Rachel Garcia

had almost the exact same symptom on a 897 a couple years back, turned out to be a front end relay that wasnt switching cleanly. the HF receive path goes through those T/R and band relays and if one of em gets corroded contacts or the coil is pulling weak you'll get exactly what you're describing — tx fine because that path bypasses the relay, rx is degraded because it goes through it. yaesu service manuals are floating around on the usual sites and they have the relay locations marked. worth putting a signal generator on the antenna port if you have access to one and just measuring what's actually getting through versus what should be. if you dont have a sig gen even just a known signal like WWV on 10 or 15 mhz and comparing it to a second radio on the same antenna via a splitter can at least tell you how far down you are in dB terms. also worth checking the IPO/ATT button settings havent gotten toggled somehow, i know that sounds dumb but ive seen people chase ghosts for a week over that.

i just passed mine like three months ago so this is fresh. the math looks scary but almost none of the actual test questions require you to do real math on the spot, its mostly recognizing the right formula or knowing which concept applies. i used hamstudystudy dot org and just drilled flashcards every night before bed for about a month. failed my first practice test miserably and then slowly got comfortable with it. the one section that tripped me up was the amplifier stability stuff and some of the operating practices questions weirdly, i thought id know those already but some of the extra-specific regs are different than what i remembered from general. anyway you can definitely do it just dont cram it all into one weekend

yeah that chaos you're describing is pretty much universal in the first hour of any realistic exercise, at least in my experience. i've been doing ARES stuff for going on 15 years now and the single biggest thing our group changed after a rough exercise was standardizing how net control handles priority traffic versus routine traffic. we literally wrote a one-page laminated cheat sheet that net control operators keep at their station during any activation. sounds silly but it helped enormously. the double-relaying problem is super common too. what helped us was designating specific relay stations ahead of time and having them check in during the preamble so everyone knows who's handling what path. and honestly — drilling the actual ICS message forms until people can fill them out half asleep. the fancy radio stuff is usually fine, its the paperwork and coordination layer where things fall apart. the debrief is probably going to be the most valuable thing you do, take good notes and dont let people get defensive about what went wrong, thats where the real learning happens.

one thing i'll add — i made this mistake early on where i was looking at a band plan chart someone posted in a facebook group and it was for ITU region 1 which is europe. the allocations are genuinely different over there so if youre reading something that doesnt quite match what youre hearing on the air in the US thats probably why. always double check youre looking at region 2 stuff for north america

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and generally its been fine but lately my packets just arent making it to aprs.fi even though i can hear the local digi pretty clearly. im running a TM-D710G with the internal TNC and ive got my path set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which from everything ive read should be totally standard. beacon interval is 1 minute. i went and checked aprsdirect and RF coverage maps and there should be at least two digis that can hit me from here. but when i look at my station on aprs.fi the last heard timestamp is like 6 hours old. my radio is definitely transmitting because i can see the TX light flash on the beacon interval. signal check from a friend down the road says im putting out fine on 144.390. one thing i noticed is my SSID might be messed up — i had it set to -9 for a while cause i was mobile then forgot to change it back when i got home. could that be causing issues somehow or is that totally unrelated. also not sure if my symbol is right, i think its set to house but honestly i dont remember changing it back after some testing i did last week. kind of a mess honestly

yeah the RMS gateway map on winlink.org also shows last heard times so you can get a rough idea of whats active before you even try connecting, worth bookmarking that. also if your 7300 is doing weird things with the Vara connection check your USB audio levels in windows, that thing is super sensitive to having the audio too hot and it'll just look like timeouts when really you're just overdriving the input. bit me for a solid weekend before i figured it out.

that hairline crack on the transistor case is almost certainly your problem right there, or at least part of it. the PA finals on the 7300 are the RD70HVF1s and they're not super expensive individually, maybe $15-20 each if you source them right, but the tricky part is they usually dont go alone. when one goes it often takes out the driver stage or blows something in the bias circuit. i'd check the bias voltage on the gate of those FETs before you do anything else — should be around 3-4V with no drive, if its zero or way off something upstream is cooked too. also worth pulling the finals and doing a diode check on them out of circuit. if the transistor thats cracked reads shorted gate to drain you're replacing it for sure. the surface mount stuff around the PA isnt that bad honestly, the 7300's layout is pretty accessible compared to some older Icoms i've worked on. if you're careful and have hot air or at minimum a fine tip iron you can probably manage it. but if you've never done SMD before maybe get your feet wet on something cheaper first.