Gregory Smith

so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing digital modes and some CW but lately ive been wanting to actually talk to people on 20m SSB and honestly my audio sounds terrible compared to everyone else i hear. like really processed and thin. im running an IC-7300 which i know has a decent built in mic eq but i havent really touched any of that stuff. the guy i talked to last week said i sounded like i was in a tin can which is not great. im just using the stock HM-219 hand mic that came with the radio. is that the problem or is it more likely a settings thing. ive heard people say you should set the TX bandwidth somewhere around 2.4kHz and keep the bass roll off not too aggressive but im not sure where any of that actually lives in the 7300 menus. also should i even bother with the speech compressor or does that just make things worse any advice from people who actually sound decent on SSB would be appreciated

yeah 10m has been really something lately, we're definitely riding the upswing toward solar cycle 25 maximum and the predictions have been pushing that out to sometime in the next year or two depending on who you ask. the flux being up in the 180-200 range is legitimately exciting for those of us who remember the dead years when it was sitting at like 65 and 10m was a ghost town for months at a stretch. for figuring out when to get on, i mostly use a combination of things — DXmaps.com is really good for seeing real time spots and you can watch the propagation paths light up almost in real time, and i also keep an eye on the DX cluster obviously. but honestly the best trick i ever learned from an old timer at our club was just to leave a radio on 28.300 or so with the squelch cracked while im doing other stuff around the shack. when you start hearing signals pop up you know the band is opening and you can actually sit down and work it. checking the solar flux every morning is worthwhile too just to set expectations for the day — anything above 150 and you start getting excited, above 180 and you should probably cancel your plans. that VU2 on a dipole and 100 watts is a solid catch by the way, india isnt always easy from north america even when 10m is good

ugh i missed it, i keep meaning to just leave the radio on more but life gets in the way. i only got my general last spring so ive never actually experienced a real 10m opening like people talk about. been on 40 and 20 mostly. one of these days

this is really interesting to read, im still pretty new to ARES and havnt done a sim exercise yet but my EC keeps talking about getting one organized. reading your post kind of makes me nervous about the ICS stuff because i've looked at those forms and they seem really confusing honestly. do you think someone with like only a year of ham experience can actually be useful in one of these or is it better to just observe the first time?

yeah i did this on mine maybe 8 months ago, took like 20 minutes including the time i spent convincing myself i wasnt going to break anything. the jumper is pretty accessible once you have the top cover off, icom actually made it pretty straightforward. you do have to do the menu reset thing after or it wont take effect, i forgot that the first time and thought i'd done something wrong. as for whether its worth it — honestly for day to day HF operating probably not a huge deal. but you're right about the band edge thing, there's a real difference when you're sitting at like 14.350 and the rig is already pulling back power. with the mod it doesnt do that, which is nice if you're contesting or just working the edges a lot. i also do some utility monitoring and having a bit more flexibility on the TX side is just a comfort thing even if i never actually transmit out of band. just feels less restricted if that makes sense.

the inverted V might be worth considering if you only have one support in the middle — you can get the apex up higher and the ends dont need as much horizontal space. i did that in my backyard with a single mast and it works pretty well on 40. not a beam obviously but gets the job done and its dead simple to build

oh man i remember being totally lost on the logging stuff my first time too. i actually just manually added the sig fields in a text editor which sounds scary but adif is just a text file really. just did a find and replace basically. also 23 contacts on 40m with a kx2 is pretty solid for a first go, what antenna did you use? im always curious what people throw up when theyre out in the field like that

so ive been trying to get my remote station dialed in for the past few weeks and im hitting a wall with the audio latency. the setup is a IC-7300 at the home QTH, running RCForb server on an old i5 box, everything connects fine through RemoteHams and i can key up and receive no problem but the round trip audio delay is somewhere around 400-500ms which makes SSB basically unusable, like im talking over myself constantly. ive tried messing with the buffer settings in RCForb and dropped the codec bitrate down to see if that helped but honestly i cant tell if its making things worse or better at this point. the internet connection at the remote end is a 50/10 cable modem and my end at the operating location is fiber so i dont think the bandwidth is the issue, more likely just jitter or something in the routing. also separately - has anyone tried bridging RemoteHams into like an Allstar or IRLP node? im kind of half thinking about linking the remote station into the local repeater network so club members could use it but i have no idea if thats even a sane idea or if the latency just stacks up and becomes a total mess. curious if anyones done something like that.

your 70% reliability issue sounds like it might just be the ubiquiti config more than anything else, those things can be weirdly fussy about QoS settings especially if youre running audio and control data over the same link without any prioritization. i had similar issues and just bumping the control channel into a higher DSCP class helped a lot. RemoteHams does work but honestly if you already have rigctld running and youre close to a working setup, might be worth fixing what you have first before paying for another solution. just my 2 cents

so i was just sitting here after dinner kind of bored and spun the dial around on 40m for a bit and its actually been pretty lively lately, picked up a couple guys chatting about their antennas and ended up listening for like an hour without even meaning to. dont know why but there's something about just passively listening that i forget i enjoy until i actually do it again. anyway not really a question just figured id see if anyone else has been noticing more activity lately or if im just getting lucky with timing

yeah the LoTW wait time varies a lot, i think it depends on how busy they are. i waited like 10 days for mine. just hang tight. one thing i'll add — make sure when you're logging contacts you're recording the exact time in UTC because LoTW matching is pretty strict about that. i had a bunch of contacts not match for a while and it turned out my logging software had a timezone issue. drove me crazy for weeks before i figured it out lol

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely confuses a lot of new generals. so the short version is the FCC part 97 rules set the hard limits — those are the legal boundaries you cannot cross. the ARRL band plan is more of a gentlemans agreement about how to organize activity within those legal limits, nobody enforces it but most people follow it to keep things from being a mess. the band edge thing is a real practical concern not just courtesy. your transmitted signal has a certain bandwidth and if your carrier frequency is right at the edge, part of your signal can bleed outside the allocation. so on 40m SSB if the upper limit for your license is say 7.300, you dont want to be operating at exactly 7.300 because the sideband content will go above that. most people leave at least a few kHz of margin, more if they have any doubt about their rig's calibration. as for 7.195 that's fine for general phone, the phone segment for generals on 40 starts at 7.175 i believe. the person you heard wasnt doing anything wrong.

so i've been reading about WWFF for a while and finally got off my butt and drove out to a state wildlife management area near me that's listed as a KFF reference. brought the FT-891 and my homebrew EFHW, set up in the parking area near the trailhead because honestly the bugs were insane deeper in and i didnt feel like fighting that with a radio on my back. the actual operating went fine once i got spotted on the WWFF spotter network, pile got pretty manageable and i ended up with like 47 QSOs over maybe 90 minutes which i think is enough for a valid activation. but a few things caught me off guard. first i had no idea how many people specifically ask for your reference number during the QSO, like almost everyone wanted the KFF number confirmed not just a signal report. i was not ready for that mentally, kept fumbling it at first. second thing was how many hunters-in-the-field showed up wanting a park to park contact. that part was actually super cool, talked to a guy running from a nature reserve in finland which i did not expect on 20 meters at like 2pm local. anyway just sharing the experience, definitely doing more of these. wondering if anyone else had a weird or surprising first activation story

yeah i had almost the exact same thing happen on my first NE602 build. for me it turned out to be the audio amp stage picking up mains through a long ground trace that looped around the board. switched to a battery like someone probably already told you and it got better but didnt fully fix it. ended up having to reroute some traces and add a ferrite bead on the audio input. kind of a pain to troubleshoot honestly but once it clears up these little receivers actually work pretty well for what they are

same boat here honestly, just got my ticket a couple months ago and CW is kicking my teeth in. one thing that helped me a little was just sending random letters into a dummy load for like 20 minutes a day without worrying about copying anything. just getting the feel of the paddles. i dont know if thats the right way to do it but my dits started sounding cleaner after about a week of that.

so i finally did my first proper WWFF activation last weekend, been meaning to do one for ages but kept putting it off because i wasnt sure i had the right gear or knew what i was doing well enough. ended up going to a local nature reserve that was already listed as a reference on the WWFF directory and honestly it was way more fun than i expected. set up my buddistick on a small carbon fiber mast, had the KX2 running on a 3ah lipo and just worked the pileup for about 2 hours on 40m. got well over the 44 QSOs needed to log it as an activation which still kind of surprises me because the location was pretty sheltered by trees. signals were getting out fine though. only thing i wasn't sure about was the logging — i used WWFF-QSO-Party logger on my laptop but i've seen people talk about using other apps too. does it matter which log format you submit as long as it has the right fields? i uploaded to the WWFF logger site after and it seemed to accept it but i wasnt 100% sure everything was correct with the reference number format. anyway if anyone is on the fence about trying WWFF i'd say just go for it, it's a really nice way to get outside and operate at the same time

also watch the band edges man, like dont transmit right at 7.300 because your signal has sidebands and if youre running USB and tuned to 7.299 your upper sideband is actually going outside the allocation. a lot of rigs will let you do it technically but youre out of band at that point. i learned this the hard way when i was new and had somebody point it out to me on the air which was a little embarrassing. general rule i use is stay at least 3 khz inside the edge to be safe

the 857 is a solid choice for a go-kit, ive seen a lot of guys run that exact radio. the power question really depends on where you expect to deploy — if youre going to a EOC or fire station theres usually shore power but you really cant count on it. i personally run a 20ah lifepo4 battery and it gets me through a full day of mixed rx/tx no problem. the bioenno packs are good but honestly some of the other brands have gotten competitive on price, worth shopping around a bit. dakota lithium is another one people seem to like. for the non-radio stuff — this is where most people drop the ball and you're smart to think about it early. i keep a laminated card with all my local repeater frequencies, the ARES nets, simplex calling freqs, and the ICS forms i might need (213 and 214 at minimum). spare AA and AAA batteries, a headlamp, basic hand tools, coax adapters, and a little notebook with a pen taped to it. sounds obvious but when youre tired and stressed at 2am you'll be glad everything is just there. also a copy of your license obviously. the antenna thing i'd just get a simple linked dipole kit or even just make one — center insulator, some wire, and a couple of SO239 connectors. cheap and it works. the buddistick type things are fine but you're paying a lot for convenience when wire works just as well most of the time.

yeah im kind of in the same boat as you honestly, started maybe two months ago. what i found is that the ARRL has some code practice files you can download and theyre actual on air recordings so it feels more real than just a computer beeping at you. there also is a code practice net on shortwave i think its W1AW that does transmissions at different speeds which is cool once you have some letters down. dont get discouraged if it feels impossibly slow at first because everyone says that. i still mess up C and Y constantly they sound way too similar to me lol

honestly the General isnt that bad once you sit down with it. i upgraded maybe 8 months ago and was in the same spot as you, tech for a couple years just doing VHF stuff. the math looks scary but there really isnt that much of it and most of it is the same ohms law stuff from tech just applied slightly differently. HamStudy.org is what got me through it, i just did like 20-30 practice questions a night for maybe 3 weeks and by the time i took the exam i was consistently hitting 85-90% on the practice tests so i felt pretty good going in the propagation stuff is actually kinda interesting once it starts making sense, like why 40 meters works great at night but 10 meters goes dead and then suddenly opens up. you'll start to care about the solar flux index way more than you expected to. passed with a 30/35 i think, wasnt perfect but you dont need perfect

so i got my general back in the spring and ive been mostly just doing casual QSOs on 40m and some digital stuff but everyone keeps telling me i need to try a contest and honestly i keep putting it off because it feels overwhelming. like i dont even know what logging software to use or how the exchange works or anything. i was looking at the calendar and CQ WW is coming up which from what i gather is kind of a huge deal? and then theres ARRL sweepstakes not long after. i did do field day with a local club which was fun but that felt more relaxed because people were just helping me the whole time and telling me what to say. is CQ WW too big to jump into as a first solo contest or should i start smaller? also does anyone do SOTA stuff during contests or is that a totally separate world, i see people mention SOTA activations during contest weekends and im not sure how that fits together

So after running a mag mount on the roof for like two years I finally broke down and did a real install in my F-150. Got a Yaesu FTM-400 going in, ran the power leads directly to the battery with an inline fuse, and mounted a NMO through the roof. Took me most of a Saturday and honestly longer than it should have because I kept second-guessing where to route the coax. Few things I wish someone had told me before I started — the coax routing through the firewall is way more annoying than any video makes it look, and finding an existing grommet that you can actually push more stuff through without killing yourself is like a puzzle. Also the 10 gauge power wire I used initially had way too much voltage drop over the length I needed so I ended up redoing it with 8 gauge. SWR is great now, getting into repeaters I couldn't even hear before with the mag mount. Anyone else do a through-the-roof NMO on a newer truck? Wondering if I should have used a lip mount instead to avoid any potential rust issues down the road, I did seal it but still kind of in the back of my head worrying about it.

had almost the exact same debate last year. went with the inverted V and tbh its been fine. worked a bunch of eu and some jA on it during good openings, nothing crazy but enough to keep me happy. i think people overstate how bad a lower dipole is for dx. the vertical might squeeze out a few more dx qsos but if your radial situation is mediocre you're just trading one compromise for another. one thing i will say is the ladder line fed version gives you a lot more flexibility if you ever want to try other bands without retuning everything, so thats worth factoring in. my tuner handles it pretty well from 40 up to 10.

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, Tech class, just got my General last week actually. been listening on HF a lot trying to figure things out before i jump in and make a fool of myself. but everyone seems to be using all these abbreviations and short codes and i can only figure out maybe half of them from context. like i know QSL means you got the message or confirming contact, and QTH is your location, but then people throw out stuff like QRM, QRN, QSB, QRZ and i kind of know what some of those mean but not really sure if im using them right in my head. and then theres all the non-Q stuff too like 73, 88, OM, YL, DE, and people just fire these off like everyone should obviously know them. is there like a good reference somewhere or can someone just explain the common ones? i dont want to ask on air and sound completely clueless

so this has been bugging me for a couple weeks now. my 7300 is running maybe 30-35w max on 40m when i tell it to do 100w. every other band is totally fine, checked 80, 20, 15, 10 and they all hit 100w no problem. ALC looks normal, the SWR is flat into a dummy load so its not an antenna thing, and the display doesnt show any faults or warnings. i did the fan mod on it last year and nothing else has been touched internally. power supply is a good astron 35A and the voltage is solid at 13.8. i tried a full reset on the radio too and no change. anyone seen this before? im wondering if its a PA transistor issue specific to that band or maybe something in the LPF switching. i dont have a scope at the moment which makes this harder to diagnose obviously. been running it as-is on other bands but id like to get this sorted before winter contest season.