Nancy White

yeah the 10m opening last week was something. i havent heard the band that alive since i was a teenager honestly and that was a long time ago. worked a guy in italy running barefoot on a vertical in my backyard, signal was like 59 plus. my neighbor came out to see what i was yelling about lol. on the FT-710 thing i think that price has been slowly drifting down for a while, the 7300 is still the one most people seem to recommend for that price range but the 710 has the better filtering from what ive read. havent used one myself though so take that with some salt. if you can demo one at a hamfest before buying that would be the move.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about confirming contacts and i honestly still dont fully understand the whole system. like i get the basic idea of QSL cards, you send a card and the other person sends one back and you have a physical confirmation of the contact. that part makes sense. but then theres LoTW which is the ARRL thing and eQSL which is a totally different thing and from what i can tell some awards count one but not the other? and i heard some DX stations only upload to LoTW and dont bother with paper cards anymore. and then some people say eQSL doesnt really count for anything serious which seems harsh but i dont know. i went ahead and signed up for both LoTW and eQSL accounts but i havent really done anything with them. do i need to get a certificate or something for LoTW? i remember reading something about that but i lost the page. and is there a way to log everything in one place or do you have to manually upload to each service separately. using WSJT-X and JTDX mostly if that matters, mostly FT8.

welcome to the hobby. yeah first contacts are always a bit clunky, thats totally normal. Larry whoever he is probably remembered doing the same thing years ago. once you get comfortable on the repeater you might wanna look into getting your general class, opens up HF and thats where things get really interesting. working stations across the country or even dx with just a wire antenna is a whole different feeling than local vhf stuff. anyway good start, keep at it.

yeah the stock hm-219 mic on the 7300 is actually decent, people dump on it but ive had good audio reports with it. the issue is usually the settings not the mic itself. one thing that helped me was getting a buddy to record my signal off the air and play it back so i could actually hear what people were hearing instead of just going off reports. makes it a lot easier to diagnose. also are you monitoring yourself on the receiver while transmitting? the 7300 has a monitor function and once you start actually listening to yourself in real time you catch stuff immediately

Not a dumb question at all, Q codes go back to like the early 1900s telegraphs era, they were basically a way to communicate across language barriers because you could send a short code and someone in another country would know exactly what you meant even if they didnt speak english. QRT yeah that means stopping transmission or shutting down, so if somone says QRT theyre done for the night basically. QSO is just a contact or a conversation between two stations. QRM is man-made interference like someone elses signal bleeding in, QRN is natural static and noise like from thunderstorms. QSB is when your signal is fading in and out. ARRL has a pretty solid list on their website, just search ARRL Q codes and it should come right up. Youll pick em up fast once you start hearing them in context regularly, honestly after a few weeks of listening it just clicks.

so ive been on more than usual this past few weeks, mostly just spinning the dial on 40 and 17m in the evenings after work. not really chasing anything specific just... listening. picked up a guy in Slovenia last tuesday which was cool, propagation was surprisingly decent for how the solar flux has been looking. anyway just curious what everyone else has been up to. feels like some nights are dead quiet and others theres stuff everywhere and i cant quite predict it anymore. maybe im just getting old lol

so the short answer is no, nothing happens automatically, you gotta actually submit and pay the application fee through the ARRL's website. for DXCC if you have LoTW confirmations that's totally fine, you dont need paper cards at all — LoTW credits are actually preferred now and the whole process is way smoother than it used to be. back in the day you had to mail in cards and get them checked at a hamfest or whatever but now you just log into your ARRL account and it tallies your LoTW confirmed entities and you submit from there. WAS and WAZ are definitely separate awards with their own rules, they just get talked about together because a lot of DXers chase all three. WAS is all 50 states confirmed, WAZ is all 40 CQ zones, and DXCC is 100 confirmed entities. each one has its own mixed/phone/CW/digital endorsement options too so yeah working Wyoming on SSB and then on FT8 can get you credit toward the different mode endorsements — they dont count as the same contact for endorsement purposes even though it's the same state. honestly just make an ARRL account if you havent and look at your LoTW stats, it'll show you what you already have credited and you might be closer than you think

I went through almost this exact thing last spring. ended up putting a cheap 8 element yagi from a well known online seller up alongside my existing vertical and honestly the difference to a repeater about 35 miles away was night and day. went from getting into it maybe 60% of the time to pretty much solid. the coax switch thing works but i just leave the yagi connected most of the time because that repeater is the one i actually care about. the local stuff i can hit with 5 watts on a HT anyway so the omni kind of became redundant for me. your situation might be different though depending on how spread out your local activity is.

the rubbermaid tote thing is totally fine to start, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. i ran mine out of a pelican case for years and honestly the tote was easier to work out of at a table. what i'd think about though is power monitoring -- do you have a way to watch your battery voltage under load? a little watt meter or even just a basic voltmeter velcroed inside the lid saves you from killing the battery without realizing it during a long activation. also and this is the one people always forget -- documentation. like printed documentation. frequencies for your local ARES nets, your ICS forms if you're doing any served-agency stuff, even just a laminated card with your most-used simplex freqs. when things get hectic you do not want to be scrolling through your phone to find the county EOC frequency. i learned that one the hard way at a SKYWARN activation a few years back, my phone died and i was just kind of standing there oh and antenna feedline -- how much coax do you have? one short jumper is never enough once you're actually set up somewhere and the mast is 30 feet away from where you're sitting

so the short version is the FCC allocations are the law and the band plans are basically voluntary agreements that the amateur community came up with to keep things organized. so if you're a general on 40m your phone privileges start at 7.175 MHz and run up to 7.300 which is the top of the band. below 7.175 you technically have CW privileges as a general but you're not supposed to do phone down there. as for band edges, the rule of thumb most people use is stay at least 3 kHz inside the edge because your signal has sidebands and if you're sitting right on 7.300 your upper sideband is going to splash outside the allocation which can cause interference and the FCC does not love that. some people say 5 kHz to be safe, it depends on how clean your radio is. i run USB on 40m and i try to keep my dial frequency no higher than 7.295 just to give myself some breathing room. the band plan stuff around 7.040 for digital and below 7.125 for CW is just convention, nobody is going to arrest you for being there but you'll probably get some dirty looks in your headphones if you fire up an SSB QSO in the middle of the CW segment

congrats man, that first contact really does feel like something even if its just a quick 59 and good day. i remember mine, i was so worried about messing up the phonetics that i just blanked on my own callsign for a second. the guy on the other end was patient though. dont wait too long on HF by the way. i told myself the same thing, that it was this big complicated thing, but honestly once you get even a cheap used radio and a wire antenna up you'll wonder why you waited. the general exam is not that bad either, lot of overlap with tech material.

yeah 40 has been rough lately, i noticed it too. honestly i think a lot of guys just default to digital modes now and voice just kinda sits empty. i still prefer ssb but its getting harder to find a decent ragchew without hunting around forever. tried 7.255 last tuesday around 8pm local and had one brief contact then nothing. solar flux hasnt been helping either i think

also worth knowing you dont have to strictly stick to the official NATO words if something isnt working. like if the other station keeps getting your V wrong you can say Victor or you can even say something like Violin if it cuts through better, ive heard old timers do that. the point is clarity not following a script. that said learning the standard set is worth it because when you say Whiskey the other guy immediately knows you mean W, theres no thinking involved, its automatic on both ends which is kind of the whole point of having a standard in the first place

The coax through the firewall thing is pretty common and honestly your instinct to protect it is the right one. What I usually do is find an existing factory grommet that already has wires going through it and carefully work the coax alongside those — most vehicles have at least one spot like that. If you punched your own hole just make sure whatever grommet you used fully covers the metal edge all the way around. Split loom over the coax on both sides of the firewall doesnt hurt either, cheap insurance. For the hum on the speakers, yeah thats almost certainly a ground loop. The usual fix is to make sure your radio is grounded directly to the chassis with a short heavy wire rather than relying on the power cable ground return. Some people also use a ground loop isolator inline on the audio but I'd try proper grounding first before adding anything. If the radio's power is coming from a long run back to the battery that can contribute too. What gauge wire did you use for power?

honestly for casual use the difference is probably not going to blow your mind. the inverted V does have a bit more high angle radiation which isnt ideal for dx but for domestic contacts it can actually be fine or even helpful. the main thing your losing with the inverted V is some efficiency because the legs interact with each other a bit more, plus the radiation pattern is sort of compressed vertically compared to a flat dipole at the same height. that said if you cant get the flat top above like 25 feet it starts to get ugly anyway, low dipoles at that height are basically cloud warmers for anything beyond regional. id say if you can get the center of your inverted V higher that'll do more for you than fighting to make it flat at those support heights. 35 feet is decent but 45-50 would make a real difference on 40. i wouldnt stress about flat vs inverted V until the center is higher.

took me about 8 months to get comfortable around 18-20wpm but i was doing the morserunner software a lot which simulates contest pileups and that thing will absolutely force your speed up whether you like it or not lol. also +1 on the head copy thing, writing every letter down is a crutch that slows you down past a certain point

field day is honestly the perfect on-ramp and it sounds like you already did that so youre not starting from zero. the exchange stuff feels confusing on paper but after like 10 contacts it just becomes muscle memory. dont stress it. one thing i wish someone told me early on — just search for the contest on youtube before you do it. there are guys who record their whole contesting sessions and you can hear exactly how the exchanges sound in real life which is way more helpful than reading the rules document imo

so anyway i put off setting up LoTW for almost a year when i first got licensed and i really regretted it. had a bunch of contacts with stations i never worked again and none of them counted when i finally did apply for DXCC. just get the certificate request done, mail it in or do it at a hamfest if you can find someone who can sign it in person which is easier. the ARRL page walks you through it even though the instructions look scary. one thing nobody told me — eQSL has two tiers basically, the free accounts and the authenticity guaranteed or AG status, and for the contacts to count for certain awards you need the AG thing. its not expensive but its worth knowing upfront. most serious DX guys will upload to LoTW though so thats really the one to focus on.

so i've been wanting to do this for probably two years now and last weekend i finally got off my butt and did it. built a little bitx40 style single band 40m rig, nothing fancy, mostly followed the schematic but swapped out a few caps i had in the junk box. runs about 4-5 watts out which honestly i wasnt sure would be enough to do anything useful. took it to the state park about 20 minutes from my house, just threw a wire up in a tree maybe 25 feet or so, used my kx2 paddle and a little battery pack i had from an old flashlight project. sat there for about an hour and a half and made 11 contacts, two of which were out to colorado and one guy in ontario. im still kind of amazed that worked. the rig runs warm but not scary hot. i did notice some spurious output that i want to look at with the scope before i take it out again, and the sidetone is a little weird — like it dips in pitch when i send longer dashes? not sure if thats a keyer thing or something in the audio chain. but overall for a first scratch build i'm pretty happy. anyone else doing a lot of portable QRP these days? curious what kind of antennas people are using in the field.

so ive been sitting on doing the mars/cap mod on my FT-857D for like two years now, always kind of nervous about voiding warranty and whatever but the warranty is long gone at this point so last weekend i just went for it. pulled the radio apart, moved the little jumper thing, put it back together and honestly the hardest part was getting the case screws back in without stripping them because my screwdriver is garbage. anyway it transmits outside the ham bands now which was the whole point since i do some MARS stuff occasionally and also wanted the flexibility. rx was already pretty wide on this radio so no change there. one thing i noticed though is that on some of the expanded freqs the ALC acts a little weird, like it hunts around a bit before settling. not sure if thats normal or if i did something slightly off. anyone else notice that after doing this mod, or is that just how it behaves outside its designed range

yeah its a lot at first but honestly you do just absorb most of it. the Q codes were originally from maritime and commercial radio before ham radio even existed, so theres a ton of them that nobody ever actually uses on the air. the ones you really need for everyday HF are maybe a dozen or so -- QRM is interference from other stations, QRN is static and natural noise, QSB is fading, QRZ means whos calling me, QRL means the frequency is in use or busy, QRX is standby wait a minute basically. the other stuff like TNX is just thanks, es is the word and, 73 is best regards or best wishes and thats probably the most universal one in ham radio. GM GE GA are just good morning good evening good afternoon. none of that is technically Q codes, its just old telegraph shorthand that stuck around. arrl website has a decent reference list but honestly just get on the air and it clicks pretty fast once you hear it in actual conversations

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think im overcomplicating it but wanted to see if anyone else has gone down this rabbit hole. basically i have a hexbeam and a vertical and i keep forgetting to switch when i move between HF bands, ended up transmitting into the wrong antenna twice last month which was not fun. my plan was to use an arduino mega with a relay board to handle the switching automatically based on what frequency the rig is outputting. ive got a kenwood TS-590SG which has the CAT interface so i figured i could just poll it over serial and check the VFO frequency then trigger the relays accordingly. wrote a rough sketch that does the polling part and it works fine on the bench, reads the frequency no problem. the issue is the relay timing. i dont know if im just being paranoid but im worried about the relay switching while theres still RF present if the timing is off even slightly. thinking about adding a PTT sense line to hold the switch until the radio goes back to receive but not sure if thats overengineering it. also wondering if a raspberry pi would actually be better for this since i could run a proper python script with better error handling but then i feel like thats overkill for what is basically just reading a serial port and flipping some gpio pins anyone built something like this or have thoughts on the arduino vs pi question for something this simple?

nice work getting it sorted. i went through something similar when i installed my 7100 and honestly the ground was the last thing i checked when it shouldve been the first lol. for the coax routing i just used spiral wrap loom for the section thats exposed inside and zip tied it loosely so theres a little slack near the door. not the prettiest but it hasnt rubbed through in two years so i'll take it

so ive been messing around with an arduino mega for the past few months trying to build something that'll automatically switch between my antennas based on what band im on. right now i have a 40m dipole, a vertical for 15/10, and a G5RV up about 35 feet. every time i qsy i have to walk out to the shack, flip the coax switch manually, and then retune the LDG tuner. its not terrible but i got lazy and figured this would be a fun project. basic idea is to read the band data from the radio (IC-7300 puts out band voltage on the accessory connector) and then use that to trigger a couple relay modules to switch the coax and also send a retune command to the LDG via its serial interface. ive got the relay part mostly working, tested it on the bench with a 12v supply and the relays click over fine. the problem im running into is the band voltage from the icom isnt quite what i expected — the documentation says like 0-8v depending on band but my multimeter is reading some weird intermediate values and i cant figure out if thats normal or if my analog read on the arduino is just noisy. also debated switching the whole thing to a raspberry pi zero just so i could have a little web interface to monitor whats happening but honestly the arduino feels more solid for just switching relays, dont really need linux for that. curious if anyone else has gone down this road and has advice on the band voltage thing especially

yeah the fan resistor mod I did mine probably 2 years ago now, its quieter for sure but honestly I kind of regret it a little just because now im always second guessing myself when im doing any extended digital ops. ended up just putting a small temp logger on the heatsink for a while to convince myself it was fine. its probably fine. but i dunno