Karen Walker

the K3 and 7300 combo is a bit of a mismatch for serious SO2R just fyi — not saying it wont work but the K3 is way ahead of the 7300 in terms of close-in dynamic range and youll notice it if theyre both running at the same time. might drive you crazy hearing your own harmonics bleed into the weaker radio. plenty of people run mismatched pairs though so dont let that stop you from experimenting.
one thing nobody mentions enough is the operator side of SO2R. like the station engineering is one problem but actually managing two radios without losing your mind mid-run is a whole other skill. i ran my first SO2R attempt at field day a couple years ago and i basically just stared at two screens for 20 minutes before defaulting to one radio out of sheer confusion. it gets better with practice but there is definitely a learning curve and sweepstakes might be a tough first contest to try it given the exchange complexity.

so i heard the Tri-County ARC is putting on their annual hamfest again, i think its the second weekend in april but dont quote me on that. been a few years since i went and last time i scored a pretty decent MFJ tuner for like 20 bucks so im definitely thinking about making the trip. anyone else planning on going? also does anyone know if theyre doing the swap tables again or is it mostly vendors this year

oh man yeah the 13wpm wall is absolutely real, i hit the exact same thing and it lasted way longer than i wanted to admit. what worked for me was honestly just forcing myself to stop writing anything down for a while. like i mean it, put the pencil away completely. you can't copy what you cant get anyway so you end up training yourself to just let stuff go and keep listening rather than freezing on one word and missing the next three.
also the farnsworth thing — i'd say keep your character speed where it is or even bump it to 25, but slowly creep the effective speed up maybe half a wpm every few days rather than jumping it. the goal is to get your brain associating the sound with the word or meaning, not the individual dits and dahs. once that clicks it really does click. took me probably three months of daily practice to get comfortable at 20 and i still have bad days. just dont give up, it comes.

honest answer? for casual SSB on 40 and 20 you probably wont notice a huge difference in what you can do. the extra allocations are real but most of the action isnt exclusively in the extra-only segments anyway. that said i took mine about a year after getting my general and im glad i did, not because i suddenly had access to magic frequencies but because studying for it actually taught me stuff i use. the filter theory stuff makes you understand why your rig sounds the way it does, the antenna theory clicks better, propagation stuff starts making more sense. its not just a piece of paper but it is kinda front-loaded in that you get more out of the studying than the actual license sometimes
the pool questions look scarier than they are. get hamStudy or the ARRL book and just grind through it over a few weeks. the math is mostly not that bad once you see the patterns

so ive been on HF for about 4 years now mostly doing SSB on 20 and 40 and ive noticed theres this huge gap between what actually matters for good audio and what guys spend all their time tweaking. thought id throw this out there and see what other people think because i genuinely cant tell sometimes if im missing something or if half the stuff people do is placebo.
the biggest thing i noticed is mic gain. like everyone talks about compression ratios and EQ curves and whatever but if your mic gain is way too hot youre just splattering all over the place and no amount of downstream processing fixes that. i spent like 6 months with my gain too high because i was told to drive it hard for more talk power and honestly it was making me sound like garbage. turned it down until the ALC was barely moving on peaks and suddenly people started commenting my audio was way cleaner.
the other thing is the mic itself and positioning. ive tried the stock mic that came with my radio, a heil PR-781, and just a random dynamic i had laying around from a PA system. the heil is nice but honestly the positioning matters more than which mic it is. too close and you get all this bass buildup and plosives, too far and you lose presence and start cranking the gain to compensate which brings us back to the first problem.
anyway curious what other people have found actually moves the needle vs stuff thats kind of theoretical. im specifically wondering about audio bandwith settings on the transmit side — my radio lets me adjust the TX filter and i have no idea what setting is actually optimal or if its even audible on the receiving end.

so ive been meaning to do this for probably two years now and just never got around to it. last month we had a pretty bad storm come through and the power was out for almost four days and i just kept thinking man i really need to get my act together here. im a general class, been licensed about three years, mostly do local repeater stuff and a little HF when the mood strikes.
anyway i finally started building out a proper go-kit. right now ive got my FT-891 with a separation cable so the head can mount up front, a 40ah lifepo4 battery from bioenno, and a little anderson powerpole distribution block. i grabbed one of those harbor freight pelican knockoff cases to put it all in. also threw in a roll of RG-8X and a end fed half wave for 40 and 20.
but here than the radio stuff i feel like im probably forgetting something obvious. like the non-radio parts. logbooks, pens, that kind of stuff. does anyone have a list or just general advice from actually deploying this stuff? i want this to be something i can actually grab and go if the county ARES group calls, not just a box that sits in my closet looking organized.

yeah i'd just swap to LMR-400 anyway if you're going back up on the roof. the price difference for 40 feet isnt that much and you'll never think about coax loss again on either band. also double check that the antenna feedpoint connection is clean, those diamond whips sometimes have a little corrosion creep in if theyve been up more than a year or two especially if you're near salt air or anything like that. 70cm is pretty unforgiving compared to 2m with any lossy stuff in the chain.

SO2R is absolutely worth it but yeah the setup is not trivial, especially with antennas that close. the BPF situation is the first thing to solve — without good bandpass filters youre just going to have the second radio deafened by your TX on the first one and vice versa. 4O3A or Array Solutions filters are the go-to but theyre not cheap like you said. some guys build their own with decent results.
on the rate question, honestly SO2R pays off most in the mid-contest doldrums for me. when the rate on your run frequency is dropping off youre not just sitting there waiting, youre working a mult or grabbing a new call on the other radio. the really skilled SO2R ops can maintain a run on one radio while doing full S&P on the other which is kind of insane to watch but takes a long time to get comfortable with. starting out youll probably just use the second radio to grab mults during QSB or band changes and thats already a big improvement. K3 plus 570 is actually a pretty workable combo since you can slave the 570 off the K3 for some of the control stuff depending on how you set it up.

yeah the listening thing is so underrated. i've watched guys on the SDR waterfall just hammering away transmitting constantly and they're all on top of each other. the DX cant pull anything out of that wall of noise. patience is genuinely the skill in pileups and most people including me for a long time just dont have it
for SSB specifically one thing that helped me was dropping power slightly and cleaning up my audio. counterintuitive but a punchy well-processed signal actually cuts better than running the amp wide open and having everything splatter. my IC-7300 has that built in processing and once i got it dialed right my pileup rate improved noticeably. also on SSB i try to transmit a bit shorter than everyone else — half second ID, pause, listen. most people send their call like three times and by the time they're done the DX has already moved on