Brian Clark

yeah 20 has been rough here too, im in the midwest and i could barely hear anything past like 1500 miles yesterday. did manage a quick qso with a station in texas but thats about it. checked propagation tools and the K index was elevated so that probably explains some of it

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i passed my general exam last week so im pretty stoked about that. but im genuinely confused about the 40 meter band and where i can actually operate. like i know theres the phone portion and the cw portion but when i look at different sources they all seem to say slightly different things and some mention a "band plan" which apparently isnt the same as the actual legal allocation?? also someone at my club told me to stay away from the band edges but didnt really explain why. is it just that your signal might drift outside the allowed portion or is there more to it than that. i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere im not supposed to and get in trouble

ran a 7300 for about two years before i upgraded to a 7610 and honestly the 7300 punches way above its weight. the only real limitation i hit was working split on busy DX pileups where having two VFOs on the same receiver starts to feel a bit cramped compared to a true dual-receive setup but for 95% of operating its completely irrelevant. your OCF dipole should do well with it, what balun are you running at the feedpoint? ive seen those get lossy if someone used a cheapo 1:1 where a 4:1 or 6:1 would have been more appropriate depending on the impedance at that end

so ive had the 7300 for about 6 weeks now, coming from an old FT-450D which i used for a few years and honestly thought was fine until i started reading too many forums and convinced myself i needed an upgrade. anyway figured id share some actual real world impressions since most of what you find is either a youtube unboxing or some review that reads like a press release. first thing i noticed is the waterfall actually makes operating different, not just prettier. like i was on 40m last weekend doing some casual S&P in a small contest and i could see a run station open up before i even heard the gap in the pileup. ended up making a few contacts i wouldve definitely missed before. the DSP filtering is also noticeably better than the 450D, i was pulling out a weak station with a big signal about 2kHz up and the IF filter just handled it, barely had to fiddle with anything. only real complaint so far is the menu system takes some getting used to and i keep accidentally bumping the RF gain when i reach for the volume. probably a me problem. also havent figured out if theres a way to set the band scope so it doesnt reset the span every time i change bands, if anyone knows how to lock that ill owe you a beer. overall though yeah its a solid radio. probably overpaying for what it is compared to used iron but the new stuff has its advantages i guess

honestly for just switching relays the pi is overkill like you said. i went down that road and ended up spending more time messing with linux stuff than actually doing radio. the arduino just works once you get the RF sorted out. one thing though — if you ever do want logging integration down the road you can always have the arduino talk to a pi over serial and let the pi handle the software side while arduino does the actual I/O. best of both worlds and keeps the sensitive electronics away from the RF mess near the antenna feedlines

i have both sitting on my desk right now lol. the RTL v4 is what i grab when i just want to throw something quick at a VHF problem or let my kid mess around with it. the SDRplay is what i use when i actually care about what im receiving. for HF especially there's no contest, the front end on the RTL just gets walked all over when theres anything strong nearby. the RSP1B with the FM notch is noticeably cleaner in that regard. one thing nobody mentions is the 12-bit ADC vs the RTLs 8-bit makes a real difference in how crowded bands look on the waterfall, theres just more usable dynamic range before things start compressing and looking weird. whether that matters for your use case i dunno but for me on 40 and 80m it matters a lot.

yeah what he said about the batteries is real. i forgot to charge my spare pack before one drill and was sweating it by hour two lol. also just a heads up, depending on how your county runs things the exercise might feel kind of stop-and-go with injected scenarios being read out by an evaluator and then you respond, so don't be thrown off if it feels weirdly scripted. thats normal for these tabletop-style things. the point is really just to shake out the kinks in the communication plan more than anything else. you'll do fine

im in the same boat been going back and forth on this for months. ended up just buying a cheap arrow satellite antenna because it does 2m and 70cm and breaks down into sections that fit in my bag. its not optimized for terrestrial work really but its way better than my handheld rubber duck and good enough for most of what i do. probably not the efficient answer but hey it works and i actually bring it instead of leaving the yagi in the car

oh man the first check-in jitters are so real, i remember doing exactly the same thing years ago. honestly just slowing down your callsign helps more than anything, phonetics are your friend even if it feels weird at first. as for the guy walking on net control, yeah that happens and most nets just kind of let it go unless its chronic. net control has a tough job and most of them are volunteers just trying to keep things moving. the unwritten rule is basically just listen twice as much as you talk and you'll figure out the rhythm pretty quick. and no you dont have to say anything beyond your call if you have no traffic, some nets actually prefer it that way so things dont drag on forever.

yeah you've got the basic idea right. the tone you transmit to open up the repeater is called the encode tone (or sometimes just PL tone, which is Motorola's old tradename for it but everyone uses it). the tone the repeater sends back is for decode on your end — so your radio can filter out anything that isnt from that repeater. that second part is more useful when you've got multiple repeaters on nearby frequencies and you dont want to hear bleedover from the next county. honestly for most people starting out you only need to worry about the encode side. just make sure you've got the right tone entered for transmit and you should open the machine fine. the decode setting is kind of optional depending on your situation. as for etiquette — you basically had it right just from listening. key up, say your callsign, maybe say "monitoring" or just your call and wait a beat to see if anyone comes back. some repeaters have a courtesy beep after someone unkeys which tells you the repeater is ready for the next person to go. wait for that before you start your reply if you're already in a QSO. and leave a gap between transmissions so someone can break in if they need to.

went through this whole thing last year when i upgraded to Extra and wanted to grab a 1x2 call. the AE7 calls in my district were almost all gone but i found one i liked and just applied through ULS, waited out the window, and got it no problem since nobody else applied. honestly way less dramatic than i expected after reading about it online. the hard part is just finding a call you actually want that isnt already taken, i used a site called ae7q dot com which lets you search available calls by format and region, way easier than fumbling around the FCC database directly

went to that one back in 2019 i think, it was decent sized, good mix of vendors and club tables. swap meet area gets picked over pretty fast so if you want the good deals get there when doors open or even a little before if they let tailgaters set up early. the food trucks they had were actually pretty solid which sounds dumb to mention but after walking around for 3 hours you care about that stuff

so ive been doing contests for a few years now, mostly single op single radio, and my rates are decent but i keep hitting this ceiling around 120-130 qso/hr on phone and maybe 80-90 on cw during the good runs. been reading a lot about SO2R and honestly it sounds like it could help but also sounds like a massive rabbit hole i might not come back from. my current setup is a K3 and an Alpha 91b and i do alright with that but adding a second radio and figuring out all the antenna switching and interstation interference stuff feels like a project that could eat a whole winter. my station isnt exactly optimized for it either, i have a pair of 40m wires and a tribander at 55ft, not exactly a SO2R dream. the thing is i watch the claimed scores from guys at my skill level who run SO2R and the difference is real, like sometimes 30-40% more qsos. but i also wonder how much of that is just them being better operators in general, not the second radio. does anyone actually track this stuff? like did you go SO2R and see a measurable rate improvement that you could clearly attribute to the second radio vs just getting more experience over time? also whats the minimum viable SO2R setup, like can i get most of the benefit without building a full bandpass filter farm and replacing all my feedlines with hardline or whatever

Canada totally counts by the way, dont sell yourself short when youre 8 months in. took me almost a year before i worked anything outside north america consistently. one thing i'll add that helped me understand it better — there's an app called HamSphere or just look up VOACAP online, you can punch in your location and a target area and it'll show you predicted propagation for different bands throughout the day. its not perfect but it gives you a feel for when to even bother trying. like right now 20 meters is usually my workhorse because it seems to hold up even when solar conditions are middling. 17 is great when things cooperate. i spent way too long calling CQ on 10m during a low flux period wondering why nobody answered

so ive been on FT8 pretty heavily for the past year or so, mostly just hunting dx and filling in the map squares, but lately ive been feeling like it's kind of... hollow? like yeah i worked a bunch of new entities but the contacts themselves are completely meaningless, just signal reports and grid squares and thats it. a buddy at the club mentioned JS8Call and said its basically FT8 under the hood but lets you actually type messages back and forth, still works at really low signal levels. been poking around at it and it seems interesting but im not sure if theres actually enough activity to make it worth setting up. also while im at it i still have wsjt-x configured for FT4 which i mostly use during contests and that's been working fine, but i kind of miss the days when i was running PSK31 and actually talking to people, like full sentences and everything. does anybody actively run JS8Call on HF and is there a go-to frequency people hang out on? and does the software handle split and rig control the same way wsjt-x does because i really dont want to reconfigure everything from scratch if i can avoid it