Microwave Guy

honestly just having a kit at all puts you ahead of a lot of people who keep saying theyre gonna do it. ive seen guys show up to activations with stuff in a grocery bag so pelican case is already winning. the thing nobody told me when i built mine was to actually deploy it at home first and time yourself. like set it up in the backyard and see how long it takes to get on the air from scratch. i was really humbled the first time i did that, took me like 45 minutes to get everything sorted and i thought i knew what i was doing. now i do a practice setup every few months and have it down to under 15 minutes which feels a lot better for a real emergency situation.

general is definitely harder than tech but not crazy hard if you put in a couple weeks of actual study. i'd say dont just memorize the answers without understanding at least a little of the why, especially the band plans and the operating rules stuff because those questions can get tricky if you're just pattern matching. the electrical formulas you really do just need to know, ohms law, reactance, that kind of thing. nothing too wild. on the privileges thing - yeah once you pass and the examiner session gets uploaded to the FCC you can technically operate under your new privileges before the paper license even shows up. you just need your name to appear in the ULS database, which usually takes a day or two after the VE session. some people check obsessively after their session lol. as a general you get most of HF, big chunks of 40m 20m 15m 10m for phone, and you still cant use the Extra-only subands obviously but thats not a huge deal starting out. 40m SSB is super active especially evenings, that would be my first stop.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i still feel awkward about when to use the NATO phonetics vs just saying the letter. like on a clear repeater contact where everyones coming in 5x5 do you really need to say "Kilo Foxtrot Seven Sierra Sierra" or is it fine to just say your callsign normally? i see guys on the club net who just rattle off their call letters and nobody seems to have a problem. but then on HF or when things are noisy i get why you'd spell it out. is there like an unwritten rule about this or does it just depend on conditions? i dont want to sound like im overdoing it on a local 2m net but also dont want to sound sloppy on HF

so ive been messing around with remote station control for a few months now and finally got to a point where i want to try doing this more seriously. my shack is about 45 miles from where i live now and driving out there every weekend is getting old. ive got a decent internet connection at the shack end, something like 25 down and 10 up from a fixed wireless provider, not fiber or anything but stable enough i think. been looking at RemoteHams as the software side of this because a buddy of mine runs it and says its pretty solid. my question is mainly about the SDR remote piece — like how does that actually integrate with a regular transceiver? im running an IC-7300 so i can pull the IQ data out over USB but im not totally clear on how RemoteHams handles that versus just doing straight audio relay. does it send the full SDR waterfall to the client side or is that too much bandwidth? also the internet linking part confuses me a bit. is that just for EchoLink type stuff or can you link the remote control sessions together somehow, like have multiple clients or chain it? i read the wiki but honestly it wasnt super clear on that piece. any real world experience with this setup appreciated

yeah FO-29 is tricky and its definitely not the most forgiving bird to start on, transponder has been flakey for years honestly. but the inverted thing you mentioned — yes thats right, USB in on the uplink shows up as USB on the downlink but the sense of doppler is flipped so as the sat comes toward you the downlink frequency is rising while your uplink needs to go DOWN to stay in the passband. a lot of guys get burned by that at first. 5 watts into an Arrow at low elevation is probably borderline, i usually run closer to 10-15 on the uplink for FO-29, it can take it. the AGC thing is real but youre not gonna hurt it with 15w from a handheld yagi, you'd need like 50+ probably to start causing problems. the bigger issue is probably your doppler correction if your not actually hearing yourself — are you manually tuning the downlink in real time or did you set it and forget it? because at a 10 degree pass the doppler on 2m alone can be like 3-4 khz across the whole pass, enough to wander out of the passband if you're not chasing it. also what software are you using for tracking? gpredict is solid if you havent tried it, it'll at least tell you exactly where the sat is and some rigs can do the doppler correction automatically if you set it up right.

the 7300 at 100w is pulling somewhere around 20-22 amps on transmit, but if your duty cycle is reasonable like you're doing a lot of net check-ins and passing traffic rather than contesting, your average draw ends up way lower. I run a similar rig on a 100ah LiFePO4 for EMCOMM exercises and typically come home with 40-50% left after 5-6 hours. the laptop is probably your sneaky power hog depending on what you're running it on - some of those things pull 3-4 amps through an inverter and that adds up. if you drop to 50w you probably wont notice a difference for most field work and it helps a lot. id leave the genny in the truck as backup and see how the battery does. worst case you go get it, but most likely you wont need it. also worth sticking a watt meter inline just so you can keep an eye on things rather than guessing.

the HT alone is gonna feel limiting real quick if you end up doing anything beyond just checking in on a local repeater. not saying ditch it, it absolutely belongs in the kit, but having that 891 available in some kind of portable config would give you way more flexibility especially on HF if you need to reach somewhere when local infrastructure is down. one thing i see people overlook is power. like everyone thinks about the radio but then they plug it into a random jump starter from autozone and wonder why it browns out under transmit. know your radio's current draw and size your battery accordingly with some headroom. my go-to for most portable stuff is a 20Ah lithium battery with an anderson powerpole distribution block so i can run the radio, a small lamp, and charge a phone if i need to. dont overthink the antenna situation starting out either, a simple roll-up jpole for 2m or a linked dipole kit covers a lot of ground and packs small.

ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now (technician, just got my general last week actually) and i still get a little confused about when its appropriate to just call CQ on a frequency versus like finding an active net and checking in. like are these totally separate things or is there overlap? i mostly operate HF now since i got my general and ive been listening a lot but havent transmitted much because i dont want to step on someone or do something wrong. also related question — on 40m in the evenings there always seems to be nets running, like pretty much any frequency i land on has something going on. is it bad form to try to call CQ in between nets or do you just kind of have to find a gap somewhere? i listened to one net last week that seemed to go on for almost 2 hours which, fair enough, but it made me wonder if there's some kind of unwritten schedule people follow. anyway any advice for someone just trying to get their feet wet on HF without being that guy would be appreciated

Nice work getting it sorted out. The power run is always the part people underestimate — I've seen guys spend 10 minutes on the radio and 6 hours just chasing a good path for the cable. Totally worth doing it right though, you really dont want to be dealing with alternator whine or ground loops after the fact. On the antenna situation, lip mounts are a bit of a compromise but honestly for hitting local repeaters on 2m and 70cm you'll barely notice. If you ever start doing weak signal work or SSB stuff on 2m it might matter more but for everyday FM use you're fine. What feedline did you use?

so ive been sitting on doing the mars/cap mod on my FT-857D for probably two years now, always chickened out because i didnt want to brick a radio i actually depend on for portable ops. finally just did it last weekend and honestly it was way less scary than i built it up to be in my head. two diodes, about 20 minutes, done. what i actually wanted to post about though is that while i had it open i also went ahead and did the ref oscillator mod with the TCXO unit. and that part i do think made a noticeable difference, especially on digital modes. the frequency stability was always a little annoying on FT8 when the radio was cold, like it would drift for the first 10-15 minutes until everything warmed up. that seems basically gone now. i know some people say you cant really tell the difference but i can at least on this radio. anyone else done both at the same time, curious if your experience was similar or if maybe i just got lucky with a particularly drift-prone unit before

I went for the first time last year and honestly didnt know what to expect. ended up buying a power supply I didnt really need but it was cheap so whatever. the flea market part was cool, talked to a lot of people. definitely going again if I can get the weekend off work

yeah what he said about LoTW is right. i was in the same boat when i started and honestly i just do all three now because its not that much extra work once everything is set up. i use WSJT-X for FT8 and it logs everything automatically and i can batch upload to LoTW every few weeks, takes maybe 5 minutes. eQSL i mostly forget about but i check it every couple months and upload my log then too. the paper card thing is kind of personal preference territory. i actually really enjoy getting them and i try to send back when i can, there's something cool about having a physical thing from a contact you made. but yeah the bureau is the way to go for keeping costs manageable, direct mail to rare DX stations gets expensive fast. your section manager can tell you how the outgoing bureau works if you havent looked into it yet

the continent filter on DXwatch is filtering by where the spotter is located, not the DX station. so if you pick North America you're seeing spots that were submitted by North American stations. the idea being those guys heard the signal and it gives you a rough idea of propagation from your part of the world. took me a while to wrap my head around that too honestly. for what its worth i just keep a browser tab open to dxwatch and use the audio alert feature when something i actually care about shows up. i have it filtered to 20 and 17 meters most of the time and set a region filter for Europe and Asia since thats what im usually chasing. the cluster inside HRD is fine but i always felt like the standalone web tools gave me a cleaner picture without having to have the whole logging suite running. if youre just getting started i wouldnt overthink the software side of it, the bands will humble you way before the tools do lol

New to SDR and tried both - SDR++ is much easier to get running initially, but GQRX seems to have better documentation and community support. Which would you recommend for someone just getting started with RTL-SDR monitoring?

i was in almost the exact same spot about two years ago lol. what helped me was just jumping into a contest with zero expectations and treating it like practice. i sat down for like 3 hours during CQ WW last october just searching and pouncing, didnt try to run a frequency or anything, and it clicked pretty fast. yeah i only made like 40 contacts but i got the hang of the exchange and logging and now i actually look forward to it. Field Day is still my favorite though honestly. theres something about the whole setup, operating outside, the group energy. if your club does it next june i'd push to actually get on the air even if its just for an hour or two. most clubs are happy to have extra ops especially if you can handle some of the lower activity periods like 4am when everyone wants to sleep

so ive been sitting on doing this for like two years now because i was always nervous about voiding the warranty (which is already long gone lol) and also just the general fear of bricking a radio i rely on for portable ops. but i finally sat down last weekend and did the mars/cap mod plus the extended receive on my FT-857D and honestly it went smoother than i expected. the mod itself is pretty straightforward once you find the right diode matrix — theres a lot of conflicting info online about which pads to bridge depending on the firmware version so just make sure youre looking at the right diagram for your specific unit. mine is an older one so the pad layout matched the older docs. took maybe 20 minutes total including pulling the bottom cover off. extended rx is working great now, been listening around on some frequencies i couldnt touch before. the transmit unlock i honestly probably wont use but it was part of the same mod so whatever. what i actually want to do next is look into improving the audio on rx, the stock filtering always felt a little mushy to me especially on crowded ssb. anyone done anything with the IF filtering on these? i know you can drop in a Collins mechanical filter but im not sure if thats actually worth the cost vs just using DSP filtering in the radio or an external audio filter downstream.

yeah i run both actually. N1MM is contest only for me, i dont even open it unless theres a contest running. Log4OM handles everything else and honestly its pretty solid once you get past the initial setup which is kind of a mess if im being honest. the ADIF import from N1MM after a contest works fine, takes maybe five minutes to merge everything into Log4OM after the dust settles. the WSJT-X dupe thing i saw that too for a while. turned out i had both N1MM and Log4OM both listening on the same UDP port which was causing all kinds of weirdness. once i sorted out which program was actually supposed to be receiving at any given time it cleaned up. you probably already checked that but figured id mention it

did the TCXO on my 705 not the 7300 but same idea basically. definitely real improvement for digi modes, you can actually see it if you pull up a stable reference signal and watch over time. the stock xtal is just kinda meh for tight-tolerance stuff. havent done much else internally, mostly just external stuff like a better mic element and swapping the stock hand mic for a desk mic. those changes honestly made more of a practical difference for phone operation than anything inside the box would. but for FT8 and JS8 yeah the TCXO pays for itself pretty fast.

okay so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and people throw around all these QSL QRM QRN QRZ things constantly and i kind of get the gist from context but i dont really know what they all actually mean officially. like i know QSL has something to do with confirming a contact but then people also use it to mean like... a card? and QRZ seems to be what someone says when they want to know whos calling but ive also heard people use it at the start of a CQ call which seems weird. is there like a good way to learn all of these or is it just one of those things you pick up over time. also what about the non-Q abbreviations like 73 and 88 and stuff, where did those even come from

Started with Gpredict and loved the interface, but moved to SatPC32 for full rig control. Orbitron has been around a long time with lots of tutorials, but limited radio integration was a deal-breaker for me.

yeah 50ah lifepo4 for a full day at 100w is gonna be tight depending how much traffic you pass. im running a 120ah epoch battery now and it basically laughs at a full day exercise. not cheap but i got tired of rationing. for the antenna — if theres literally no stakes allowed ive had decent luck with a non-resonant wire just draped over whatever is around, fence line, bushes, doesnt matter, and let the tuner deal with it. ugly but it works and setup is like 3 minutes. for an actual vertical on 40m with no radials youre looking at a pretty lossy system, at least throw a few 16 foot wires on the ground even if theyre just coiled up awkwardly, makes a noticeable difference

so ive been running a simple 40m dipole at about 30 feet for a couple years now and it works fine, gets me contacts, no real complaints. but i keep reading about how verticals have this low angle radiation that's supposedly better for dx and im starting to wonder if im missing out. the thing is i live on a small lot and putting up a proper ground radial system seems like a huge pain. ive seen guys say you need like 16 minimum to make a vertical actually work right and some say 32 or even 64 for best performance. my yard isnt even big enough to do that without the radials running under the fence into the neighbor's yard which seems like a weird conversation to have. so my question is basically — is a well-installed vertical with a decent radial field actually going to outperform my dipole for working europe from the midwest, or is the difference kind of overstated online. the dipole is broadside roughly northeast-southwest so it does favor that path at least somewhat. just wondering if anyones actually done a real comparison or if this is one of those endless debates that never gets settled

this is making me think i should actually push our club to do something like this. we talk about being prepared but i dont think weve ever actually simulated anything beyond like a basic net check-in. how did you get people motivated to show up on a saturday for a drill? thats always the hard part around here, everyone says theyre interested but then something comes up.

so ive been trying to figure out if its worth the drive this year, last time i went i picked up a barely used HF rig for way less than i expected but also spent like 3 hours in the flea market area just wandering around not buying anything lol. anybody from this area planning to go or know if theres any club stuff happening around the same weekend, my local club mentioned something about a carpool but nobody has confirmed anything yet

the dual chaser thing threw me off too my first time, didnt realize a chaser can log you on every band and mode, its just from your side that each summit only counts once. the community is really nice about explaining stuff though, most chasers are super patient with new activators also dont stress too much about the SWR, the 818 can handle a bit of mismatch and 4 contacts from a wire hung wrong off a tree branch is honestly pretty impressive for a first go