Lisa Wang

i went through this exact same thing lol. ended up with the UV-82 mostly because someone on reddit said the dual PTT buttons were nice and honestly i dont even use that feature. works fine though, been hitting W5XYZ (our local linked repeater) every evening no issues. just make sure whatever you get you double check the frequency coverage because some of the cheaper ones have weird gaps or the transmit power isnt what they advertise

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been trying to figure out this whole QSL confirmation thing and honestly its kind of overwhelming. like i understand the basic idea — you made a contact, you confirm it, cool — but i dont really understand why there are so many different systems and which ones actually matter for awards and stuff. i signed up for LoTW because everyone said thats the one to use, and i get that its run by the ARRL and the confirmations are cryptographically signed or whatever so theyre considered more trustworthy. but then ive also seen people mention eQSL and i made an account there too and now i have confirmations in both places and i dont really know what to do with any of them. does it matter which one i upload to? do i have to upload to both? also paper cards — i got a few in the mail from people and they look really cool honestly, i can see why people like them. but i havent sent any out yet because i wasnt sure about the process. do you just mail them directly to the other person or does it go through a bureau or something? i looked up bureau and now im even more confused about that whole thing lol. any help appreciated, been sitting on this question for a while

i tried this exact setup last summer and ended up just leaving the yagi in the car most days honestly. the gain is nice but my feedline was kind of long and i think i was losing half of it anyway. probably need to redo that whole run before it makes sense to use it portably.

so i finally got my direct conversion receiver for 40m to actually receive something other than static and i have to say i did not expect it to work this well for a first attempt. been messing with electronics for about 15 years but never actually built a radio from scratch before, always just kit stuff or bought commercial gear. the design is pretty basic, LM386 audio amp, NE602 mixer/oscillator combo, nothing fancy. wound my own coils on a T50-2 toroid which took like three tries to get the inductance anywhere close to where i wanted it. trimmer cap for tuning across the band. whole thing fits on a piece of perf board about the size of a paperback book. first night i fired it up i heard a couple of ssb signals which honestly just sounded like garbled noise because DC receivers do that whole mirror image thing and both sidebands come through at once. but then i figured out how to tune slightly off center and suddenly i had this guy from ohio coming in clear as anything talking about his antenna situation. sat there for like an hour just listening and feeling unreasonably proud of myself. sensitivity is decent enough that i can hear stations that my FT-891 also hears, not all of them but enough to know the thing works. selectivity is obviously not great without any real filtering ahead of the mixer but for 40m SSB in the evenings it's workable. thinking about adding a simple bandpass filter on the input and maybe a better audio filter stage. anyone done mods to a basic NE602 design worth talking about?

not a dumb question at all, this stuff confused me for years honestly. so the short version: DXCC, WAS, and WAZ are all separate awards from the ARRL and they track different things but they can overlap — a QSO can count toward more than one award at the same time if it meets the criteria. so that Canary Islands contact could count for DXCC (EA8 is a separate entity) and also for WAZ zone 14 i think, you'd want to double check that. LoTW is the way to go for confirmations, if the other station uploads their log it'll match automatically and you'll get credit. not every DX station uses it though so sometimes you're waiting a while or you end up sending a paper QSL card. dont give up on that canary islands one, plenty of EA8 ops are active on LoTW. i'd say start with DXCC since it kinda naturally pulls you into chasing DX and the others fill in along the way without a ton of extra effort

honestly dont stress too much about it, every net does things a little differently and most net controls are pretty forgiving especially with newer hams. the name and location thing is super common on local nets, kind of a social thing more than a rule, people like to know who theyre talking to and where youre coming from. some nets are more formal about it than others. for traffic, if its a formal traffic net like an NTS net there absolutely is a specific format and it matters, but on a casual club net most people just pass it conversationally. just say something like hey so-and-so i have a message for you from so-and-so and read it out. if you ever want to get into proper traffic handling the ARRL has a whole thing on NTS procedure but honestly for a ragchew net nobody expects that level of formality. sounds like youre doing fine, the fact that you listened for weeks before jumping in is more than most people do.

so ive been chasing LEO sats for a few months now, mostly FM stuff on SO-50 and the like, got pretty comfortable with that. decided to step up and try working AO-73 and some of the other linear transponder birds and man it is way harder than i expected. the problem im having is i can hear the downlink fine on 145 MHz, signals sound decent when the bird is high enough, but i cant seem to get my uplink to actually land where i want it in the passband. ive got doppler correction running through gpredict and that part seems okay but when i transmit i either cant find myself or by the time i do the pass is like halfway over. also the inverting transponder thing is tripping me up, i keep forgetting which way to tune and end up going the wrong direction. im running an ic-9700 and a pair of small yagis on an az-el mount, so the hardware should be up to the task i think. is this just a practice thing or am i missing something fundamental about working linear birds vs FM repeater sats

oh man yes, my first activation was an absolute mess lol. i forgot my coax and had to use a random piece of RG-8X i had in the trunk that was way too long and just coiled it up on the ground. no idea how bad that was affecting things but i still got my 10 contacts so whatever. the pileup thing surprised me too, i remember being totally unprepared for people actually calling me. you kind of think you'll be out there struggling to get anyone and then suddenly everyone wants to talk to you at once and your brain just goes blank on the exchange. the guy calling on your frequency is just a thing that happens unfortunately, some hunters get pretty aggressive especially when a park is rare or needed for their challenges. 23 contacts for a first activation on a compromised antenna is honestly solid, dont sweat it too much. it gets way smoother after a few times out

yeah i use both, pretty different tools honestly. FT8 is good for what it is — if i want to work a new country or just check propagation its unbeatable, -20dB signals actually decoding is still kind of magic to me even after all this time. but JS8Call scratches a different itch. its more like what PSK31 used to be back in the day before FT8 ate everything, you could actually have a conversation with someone instead of just swapping signal reports. activity on JS8Call tends to cluster on 40m around 7.078 and 20m around 14.078 give or take, and theres a normal speed and a fast mode so worth checking both. the relay stuff does work, ive seen messages get passed through intermediary stations and arrive which is kind of neat for emcomm types but day to day its not something i rely on. honestly just get on there in the evenings and hang out, its a smaller community so people actually respond when they see a CQ

omg yes i heard it too and im only like 3 months into my technician license so i wasnt sure if what i was hearing was normal or not lol. i have a little handheld that doesnt really do HF but my neighbor who got me into the hobby let me sit with him and we were working all kinds of DX on his setup. he said to just wait because 10m was going to get good and he wasnt kidding. im really motivated now to get my general so i can actually get on HF myself. studying for the exam this month hopefully.

I started completely from zero last year at age 68. Long Island CW Club got me making QSOs within 3 months of starting their classes. The key is consistent daily practice - even 15-20 minutes helps. Don't get discouraged by the learning curve, we've all been there!

yeah the 10 minute ID thing is still the rule, part 97.119 hasnt changed on that, you gotta give your callsign at the end of a contact and at least every 10 minutes during a long one. that parts pretty simple. for 10 meters as a tech you do have some privileges but its limited. you can do CW across most of the band and then there's a small phone segment i think around 28.3 to 28.5 MHz where you can actually talk. power limit up there is 200 watts PEP for technicians on HF which is honestly plenty to work some DX when the band is open. just dont go transmitting outside those sub-bands or youre technically in violation of 97.301 which lays out all the frequency allocations by license class. the ARRL has a frequency chart that makes this way easier to understand than reading the actual CFR, id grab that before anything else

same thing happened to me when i did my first inverted-V, came in low and i panicked thinking i measured wrong. turns out it was fine, just needed a small trim. i went maybe 2 inches at a time per leg and checked with the analyzer each time, took a few iterations but eventually got it sitting right around 7.15 which is where i wanted it for phone. one thing i'll mention — make sure you're trimming both legs equally if you want to keep it balanced. i forgot to do that the first time and ended up with slightly different leg lengths which probably didnt matter much electrically but it bugged me lol

oh man my first drill was a mess lol. showed up with my little baofeng and everyone else had these fancy radios i'd never seen before. but dont worry about it - the whole point is to learn. they'll probably have you practice copying traffic messages in the proper format which is different than regular conversation. bring a notepad and pen for sure, and maybe a clipboard if you have one. most ARES folks are pretty patient with new people

yeah the Q codes go way back to like early telegraph days, they were designed so operators who spoke different languages could still communicate. most of them are questions when you send them alone, and answers or statements when someone replies with them. so QRM by itself is basically asking "are you getting interference" but if someone just says QRM in a sentence they usually mean "there is interference" -- it gets a little loose in practice. the ones youll hear most on voice are probably QSY which means change frequency, QRM is interference from other stations, QSB is fading signal, QTH is your location, QSL means acknowledged or confirmed (thats also where QSL cards come from), and QRN is static or natural noise. QRZ means "who is calling me" and you hear that a lot when someone is trying to figure out who just called them. honestly just grab the ARRL handbook or even just google "ham radio Q code list" and keep it next to you for a while, it clicks pretty fast once youre actually using them

this is actually a pretty common gotcha with APRS messaging when youre RF only. the thing is, your beacon packets go out and any igate hears them and dumps them onto APRS-IS no problem. but for messaging to work both ways, you basically need a two-way igate nearby — meaning one that not only uploads from RF to internet but also gates messages back down from APRS-IS to RF. a lot of igates out there are receive-only, they just suck packets up and push them to the internet but wont inject anything back onto RF. so if the station youre messaging is on APRS-IS side and your local igates are RX-only, your message goes nowhere. check on aprs.fi what igates are actually hearing you and then look up whether theyre configured as two-way. sometimes you can tell from the igate status packets. if theres no two-way gate in range, you kind of just have to accept that RF-only APRS messaging is hit or miss depending on your local infrastructure. the D710 itself is solid for this stuff, probably not the radio thats the issue.

Great list! I'd add that don't monopolize a frequency - allow others the opportunity to join in or use the frequency, especially during peak times or busy nets. Also, learn the proper use of Q-codes but don't overdo it on phone.

hamstudy.org is honestly probably all you need for the tech exam, dont overthink it. just grind through the practice questions every day and pay attention to the ones you keep getting wrong. the way it tracks your weak spots is pretty useful. 3-4 weeks is plenty of time if youre putting in even 30 minutes a day. the arrl book is fine but most people i know never read the whole thing, they just use it to look up stuff that doesnt make sense from the question pool alone. like if you see a question about antenna polarization and it means nothing to you, maybe flip to that section, but dont feel like you have to read cover to cover before the test. one thing i'd actually suggest is just learn the answers to the rules and regs questions cold because those dont really require understanding, just memorization. the electrical stuff is easier if you actually get why ohms law works the way it does, but for the FCC part stuff just drill it.

so i've been on the waitlist at my local dealer since like early spring and they finally called me yesterday saying the IC-7760 came in. i havent picked it up yet because honestly im a little nervous about dropping that kind of money right now but i've been watching the unboxing videos and reading everything i can find on it. the remote head thing is really what sold me on it originally — i've got a weird shack setup where the radio has to kind of be around a corner from where i actually sit and my current cable run for the IC-7300 is already kind of a mess. also on a totally different note, 10 meters has been absolutely wild this week. worked a bunch of south american stations Tuesday evening with like 100 watts and a dipole that is definitely not optimized for that band. solar flux has been up there lately and i feel like a lot of newer hams might not even realize this is what a real solar max feels like. if you havent tried 10 or 12 lately you might want to dust off whatever antenna you have pointing that direction. anyway has anyone actually gotten their hands on the 7760 yet or is it still pretty scarce out there? curious what people think of it compared to the 7300 since thats my only real reference point for Icom rigs.

so i've been running an old TS-430S for probably longer than i should have, great radio honestly but the age was starting to show and i was tired of fighting with the IF filters and just the general lack of a decent panadapter situation. anyway finally broke down and got an IC-7300 and i've had it on the bench for about three weeks now. first impressions — the waterfall display is just ridiculously useful, i know everyone says this but until you've actually used one for real you don't really get it. tuning around 40m in the evening and being able to just see the whole band laid out like that, spot a signal, click on it, that workflow change alone probably made it worth it for me. the built in ATU handles my end-fed pretty well though i do have a separate LDG out there too for when things get weird. one thing that kind of bugs me is the menu system takes some getting used to. not terrible but not intuitive either, i've been keeping the manual open on the tablet next to the rig which i havent had to do since i was a tech studying for general. receiver seems excellent, did some comparisons against my buddys IC-7610 on a shared antenna and yeah the 7610 is better but not by a huge margin for the price difference. overall really happy with it, just curious if anyone else made a similar jump from an older conventional rig and what the adjustment was like

ALC is the thing people overlook the most honestly. on the 7300 you really want that ALC meter barely moving on voice peaks — like just kissing the bottom of the ALC scale. if its bouncing all over thats usually a sign your mic gain is too high and the radio is having to compress the heck out of your signal just to keep it clean. back the mic gain down until the ALC barely moves and then set your processor from there. on the processor question, the IC-7300 speech processor is actually pretty decent but most guys run it too hot. it helps for pileups and marginal band conditions but on a clear band talking to somebody nearby it can make you sound processed and weird. i usually leave it off unless conditions are rough or i really need to punch through something. the stock hand mic on icom isnt the worst thing in the world — biggest issue is most people hold it too close or at the wrong angle and get a bunch of plosives and proximity effect. try holding it off to the side a bit rather than dead-on and keep a couple inches away. honestly that alone might help more than any equipment swap. that said a desk mic does make a real difference if youre doing any serious operating just because you dont have to think about mic technique as much.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and all that but it feels like operating a slot machine more than actual ham radio if im being honest. someone on the club reflector mentioned JS8Call and i downloaded it last week and have been poking around but im having trouble understanding the workflow compared to WSJT-X like in FT8 the whole thing is automated enough that i can walk away and come back and see what got logged. JS8Call seems like it wants you to actually be there, which is fine, but the timing windows and the relay stuff is confusing me. i set it up on 40m around 7.078 and i can see activity in the waterfall but half the time my transmissions dont seem to get responded to also been messing with PSK31 a bit, fired up fldigi and worked a few guys in europe on 20m last weekend which was satisfying in a completely different way than FT8. feels more like a real QSO. anyway not really a specific question just wondering what other people use these modes for and if JS8Call is worth sticking with or if im just doing it wrong