Amanda Jackson

so anyway i finally got it working after about three weekends of messing around and thought id share what tripped me up in case anyone else is going through the same thing. i put a Yaesu FTM-300DR in my truck and it sounds great now but getting there was kind of a pain. the biggest thing that got me was the power connection. i ran the power leads straight to the battery like everyone says to do and the radio worked fine but i kept getting this weird buzzing noise that changed with engine RPM. turns out one of my ground leads wasnt making great contact under the seat where i had it bolted. spent two hours chasing RFI and it was just a bad ground the whole time. once i cleaned that connection and used a star washer it went completely quiet. the other thing was antenna placement. first i had a mag mount on the trunk lid kind of off to one side and the pattern was all weird, uneven signal reports depending on which direction i was driving. moved it to the roof dead center and it made a noticeable difference. probably obvious to most people but i didnt think about it much at first. anyway if anyone is just starting out with a mobile install, take your time with the grounding, it really is as important as everyone says. whats everyone else running for mobile antennas these days?

oh man the 10-12wpm plateau is SO real, i spent like 3 months stuck right there and almost quit honestly. what finally broke it for me was two things — first i bumped my character speed way up on lcwo, like to 18 or even 20wpm, but dropped the overall word speed way down so there was more space between characters. the idea being you train your ear to hear the letters as sounds not dots and dashes. second thing was i started just listening to actual on-air CW even when i couldnt copy it, just having it on in the background while doing other stuff. not sure if that really did anything scientifically but it felt like it helped me get used to the rhythm. as for how long to 20wpm... i wont lie to you, for me it was probably close to 18 months of pretty regular practice before i felt genuinely comfortable in a real QSO at that speed. some guys do it faster. i know one guy who went from zero to 20 in like 8 months but he was practicing an hour a day minimum so thats just a different commitment level. the X and Q thing you mentioned goes away, just takes repetition, those letters start sounding like whole sounds eventually instead of a puzzle you have to decode.

i was in the same boat not that long ago, the Q codes felt really overwhelming at first but honestly you only really need maybe 10-15 of them for everyday operating. the rest are pretty obscure and even experienced operators have to look them up sometimes. dont stress too much about memorizing the whole list before you transmit, you'll pick them up naturally as you go

wait there are people who dont use NATO phonetics? i kind of just assumed everyone used them all the time lol. i guess that makes sense on a repeater though. i still say them every time because im paranoid about my call being logged wrong in someone's logbook but maybe im overdoing it on the local stuff

I made almost exactly this jump about two years ago. Had the RTL-SDR v3, was doing the same thing with direct sampling, and yeah the HF experience is just kind of tolerable at best. The RSP1A is a noticeable step up for receive, no question. The dynamic range difference is real, especially if you're anywhere near AM broadcast stations — with the RTL the front end just gets hammered and you get all kinds of crud bleeding into adjacent frequencies. The RSP1A handles that a lot better with the built-in preselectors. SDRuno is fine but I actually ended up running the RSP1A through SDR# with the SDRplay plugin and that worked really well for a while before I switched to SDR Console. If you're not planning to transmit then the HackRF doesn't really make sense for this use case — it's a 8-bit ADC and the noise figure is worse than the RSP1A for pure receive work. the HackRF is more of a do-everything device and it compromises some on receiver quality to get there. spend the money on the RSP1A before the antenna honestly. a better receiver shows you what your current antenna is actually doing and then you can make a smarter decision about the antenna after.

i had the same confusion when i was studying. one thing that tripped me up is that part 97 doesn't just cover what frequencies you can use, theres also stuff in there about things like station identification every 10 minutes, not doing business communications, all that. so even when you ARE allowed on a frequency there are still operating rules to follow on top of it. just something to be aware of as you dig into it more.

yeah the RF getting into the arduino is super common with these setups, had the exact same thing happen with a band decoder i built last year. the relay modules usually have optoisolators but the input lines to the arduino itself are wide open and basically act like little antennas. what helped me was putting ferrite beads on every wire going into the thing, like literally every single one including the power leads, and then adding a 100nf cap to ground right at each input pin. also make sure your ground braid is actually a proper RF ground and not just a long wire because that can make things worse actually. the other thing i found was the cheap relay boards sometimes have really noisy coils that backfeed into the 5v line when they switch, worth throwing a snubber diode across each relay coil if they dont already have them. most of the amazon ones do but you never know what youre actually getting.

yeah this hits close to home. we did a SKYWARN integration drill back in the spring and i had almost the exact same battery situation except mine was a handheld i grabbed out of a drawer and the charge indicator was lying to me lol. showed full, lasted maybe 45 minutes. the ICS forms thing is real too. theres a reason some of our more experienced guys say you should run through a 213 at least once every few months just to keep the muscle memory. its not hard but when youre also trying to copy a frequency list and log traffic at the same time it gets sloppy fast. one thing our EC started doing is requiring everyone to submit at least one piece of formal traffic during our monthly nets, just to keep people from going totally rusty between activations. has helped a lot honestly. the frequency list thing is just good practice to review every january or something, tie it to something you already do so it doesn't slip.

so ive been sitting on this TCXO-15 unit for like three months now and finally got around to installing it last weekend. took me longer than it should have because i was being overly cautious with the ribbon cables but overall not a bad job if you've done any surface work before. the thing is i'm not totally sure i can hear a difference in normal operation but on WSPR overnight the drift is noticeably better — like the signal just sits there instead of wandering around the edges. before the mod i was seeing maybe 2-3 Hz of drift over a few hours and now its basically flat. running a GPS disciplined reference on my other rig so i have something to compare against. not sure it matters for most operating honestly. if you're doing FT8 or voice work probably not worth pulling the rig apart. but if you're into weak signal stuff or trying to run any kind of precision frequency work its a pretty clean mod and icom actually sells the part so its not like you're voiding warranty with some frankenboard situation. anyone else done this or any other internal mods on the 7300 thats actually made a real difference to them?

22 miles on 2m for packet is usually fine as long as theres decent path, but check your RF output too. some rigs default to low power for packet stuff depending on how PTT is wired up. i had a similar issue with a different rig and it was putting out like 5 watts instead of 50 because of some squelch/VOX thing i had set wrong on the Signalink.

so our ARES group has a county-level exercise coming up in about 6 weeks and i've been tasked with figuring out the power situation for our primary station. we're setting up at a fairgrounds site, no shore power available except one outlet in a building that's maybe 300 feet from where we want to actually operate, which is basically useless. right now the plan is to run an IC-7300 plus a 2m/70cm setup, maybe a laptop for logging, and some odds and ends. not running a linear so total draw shouldn't be crazy but i'm trying to figure out if a generator is overkill or if we should just go deep cycle batteries and a decent solar panel or two since the forecast looks pretty good for that weekend. the antenna situation i have mostly figured out — setting up a linked dipole for HF that i can adjust between 40 and 20 depending on what nets we're assigned to, and a jpole up on a mast for the vhf stuff. the jpole is just a roll-up copper one ive had for years, works fine. the dipole is the one i built last winter, havent had any problems with it but also havent really stress tested it in a field environment with people walking around and bumping into things. main question is really around the power. anyone done extended field setups like 8+ hours without a genny? what are you actually pulling in amp hours when you're doing like moderate tx duty cycle? i know the math but i always feel like real world is different than what i calculate on paper.

yeah what he said about LoTW being the main one for awards is right. i went through this same thing when i started chasing DXCC and wasted a bunch of time uploading to eQSL thinking it counted lol. it does count for their own awards system which some people care about but its not the same thing. one thing i'd add is just make sure your TQSL certificate is set up with the right callsign and the dates are correct, that tripped me up early on where i had the wrong QTH info in the certificate and some contacts werent matching up right. the ARRL has a pretty decent setup guide on their site if you dig around for it

so ive been using WSJT-X for FT8 stuff for about a year now and it logs to an ADIF file which i then import into Log4OM and that's been working fine for casual operating. but i'm starting to get into contesting a bit more and everyone seems to say N1MM is the thing to use for that. my question is do people actually run both or do you just pick one and stick with it the thing that confuses me is the workflow. like if i'm doing a contest in N1MM but then i also want to work some FT8 on the side during the same weekend do i have to manually merge the logs after or is there a cleaner way to do it. i tried reading the N1MM documentation and it's honestly a lot to take in all at once also Log4OM has that built in integration with WSJT-X through UDP which is pretty seamless, does N1MM do something similar or is it more of a manual import situation. genuinely not sure which direction to make the default logger at this point

yeah i had the same confusion when i started checking into nets. what helped me was just listening to how the more experienced guys handled it for a few weeks before i started participating. most of the time on a typical club net the whole thing is short enough that IDing at check-in and then again if you make any transmissions after that keeps you covered. one thing i'll add is dont stress too much about it on a casual local net, net control usually knows everyones voice and call anyway. now if you're ever doing formal traffic handling with NTS or something like that the procedures get a bit more specific but for a weekly 2m ragchew net you're probably fine just using common sense and keeping your call in there when it makes sense.

so ive been running an old FT-450D for probably 4 years now and always kinda wondered what i was missing. shack buddy kept telling me to upgrade but i was never really convinced the juice was worth the squeeze, you know? anyway i picked up a used IC-7300 off a guy in the club for a pretty decent price, he was moving up to an IC-7610 so the timing worked out. first thing i noticed honestly was just how much better the waterfall is. i know everyone says that but i didnt really get it until i sat down during a pileup on 17m and could literally see who was transmitting and where they were sitting in the passband. made s&p way more efficient than i was used to. the built in ATU is fine, nothing special, but it gets the job done on my 40m dipole which is a bit short. the real difference for me was weak signal work on 40 and 80. the noise floor just feels lower, or maybe its the filtering, im not totally sure which one is doing the heavy lifting there. i had a decent QSO with a station in Slovenia running maybe 50 watts on his end and it wasnt even a struggle, just comfortable copy the whole way through. anybody else made a similar jump from an older mid-range rig? curious if the improvement was as noticeable for others or if i just got lucky with conditions that week.