Paul Anderson

im pretty new too, got my ticket about 8 months ago, and what helped me a lot was just downloading one of those Q code reference cards as a PDF and printing it out. also the ARRL has a decent list somewhere on their site. the ones that confused me forever were QRM vs QRN because both are interference but from different sources. QRM = man made, QRN = natural. once someone explained it that way it clicked. oh and people also use a lot of CW shorthand even in voice sometimes which is weird, like saying 73 out loud instead of just saying goodbye. some of the older guys also say things like PSE for please and TNX for thanks and UR for your and it can feel like a whole different language at first but you do get used to it

3 miles off sounds like it could be a datum issue honestly. probably not but worth at least ruling out. more likely though is the manual position override thing the other guy mentioned, i did that exact thing when i first set mine up and spent an afternoon confused about why i was apparently operating from a parking lot two towns over.

so ive been running FT8 for about two years now mostly on 20m and 40m and its great for what it is, racking up contacts and all that, but lately ive been reading about JS8Call and the whole store-and-forward mesh relay thing and im honestly not sure if its solving a problem i have or just a cool idea in theory
my setup is nothing special, IC-7300 into a fan dipole up about 30 feet, running WSJT-X with a SignaLink and i get decent results even when the band sounds completely dead. but JS8Call seems like it requires more of a active community presence for it to actually be useful, like if nobody is on in your region its kind of pointless right? at least with FT8 theres always somebody in the log
i also messed around with PSK31 back in the day and honestly kind of miss it, felt more like actually talking to someone even though the SNR performance is nowhere near FT8. anyway curious if anyone here actually uses JS8Call regularly or if its mostly just guys experimenting and then going back to FT8

The 10 minute rule is actually per transmission series not per individual exchange, so if you and another ham are going back and forth in a conversation you just need to make sure neither of you goes more than 10 minutes without identifying — and then you both ID when you're done. In practice for a short ragchew thats usually just ID at the start, maybe once in the middle if it runs long, and then at the end. Nobody's sitting there with a stopwatch but the spirit of it is pretty easy to follow once you get a feel for it.
For nets it really does vary. Most formal nets the net control will acknowledge you by callsign when you check in and then you ID again if you get a traffic pass or have a comment. Informal nets are more relaxed. Honestly just listen to how the regulars do it on whatever nets you frequent and mirror that — you'll pick it up fast. The fact that you're even asking means you're already ahead of a lot of new hams.

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now and generally its been working fine for tracking, my position beacons show up on aprs.fi no problem, but the last few weeks any messages i send to other stations just seem to disappear into the void. the other station isnt seeing them and they dont appear in the message log on aprs.fi either.
im running a TM-D710G into a digi i built from a T2-135 board with a raspberry pi running direwolf, path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. ive tried sending to a couple different callsigns to rule out the one station being the problem. beacons still work fine which is what makes this weird to me, its specifically the message packets that seem to be getting dropped.
anyone seen this before? wondering if its a direwolf config thing or maybe something upstream with the APRS-IS injection. honestly not even sure where to start debugging this one.

the clone HackRF situation is actually worse than hit or miss these days, seen a few people get ones that couldnt even do a proper loopback test and the TX power was way off spec. if you go that route just buy from Great Scott Gadgets directly or a known reseller
but yeah if youre not transmitting the RSPdx makes more sense for your use case, i mostly just wanted to throw in the clone warning cause i see people get burned on that regularly. 630m is fun if you can ever get a suitable antenna together, theres more activity on that band than most people expect