency manually and that shows fine, so the radio is definitely transmitting. Makes me think the packet itself is malformed somehow or the TNC isnt encoding it right. Anyone run into this before with the D710? Im starting to wonder if theres some setting buried in the menus im missing. The manual for this thing is like 200 pages and not exactly clear on the APRS specific stuff.

ok so i passed my general a few months ago and ive been trying to figure out the 40 meter band and where i'm actually allowed to transmit. like i know there's a chart somewhere but every time i look at it i get more confused. my understanding is that generals get phone privileges starting at 7.175 but then i keep hearing people say to stay away from the band edges and im not totally sure what that means practically speaking. like if the band goes up to 7.300 does that mean i shouldnt be transmitting right at 7.300 or just close to it? and what happens if my signal is wide enough that it bleeds over? i have a fairly basic radio and im not 100% sure how wide my signal actually is on SSB. just trying to not step on anything i shouldn't and also not accidentally transmit out of band

ok so i passed my technician exam like two months ago and ive been mostly on 2m and 70cm doing local stuff which is fine but i really want to try HF. i read somewhere that techs get some HF privileges but honestly the FCC part 97 document is kind of a wall of text and i cant figure out exactly what im allowed to do without getting in trouble. from what i can tell i get 10m phone somewhere around 28.3 to 28.5 and some CW privileges on a few other bands? but i also saw something about RTTY or data modes being allowed somewhere. i dont want to just transmit on something and find out i wasnt supposed to be there. is there like a simpler breakdown of this somewhere or am i just going to have to sit down and actually read the whole thing

so i got my technician license back in March and ive been mostly just listening and doing the occasional simplex contact but a buddy of mine told me about the Wednesday evening net on 146.52 and i checked in last week for the first time and it was honestly way more fun than i expected. the net control was super patient with me fumbling through my first check-in and i didnt even have my callsign fully memorized yet which was a little embarrassing but whatever. anyway now im kind of hooked and want to find more nets to check into. i know theres the ARRL nets and stuff but the list on their website is kind of overwhelming and i dont know which ones are actually active vs just listed and never happening. does anyone have nets they check into regularly that they'd recommend? im in the midwest so local repeater nets are great but i also have a general class exam scheduled for next month so maybe some HF nets after that? just looking for suggestions from people who actually do this stuff

that's a great first deployment story, congrats on getting through it. 14 hours on battery is solid, what was your draw like with the 7300? i always worry about underestimating consumption when i'm doing extended ops at a shelter. our group uses mostly VHF for shelter-to-EOC links but ive been pushing for some HF redundancy for a while now, some of our served agencies are finally warming up to the idea. the mindset shift you described is real. drills are drills and everyone knows it even if they're trying hard. when theres an actual activation something just clicks differently. good on you for sticking through the slower training periods, a lot of newer folks drift away after a few months if they don't see action pretty quick.

the partial call thing is real but you gotta be careful with it. works best when the DX op is clearly struggling to pull calls out, like when conditions are rough and he keeps coming back with partial calls himself — then yeah just your suffix makes sense and cuts through better. but if the band is decent and he's copying fine, sending just your suffix is kinda rude to be honest, other stations with the same suffix get confused and it slows everything down. the sweep pattern thing you noticed is exactly right and its something most people never pay attention to. i spent probably a full afternoon just listening to a VU7 expedition a few years back without ever transmitting, just mapping where they were pulling calls from in the split. by the time i finally started calling i had a pretty good mental model of the rhythm and got through in maybe 20 minutes which for that one was fast. the other thing i'd add is if your signal has any kind of issue — splatter, slightly off frequency, anything — you're dead in a pileup no matter what technique you use. i upgraded from a barefoot 100w to running an amp at around 500w and the difference was honestly pretty significant, not because of raw power alone but i think my audio also got cleaned up when i switched rigs at the same time so hard to isolate the variable there.

wow congrats on your first activation, thats pretty cool that you got a real one so quickly. im still just doing the weekly nets and havent been called out yet. was the HF side of things involved at all or was it mostly 2m? i keep reading about NVIS setups for when repeaters go down and im trying to figure out if i should be practicing more on 40m for that kind of thing.

congrats on passing the tech exam, welcome to the hobby. so the baofeng debate is basically eternal on these forums and honestly both sides have a point. they work fine for getting started and learning the ropes, but the build quality is what it is and the programming software can be a headache. that said ive handed them to new hams at our club and most of them have no complaints for basic repeater use. if you can stretch to around $100-120 the Yaesu FT-65 is a much better experience in my opinion. better receiver, easier menus, and it just feels like a real radio in your hand. the dual-band coverage on both is probably more than you need right now but its nice to have 70cm available. honestly for where you are right now either would serve you fine, just maybe stay away from the no-name clones that look like baofengs but arent even really baofengs if that makes sense.

so its a tuesday night and im just spinning the dial on 40m and theres like... not much going on. heard a couple guys ragchewing down around 7.250 but honestly couldnt make out half of it, propagation is pretty rough tonight i think. been a ham for about 3 years now and i still find myself just sitting there with the squelch open hoping something interesting pops up. anyone else do this or am i just weird

yeah saw that too, the specs sheet they put out looked pretty solid but i always wait a few months before trusting any of that stuff. remember when that other radio came out and everyone was hyped and then the first batch had that weird audio issue that took like two firmware updates to sort out. just saying. the 6m thing though, i worked a couple stations down in the caribbean yesterday afternoon around 50.125 so it definitely seems to be moving. had a nice opening into south america too for maybe 45 minutes. worth checking if you havent already.

so ive been running N1MM for contesting for years now and its great for that obviously, but for everyday logging its kind of a pain to deal with honestly. someone at the club mentioned Log4OM and ive been messing around with it this week and its pretty nice for general stuff, awards tracking, QSL management etc. my problem is WSJT-X. i have it talking to Log4OM okay now but during contests i still want to use N1MM because frankly nothing touches it for serious contesting and the bandmap integration is just too good to give up. but then i end up with QSOs in two different logs and i have to merge stuff after and its just a mess every time. does anyone have a workflow that actually works here or am i just stuck choosing one and dealing with the limitations? i know you can pipe WSJT-X to N1MM during contests but outside of that i dont really want N1MM running just to log a few FT8 contacts on a tuesday night

so we had our first real activation last month — county EOC requested ARES support during the flooding and honestly i wasnt totally prepared for how different it felt versus drills. like we do these exercises every few months and everything is kinda scripted, you know? real thing was just... chaotic in a way thats hard to explain. the net control guy did a great job keeping things organized but there were operators showing up who hadnt been to a training in over a year and didnt know our current ICS forms procedures, and we had one guy trying to use a radio that wasnt programmed with our current repeater setup. took like 20 minutes just to get him on the right frequency which felt like forever when stuff was actually happening. im not trying to complain, overall it went well and EC said it was a success. but it made me realize how much the training exercises kind of smooth over the messy parts. anybody else been through a real activation and had that same kind of reality check moment? wondering if theres specific stuff i should be pushing our group to practice that would help close that gap

yeah i went through this exact same thing last winter. FT8 just started feeling hollow after a while, like you said, slot machine is exactly the right word for it. switched most of my digital time to JS8Call and havent really looked back for casual operating. still fire up WSJT-X for contests or if i want to work a specific DX entity but day to day JS8Call scratches the itch better. one thing i'll say is give yourself a few sessions before judging it, the first time i sat down with it i was confused by the interface and didnt really understand how the heartbeat beaconing worked or why my messages werent getting responses. once it clicked it made more sense. also the 40m JS8Call calling frequency is 7.078 i think, make sure you're actually on the right freq cause i wasted like a week wondering why i wasnt hearing anyone

yeah i went through the exact same thing when i first started, felt like i was invisible on the air for weeks lol. one thing i'll add that tripped me up -- on the baofeng make sure youre actually saving the settings to the right memory channel, i kept editing the wrong one and wondered why nothing stuck. also some repeaters have a timeout timer so if nobody responds right away just try again a little later, sometimes the repeater is linked to other systems and theres a lot of traffic you might not even realize is happening. dont get discouraged, once you get the tone programmed in youll probably start hearing yourself hit the repeater no problem.

yeah i was in the same boat when i first started checking into nets, felt like everyone else knew some secret rulebook lol. one thing that helped me was actually downloading the net's preamble script — a lot of clubs post them on their website and you can see exactly what net control is going to say and when they expect responses. also if you're on a repeater with a bit of a tail or courtesy tone, that's usually your cue that someone finished transmitting and it's ok to key up. takes a while to get the feel for it but you'll get there pretty quick

Not a dumb question at all, the actual Part 97 text is genuinely rough to read if you're not used to legal/regulatory language. For Technician HF privileges you've got CW on certain segments of 80, 40, 15, and 10 meters, then phone and image on 10m from 28.300 to 28.500 MHz. Power on HF is 200 watts PEP max for Techs on those segments I believe, though on VHF/UHF you can run up to 1500 watts if your radio can even do that which most cant. Third party traffic is basically when you let someone who isnt licensed use your station to communicate, like letting your wife say hi to someone on the other end. It's mostly relevant for international contacts because there are countries that have third party agreements with the US and ones that dont. For domestic stuff it's less of a minefield but you still need to stay in control of the station. Honestly for right now just focus on getting on the air and you can dig into the edge cases as they come up. The ARRL has a band plan chart that's way easier to read than the raw FCC text.

honestly your kit sounds way more thought out than mine was when i first put one together lol. mine was basically a radio in a backpack with a power strip that required shore power so... not exactly emergency ready. the charging question is a good one. im still figuring out solar myself but ive seen guys at our local ARES meetings use those goal zero panels and they seem to work okay. not the cheapest option but they're pretty foolproof which matters when things are chaotic. also random thing -- do you have a copy of your license in the kit? i know you dont technically have to carry it but if youre operating somewhere unfamiliar or alongside served agencies it can just smooth things over to have it handy. i keep a laminated copy with mine now.

been doing ARES for about 12 years now and honestly the best advice i can give is dont try to build the perfect kit all at once. you'll end up with a $2000 pelican case full of stuff you never tested together and then wonder why nothing works when you actually need it. my main kit is VHF/UHF focused because thats what 90% of local emcomm actually needs. i run a Yaesu FT-891 for HF when i need it but thats a secondary bag i only bring if the activation specifically calls for it. for battery ive been using a 40ah lithium iron phosphate for a couple years now, the weight savings over SLA is real, especially if youre hauling stuff any distance. had a sealed lead acid before and lugging that thing around got old fast. the organization thing matters more than people think. i put a laminated card inside the lid of my main case that lists everything thats supposed to be in there. that way after an activation i can check off whats there and replace anything i used or forgot to pack back. learned that the hard way when i showed up somewhere without a single PL-259 because i borrowed it for a previous event and never put it back.

oh man i feel this post. im still pretty new to all this emcomm stuff and our group did a tabletop exercise (not even a full deployment sim) and i still got confused about when to use formal message format versus just passing info verbally. there seems to be a lot of nuance that you only really get from doing it over and over. did your group debrief afterward? ours does a whole after action review and honestly thats where i learn the most, people are pretty honest about what went wrong

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now, general class, and i keep meaning to check into the local 2m net on tuesday nights but i always chicken out at the last second. i know that sounds dumb but i genuinely dont know the right way to do it. like when do you actually key up? do you wait for the net control to specifically ask for check-ins or is there a window where you just jump in? last week i tried and there were already people checking in and i didnt want to step on anyone so i just listened the whole time again. also is it weird to just say your callsign and nothing else or are you supposed to say your name and location every time? ive heard some people do the full intro and some just say their call. i dont want to be that guy who does it wrong in front of everyone on the frequency lol

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and still a little fuzzy on when youre actually supposed to use the NATO phonetics vs just saying your callsign normally. like on a busy repeater i hear some guys just say their call straight and others go full alpha bravo charlie every single time. is there a rule about this or is it more of a judgment call thing i ask because i fumbled through a contact last week and the other guy had to ask me twice for my call and i was spelling it out but i mixed up which word goes with which letter and said something like november foxtrot lima and then panicked and said november lima foxtrot which is backwards so that was embarrassing. i guess im just not practiced enough but also wasnt sure if i even needed to do that in the first place for a simplex contact