Karen Brown

yeah check the NR setting first like the other guy said, i did the exact same thing to myself last year and felt like an idiot when i figured it out lol. mine was set to like NR level 8 from some contest i was messing around with and i forgot to turn it off. sounds exactly like underwater audio when its cranked up on a quiet signal.

i was in the exact same boat like 8 months ago, dont feel bad. the award stuff is weirdly complicated for something thats supposed to be fun lol. one thing i'll add is that for WAS specifically i just submitted mine online through LoTW and it was actually pretty painless once i figured out where the form was buried on the ARRL site. took a couple weeks to get the certificate and i was honestly surprised how fast it went. the mode endorsement thing tripped me up too at first. i did mixed WAS first just to get the basic award and then went back and worked the remaining states i needed on digital to get that endorsement added later. you can kind of build on it over time which is nice, you dont have to do it all at once

im pretty new to this too so take this with a grain of salt but i started using the HamAlert website a few months ago and its been great for exactly what your describing. you can set it up to send you a push notification or email when a specific callsign or DXCC entity gets spotted on whatever band you want. caught a couple good ones that way without having to watch the cluster nonstop. its free as far as i know, or at least the basic version is

Don't forget the 'go bag' essentials beyond radio gear - I learned this the hard way during a 14-hour activation. Pack food, water, warm clothes, and charging cables. You need a kit for your needs AND a kit for your radio needs as KE5MHV says.

had almost the exact same situation last year, marginal on one repeater that was like 40 miles out. swapped my RG8X for LMR400 on just a 30ft run and honestly it made a bigger difference than i expected. not like night and day but definitely cleaned things up. the repeater in question also turned out to have a crappy antenna on their end lol so there was only so much i could do anyway one thing nobody mentioned — have you tried just repositioning what you have? chimney mounts can sometimes put the antenna right next to stuff that causes pattern distortion. i moved mine like 18 inches away from the brick on a standoff and it actually helped more than i thought it would for one specific direction.

yeah that pattern — one band low, everything else fine — usually points to the LPF relay or the filter switching itself rather than the finals. on the 7300 the low pass filters are switched by relays and if one of those relays has a dodgy contact it'll pass signal but with extra loss, and that loss shows up as reduced output. 20m shares a filter with... i want to say 17m if i remember right, might be worth checking whether 17m is also slightly low or if its just 20. if 17 is also affected that kinda confirms it. the fix isnt too bad if youre handy with a soldering iron, the relay can be reflowed or replaced, but honestly given the 7300s price point id be on the phone to Icom service first to see if this is covered under anything. theyve been decent about stuff like this in my experience.

so ive been playing around with cluster spotting for a few months now and i think i finally have a decent workflow but wanted to see what other people are doing. basically i keep DXwatch open in one tab and QRZ.com open in another and when i see a spot come through i'll look up the callsign on QRZ to check if its a new entity for me before i even bother spinning the dial. seems to work okay but sometimes the spots are like 10-15 minutes old by the time i see them and the pile already died down. im also using the DX4WIN logging software which has a built in telnet cluster connection but honestly i find the web tools easier to read at a glance, especially DXwatch with the band filters. anyone using a dedicated app on their phone or tablet for this? i downloaded one called DX Toolbox a while back but never really figured it out. also not sure if im reading the spot frequency correctly sometimes — does the spotted frequency always account for the split or is that something you have to figure out from context? feel like i missed a few rare ones because of that

oh man yeah the 5-10wpm wall is so real and i think almost everyone hits it. what helped me more than anything was forcing myself to stop trying to copy every single character. like literally stop. just listen for a second and let it wash over you. sounds counterintuitive but when you start recognizing common words as sounds instead of sequences of dots and dashes it just clicks eventually. the other thing i did was listen to W1AW code practice at speeds higher than i was comfortable with, like i couldnt copy most of it but my ear was getting used to what faster CW sounds like. took a few weeks of that alongside normal practice before i noticed i was relaxing more at 10-12wpm. also honestly Morse Runner is great even if youre not a contester, just set it to a slow qrm-free setting and work callsigns, it forces you to copy in real time with no rewind button which is kind of the whole game

forget the charts, seriously just forget them. that whole dots and dashes memorization thing is a trap that slows you down later because your brain ends up doing an extra translation step instead of just hearing the letter directly. the way to do it is learn each character as a sound from the very beginning, like dit-dah is A, not dot dash is A. the koch method is actually really solid for this — basically it starts you with just 2 characters at full speed, like 20wpm, and you only add a new one once you can copy the current set at something like 90% accuracy. LCWO.net is free and does this automatically for you, just set it up and work through the lessons. honestly even 15 minutes a day is enough if you're consistent, the problem most people have is doing 2 hours one day then nothing for a week

honestly the inverted V at that height is still going to outperform a vertical with only 8 radials on 40m for most regional stuff. the radiation angle on the vertical with a minimal ground system is going to be higher than people think, you lose a lot of that low angle advantage when the ground system is compromised. and the noise pickup on a vertical in a suburban lot is usually worse anyway because it's omnidirectional and just soaks up everything. the inverted V with the apex at 20 feet isnt glamorous but ive worked plenty of guys in europe from the midwest with worse setups than that. if you can get the feedpoint up to 25 or even 22 feet youll be in decent shape. just use good quality 450 ohm ladder line if you want to also use it on 80, run it to a 4:1 balun at the shack and then to your tuner. that way you get real multiband use out of one piece of wire and you're not dealing with the radial situation at all. the random wire noise floor problem is probably more about the antenna than the location, a balanced feedline situation should help with that too.

yeah the 857 is kind of overkill for most go-kit stuff depending on what you're actually doing with it. if you're doing emcomm and mostly sitting on a repeater or doing packet you could honestly get away with way less radio. i keep a second smaller kit with just an ft-60 and a slim jim antenna rolled up and that covers probably 80% of what i actually get called out for. the battery question is a whole thing lol. i have solar but rarely use it unless im out more than a day. for a weekend deployment the 35ah should be plenty if you're not transmitting constantly. just watch your receive current too, people forget the radio is still drawing power just sitting there listening.

the stock mic on the 7300 isnt terrible but its not great either, and yeah the default EQ settings are kind of optimized for whatever Icom thought sounded good which doesnt necessarily match your voice. first thing id do is actually record yourself — just use the monitor function or plug a recorder into your audio chain and listen back, most people are shocked how different they sound compared to what they think. for the parametric EQ on the 7300 a lot of guys find that boosting slightly around 2-3kHz and rolling off some of the low end below maybe 200Hz cleans up the audio a lot for SSB. the bandwidth on SSB is limited anyway so having too much bass just eats into your modulation without adding intelligibility. compression is worth setting properly too — the 7300's built in ALC meter is your friend there, you want peaks hitting maybe 2/3 of the way up, not slamming all the way. the Heil will make a noticeable difference though, especially that PR-40, it has a tighter pattern so it's more forgiving about room noise and it just has a better midrange presence for voice.

this is kind of off topic but your mention of 6m openings reminded me — im pretty new to this whole thing (got my general back in March) and i still get confused about how to tell the difference between Es and tropo on 6m. like when im watching the cluster how do i even know which one it is? i asked at my local club and got kind of a long answer that went over my head a bit. the distances maybe? sorry if thats a dumb question

i think the 1000 QSO threshold thing is kind of a myth honestly, or at least its not a hard rule. what matters more is whether you have the station infrastructure to support it without constant fiddling. if youre fighting antenna switching or IMD issues during the contest thats where your rate actually tanks, not from being a slightly less experienced SO2R operator. also worth mentioning that some logging software makes a huge difference here. n1mm has the SO2R support built in pretty well and the radio focus switching with a footswitch changed things for me a lot. without that you end up mousing around between windows which kills any advantage you gained

yeah this trips up a lot of newly licensed folks, the short version is the FCC allocation is the actual legal limit and the band plan is more of a gentlemans agreement that the amateur community uses to keep things organized so nobody steps on each other too much. youre not going to get fined for operating SSB at say 7.150 even though the band plan might suggest that area for something else, but people will definitely give you grief about it on the air. the band edge thing is a bit different though and thats actually worth paying attention to. the concern is that your signal, depending on how your rig is set up and what mode youre running, can have sidebands that extend beyond where your carrier frequency is. on SSB the suppressed carrier is what you tune to but the actual audio content goes up several kilohertz from there, so if you park your dial at 7.125 your signal might be reaching up toward 7.128 or so depending on your audio. not a huge deal in the middle of the band but at the lower edge of your allocation it matters because you could be splattering into the CW portion or into a segment you dont have privileges on. most people suggest staying at least 3 kHz or so inside any hard boundary just to be safe.

the split thing is huge and most people never figure it out. i spent years just adding to the noise before i started really listening to where the dx was actually coming back. these days i spend the first few minutes just watching the pattern — where is he fishing, how wide is his listening window, is he moving up or down through the pile. once you get a feel for it you can make a pretty decent guess. i run a modest station too, 100w and a hex beam at 30ft, not exactly a big gun setup, and i still manage to work most things i need with patience. the short call thing is a bit more situational in my experience. if the band is really degraded and the dx is clearly struggling to copy full calls then yeah just throwing the suffix can work. but if conditions are decent and the op is asking for full calls you're just annoying everyone including the dx. read the situation basically.

yeah i went through the same thing with my first dipole, spent way too long worrying about the feedpoint and it just worked anyway lol. i never put a balun on mine and it's been up two years, works fine. i know thats probably not the right answer but sometimes its just good to know it'll at least function. one thing i would do different is use some kind of strain relief so the coax weight isnt pulling directly on your wire connections, had one come apart on me after a wind storm and it was annoying to fix up on a ladder.

not sure about the specific audio drift thing you're describing but just wanted to say ive been running a remote station for our club through wfview instead of RemoteHams and it handles the 7300 really well, might be worth a look if you keep having headaches. wfview has gotten a lot better in the last year or so with the network audio stuff the internet linking idea sounds interesting though. we did something vaguely similar tying a remote rx site into our linked repeater system but we used a dedicated URIxB interface and just treated it as another node. wasnt exactly elegant but it worked for what we needed during a couple of ARES exercises

haha yeah i do this all the time, especially on weeknights when theres nothing good on tv. 40m at night is just good background noise honestly. sometimes ill leave the radio on while im doing other stuff and just half listen. caught a really interesting conversation last week between two guys in florida talking about the hurricane prep stuff they do with their clubs, that turned into like a 45 min ragchew that i eventually jumped into. you never know what youll stumble onto

congrats on the first one, that creek spot sounds like a great setup honestly. to answer your questions — yeah anywhere within the reference boundary counts, you dont have to stick to a trail or any particular spot as long as you're actually inside the area. some folks hike way out, some just pull off at the parking area, doesnt matter for the log. the 44 QSOs is total, not per band. so your 47 is good, you're fine. a lot of people get tripped up on that. the rules page on the WWFF website is a bit of a maze but once you've done a couple activations it starts to make more sense. just make sure your log has the reference number in there correctly and the date lines up, thats usually where people run into trouble with the upload. sounds like you did everything right though. 40m is the workhorse for these, good call starting there.

yeah what he said but also i'll add that during contest operating you sometimes drop phonetics on fast exchanges just to save time, like if signal reports are 59 across the board you're not spelling out every single thing. but your callsign you still phonetic, always. i've had my call logged wrong so many times when conditions got sketchy and i tried to shortcut it, not worth it

yeah 40 has been all over the place, i think we had a minor geomagnetic disturbance a few days back which would explain the weirdness. i usually check the solar flux index before i even bother setting up but honestly even when the numbers look decent things can still be unpredictable. your feedline situation probably isnt helping though, bad coax can mask whats actually going on with the band

so i've been interested in ham radio for a while now, mostly because my neighbor has this huge antenna setup and it got me curious. anyway i finally decided to just go for it and get licensed but honestly i dont even know where to begin. like is there a specific book i should get or is the online stuff good enough? i've been looking at some websites but theres so much information and i cant tell whats actually useful vs just noise. also how hard is the test actually? i work full time so i cant spend months studying, realistically how long did it take you guys to feel ready? someone at work said two weeks but that seems fast. and do i need to memorize a bunch of math or is it more conceptual stuff

so ive been doing contests for maybe 3 years now, mostly single op on one radio, usually finish somewhere in the middle of the pack for my category. im not trying to win anything serious but i do like pushing my rate up and seeing how high i can get the score. lately ive been reading a lot about SO2R and i cant decide if its worth the complexity for someone at my level. my current setup is an IC-7300 into a hex beam at about 35 feet. i have an old TS-570 sitting in the closet that still works fine. so in theory i have the hardware for a basic SO2R but i know theres way more to it than just plugging in two radios. the filtering situation alone seems like a nightmare, especially since my antennas arent exactly great at band separation. my main question i guess is whether SO2R actually improves your rate enough to justify all the setup headaches, or whether id be better off just focusing on better run/S&P balance and band change timing. ive been reading about the SO2R technique where you use the second radio to find a mult while youre running but that seems like it requires a level of mental bandwidth i might not have during a fast CW contest. ssb would maybe be more manageable? anyone gone through this transition and have thoughts on whether it was worth it

so ive been running a mag mount diamond on my F-150 for about two years now, mainly for 2m/70cm and it works fine i guess but ive always had this nagging feeling im leaving performance on the table. the mount sits on the roof and the cable runs down through the door jamb which i know isnt ideal and i do get a little bit of noise from the engine on certain rpms which might be a grounding thing or might be the coax situation, hard to say. anyway my buddy who does a lot of APRS and linked repeater work says just drill the roof and put in a proper NMO mount and be done with it. he's probably right but i keep putting it off because, well, drilling a hole in a 4 year old truck feels permanent. has anyone done this and actually noticed a meaningful difference on receive or is it mostly just the cleaner install that makes it feel better? also wondering if a longer antenna like a 5/8 vs the 1/4 wave i have now would help on the repeaters that are a bit further out.