Rachel Garcia

So i got my ticket back in the early 2000s and did a little CW back then but life happened and i basically dropped the hobby entirely. Just got back into it a few months ago and im trying to relearn the code. Im at maybe 8-10 wpm on a good day receiving, sending is probably worse honestly. My old straight key still works fine but i picked up a used Bencher BY-1 paddle at a hamfest and im struggling with it. I dont know if its the keyer in my radio (its an IC-7300) or my technique but my dits keep running together in a weird way. Like i send what i think is an A and it comes out sounding more like a dit-dit-dit or something. I watched some youtube videos on paddle technique but i feel like im gripping it too tight or something. Does anyone have tips on how to actually get comfortable with paddles cause the straight key feels more natural to me still. Also is there a good way to practice receiving that isnt just listening to W1AW? I find their transmissions kind of stressful for some reason, like i freeze up when i miss a letter and then i miss the next three trying to figure out the first one.

so ive been running an old FT-450D for like 6 years and honestly it served me well but the receiver always felt a little mushy on crowded bands, especially 40m during contests when everything gets wall to wall. a buddy of mine kept telling me to just get the icom and i kept putting it off because 1100 bucks is not nothing. anyway picked one up last month from a local ham who was upgrading to a 7610, got it for around 800 which felt fair. first thing i noticed was the waterfall — i know everyone talks about it but until you actually sit there and watch signals pop up in real time you dont really get it. found a few dx stations i would have just tuned past on the 450. the built in ATU is a bit weak, cant really tame my 80m doublet below like a 3:1 mismatch without complaining, i still end up using my LDG out front for that band. and the fan noise is more noticeable than i expected, my shack is pretty quiet at night so it stands out. minor gripes though. overall very happy. if anyones on the fence about this radio i'd say just do it, the receiver really is noticeably better in a busy pile up situation. curious if anyone else has done the 450 to 7300 jump and whether they noticed the same thing on receive

so i've been a ham for about two years now, got my general last spring, and i finally joined our county ARES group a few months back. been going to the monthly nets and the occasional training exercise but nothing real had come up yet. well last weekend that changed. we had some pretty bad flooding in the area and the EOC got activated, and our EC called everyone in. i show up with my go bag and my ft-891 in the car and honestly i kind of froze up for the first few minutes because it was way busier than any training drill i'd been to. lots of people, the served agency folks were stressed, radio traffic was going constantly. i ended up getting assigned to just log traffic at one of the stations which felt a little boring in the moment but looking back i think it was probably the right call for someone who hadn't done this before. by hour three i was comfortable enough that they let me actually handle some of the welfare traffic and i got the hang of ICS message format pretty quickly once i was doing it for real instead of just practicing. anyway just wanted to share because i feel like nobody talks about how weird that first activation feels. like all the training is good but there's something about it being actual that just hits different. anyone else remember their first one?

honestly for the exam itself you can get away with memorizing the pool like you did for General, the pool isnt that much bigger and there are tools like HamStudy that make it pretty manageable. took me about 6 weeks of studying maybe 20-30 minutes a day on my lunch break and i passed with a decent margin. that said i would actually recommend taking the time to understand at least the transmission line stuff and the filter theory because once you have full Extra privileges you'll actually encounter situations where knowing why something works matters, especially if you start building antennas or dealing with feedline matching issues. the exam is definitely a step up from General but its not like an engineering degree or anything, just takes some patience

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.

yeah the traffic handling thing is such a common gap, we ran into exactly the same issue about three years ago. a lot of people come up through the repeater net culture where it's pretty loose and conversational and then when you throw an ICS 213 equivalent at them they freeze up a bit. what ended up helping us a lot was running a dedicated traffic net every couple weeks just so people got comfortable with the format before they needed it under pressure. the repeater shadow zone thing is worth doing a real survey on if you havent already. we actually drove around the county with a signal meter and logged the dead spots and it was eye opening. ended up identifying two hilltop sites where a portable digipeater or a simplex relay station would plug most of the gaps. that map has been one of the most useful planning documents we have now. if your group hasnt done a formal coverage survey i'd really push for it before the next exercise, makes the conversation a lot more concrete than just guessing

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

Hey welcome to the hobby, nets are genuinely one of the best ways to get comfortable on air especially early on. For a basic check-in net you really just wait for net control to ask for check-ins, then when it's your turn you key up and say your callsign phonetically, give your name and location, and maybe mention if you have traffic or just checking in for the activity. something like "whiskey four x-ray romeo romeo, John in Springfield, no traffic, just checking in" is totally fine. Net control will acknowledge you and that's pretty much it. Dont overthink it, they want you to check in, that's the whole point. As for special event stations, yeah absolutely worth it if you're into that kind of thing. The certificate is just a fun thing to put on the wall but some of them do count toward awards depending on the issuing organization. Usually the sponsoring club will post the operating frequencies in the announcement, sometimes on QRZ or the ARRL website. 40m and 20m during the day are usually good bets for weekend events.

yeah i was in the exact same boat a few months ago, stepping on people is basically a rite of passage haha. one thing that helped me was actually just saying my callsign kind of slow and clearly instead of rushing it out. that way even if two of you key up at once, net control can sometimes still catch one of the calls. and honestly net control has heard it all before, they're not going to be annoyed.

one thing that helped me a ton that nobody ever talks about is just asking for honest reports from people you actually trust rather than random contacts who just say "you're 59" no matter what. i have two or three guys i work regularly who will actually tell me if something sounds off, and we've done back and forth sessions where we tweak and report for half an hour. way more useful than any meter or software imo also the low end rumble thing — check if your desk or whatever the mic is sitting on is vibrating. i had the same issue for months and it turned out my mic stand was picking up my mechanical keyboard through the desk. stuck some foam under the base and it went away completely. dumb fix but there it is

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.

yeah 10m has been something else lately. i worked a guy in Italy last week on a mobile whip while sitting in my driveway, just completely by accident, i was testing the antenna and didnt even have the amp on. the solar flux has been climbing pretty steadily and if you check the DX cluster theres been openings almost every afternoon into Europe from the east coast. good time to have a beam if you got one but honestly even modest antennas are doing well right now. on the Icom thing, i think you might be thinking of some speculation threads over on eham or maybe the amateur radio subreddit. there's been rumors floating around about something new but nothing confirmed that ive seen. Icom tends to keep stuff pretty tight until they officially announce at a hamfest or whatever. keep an eye on the ham radio outlet newsletter or DX engineering emails, they usually get the heads up pretty quick when something real is coming.

25 feet on 40 is pretty low yeah, youre right that its going to favor high angle stuff. but honestly for working stateside and even some shorter DX paths it doesnt matter as much as the articles make it sound. i ran a dipole at similar height for years before i had room to do anything else and still worked a ton of countries. that said if you want to try a vertical, you dont need 32 radials to get it working. thats kind of the theoretical ideal from the classic Radial study. even 4-8 quarter wave radials on the ground will get you like 80-90% of the way there in terms of efficiency and the difference between 8 and 32 is smaller than people think. just make sure theyre actually on or slightly buried in the ground, not elevated, or you change the whole feedpoint impedance situation. id try a simple one first before committing to a big radial field project

That shelter coordination work is exactly the kind of thing that doesn't get talked about enough. Most people picture ARES as some dramatic thing with antennas everywhere and urgent traffic flying back and forth, and sometimes it is, but a lot of it is exactly what you described — being there, being reliable, logging everything carefully so there's a record. The headcounts alone can be critical if something goes sideways and they need to account for people. Also your point about the waiting is so true. I always tell newer folks in our group to bring something to do with their hands during standby because mental fatigue from just sitting alert for hours is real. A lot of operators I know bring a small notebook and just practice their logging by hand or review their ICS forms. Keeps the brain engaged without getting distracted. Sounds like you did great though, 6 hours net control on your first real activation is no small thing.

yeah i did almost exactly this about two years ago, though i was using a 7600 at the time. the CI-V stuff is actually not that bad once you get your head around the address scheme. basically your radio has a default CI-V address (0x94 for the 7300 i think, worth double checking) and you just send it commands over serial and it responds. you dont need to sniff anything, you can actively poll it for the operating frequency. i ended up going the raspberry pi route for exactly the reason you mentioned — there's a library called pyserial that handles the serial side and then i just wrote maybe 80 lines of python to parse the frequency response and map it to a band. from there i used the GPIO pins to drive a ULN2003 transistor array that switched the relays. worked great. the pi is kind of overkill for just this but it also means you can add a little web interface later if you want, which i did, so now i can see antenna status from my phone which is kind of cool. the relay module you have should work fine either way. just watch the flyback diodes — the cheap amazon modules sometimes have them, sometimes dont. worth adding them yourself if youre not sure or you'll eventually fry something.

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.

Absolutely worth it! The first contest weekend I heard tons of people making contacts in those parts of the bands I wasn't allowed to transmit in - my competitive nature got the better of me! The Extra-only segments are where the serious operators congregate during major contests and rare DX operations.

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.

Congrats on the first activation, 44 QSOs is a solid start honestly. On the logging question -- you want to upload directly to the WWFF Logsearch portal, thats the one that actually counts for the program. LoTW and the others are separate and dont cross over automatically. When you upload to WWFF Logsearch your contacts get credited to the hunters on the other end whether they knew it was a WWFF activation or not, the system matches callsigns. So yeah they get credit even if they just stumbled onto your frequency, which is nice. HAMRS exports ADIF just fine and the WWFF portal accepts that, so your workflow should be pretty straightforward. Just make sure your ADIF has the MY_SIG and MY_SIG_INFO fields populated with WWFF and the reference number or some uploaders get picky about that. Might be worth double checking before you submit.

that japan contact on 10m is awesome, i havent managed anything that far yet. im still pretty new to HF so take this with a grain of salt but i started using the Space Weather website and they have a daily forecast that explains things in plain english which helps me a lot. also someone in my club told me to just check WWV at 18 minutes past the hour, they broadcast the solar flux and geomagnetic conditions right in the audio which is kind of cool if you think about it.

honestly i made almost that exact switch about two years ago, went from a 590 to a 7300 and my take is — the spectrum scope alone made it worth it for me. not because i needed it technically but because it genuinely changed how i operate. i actually watch band conditions now instead of just spinning the dial and hoping. that said the 590 receiver is no slouch and if youre doing casual 40m ragchews you are probably right that you wont notice a dramatic difference in received audio or anything like that. the one thing i will say is the 7300 touchscreen takes some getting used to. i kept accidentally changing stuff for the first few weeks. but now i dont think about it. if youre not in a hurry to spend the money, antenna is probably the smarter move like you said — a better antenna will do more for your DX contacts than swapping one good rig for another good rig.

so ive been doing single op for years and finally got a second radio set up properly — K3 on run, FT-991A as a mult radio with a 2x4 bandpass filter setup between them. did my first real SO2R attempt last weekend during the CW sprint and honestly it was kind of a disaster but i could see flashes of why people do this. my rate on the run radio kept getting wrecked because i was fumbling with the SO2R controller and losing my rhythm. probably spent more time managing the second radio than actually working anyone. ended up pulling it apart about 2 hours in and just going back to single radio where i actually know what im doing. question for people who've done this a while — how long does it actually take before SO2R starts helping your rate instead of hurting it? i get the theory, find a mult on 15 while you're running on 20, quick QSY, back to run. but in practice i kept missing calls on the run station while i was tuning around on the second one. is this just a practice thing or do people actually run SO2R differently than i was trying to?

hey dont stress about it too much, everyone does something like that their first few check-ins, net control has heard it all trust me. the mobile/portable/fixed order thing is actually not universal at all — some nets do it that way, especially traffic nets that follow ARRL format, but a lot of casual ragchew or information nets just take check-ins in whatever order they hear them. best thing to do is listen to a full net cycle or two before you jump in so you can get a feel for how that specific net runs. most net controls will also say at the top of the net how they want check-ins done if they have a preference. you did fine, phonetics were the right call, just took a bit of nerves out of the equation next time you know what to expect.