John Patterson

the 891 audio mod threads on eham and qrz are kind of all over the place, some people are talking about different revisions of the board so it gets confusing fast. what might actually help more than the cap swap honestly is pairing a decent dynamic mic with the right impedance rather than the stock mic. i swapped to an SM-58 with a little interface cable and the difference was bigger than any hardware mod i tried before that. still worth doing the mod eventually if you want to dig in but sometimes the gain is sitting right there at the mic end and its cheaper to start there. just my take.

so ive had the 7300 for about three weeks now and figured id share some stuff for anyone sitting on the fence about it. came from an old FT-450D which honestly served me pretty well for years but i was getting real tired of fussing with the filtering and the waterfall on that thing is basically useless compared to what the icom gives you.
first thing i noticed was how much easier it is to find activity on 40m at night, just watching the spectrum and clicking around is kind of addictive honestly. the built in ATU handles my off-center fed dipole reasonably well on most bands, had a bit of grief on 80m but i think thats more my feedline situation than the radio. audio out of the speaker sounds better than i expected for a shack radio, though i still run it into a little external speaker most of the time anyway.
the touch screen took some getting used to, a couple times i brushed it by accident and changed something while transmitting which was mildly embarrassing. also the menu system is deep, like really deep, i still stumble across settings i didnt know were there. overall though pretty happy with it, feels like a significant jump from where i was. anyone else running one of these with a compromised antenna setup?

the wall wart is almost certainly your problem or at least a big part of it. those switching supplies dump a ton of garbage into the audio on sensitive low-level circuits like this. i had the exact same symptom on a similar build and adding a 78L08 regulator plus some filter caps on the supply rail cleaned it up massively. also try running it off a 9v battery just to confirm that's the issue before you go changing anything else.
the LM386 at max gain is also just inherently noisy and prone to oscillation, some people put a 10 ohm resistor in series with the output to stabilize it. but honestly diagnose the supply first, the muddy low frequency rumble is classic switching supply hash.

Consider the OCF Masters approach with center loading capacitors to selectively raise lower band resonances while keeping high band coverage. This could solve your 12m issue without compromising other bands.

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly its great for racking up contacts and getting grid squares but lately its been feeling kind of hollow you know, like youre just exchanging signal reports with a robot. heard about JS8Call from a guy at the club meeting last month and started poking around with it this week.
the basic idea makes sense to me — its built on the same weak signal foundation as FT8 so you get a lot of that noise floor magic but the messages are freeform text so you can actually talk to someone. the tradeoff is obviously the speed and i guess bandwidth in a way. JS8Call messages take longer and you lose some of that extreme sensitivity that makes FT8 so stupid good at pulling signals out of nowhere.
im running a G90 into a random wire up about 25 feet with a 9:1 unun, so not a great antenna situation, and i was curious if people have had luck with JS8Call when the signals are marginal. like does the extra symbol time actually help enough on a compromise antenna setup or am i going to be frustrated watching half my messages fail to decode. also is there still an active userbase on JS8Call or did everyone just go back to FT8 after the novelty wore off. seems like every digital mode eventually loses people to FT8.
not trying to abandon FT8 entirely just wondering if JS8Call fills a different niche or if its kind of redundant

i just did this like two months ago so its pretty fresh. went for a 2x3 call in my district and honestly it was pretty painless, just filed through the FCC ULS online and waited. got it without any issue because i dont think anyone else wanted that particular call lol. the hardest part for me was just deciding WHICH call i actually wanted, i spent way too long on that part.
one thing to double check — make sure the call you want is actually available and in the right format for your license class. generals cant hold 1x2 or 2x1 format calls, only extras can. there's different formats for each class so just look that up before you get your heart set on something you cant actually get yet

you can absolutely work EME with what you have, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. 500w and a 15 el yagi is genuinely enough to get on the scoreboard with JT65B, people have done it with less. the mode basically brought EME down to the level of a halfway decent 2m station. you wont be breaking any records but you'll make contacts.
the elevation rotor thing is real though. technically you can do what's called horizon-to-horizon tracking but you're really limiting your windows, maybe 20-30 minutes of usable time when the moon is crossing at low elevations. for serious operation you want full az/el. G-5500 combo is the goto for a lot of guys at this level, nothing fancy but it works. pair it with something like Orbitron or MacDoppler for tracking and youre basically set on that side.
biggest thing people underestimate is the preamp. a good low noise preamp at the feedpoint makes more difference than you'd expect, something with a noise figure under 0.5dB. down to 0.3 isnt hard to find these days. that matters a lot more on receive than squeezing another 50 watts out of your amp.

yeah i had something similar when i put a radio in my jeep, drove me nuts for like two weeks. turned out my fuse was way too far from the battery. i thought i had it close but it was actually closer to the firewall. not saying thats your problem but worth double checking everything.
also the FTM-500 has some squelch and noise blanker settings in the menu that might help in the meantime while you track it down. i dont remember the exact menu path off the top of my head but its in there somewhere.

i took mine like 6 weeks after getting my tech and passed first try, the practice tests on hamStudy really do prepare you pretty well. the part about operating priveledges and band plans tripped me up a little because theres a lot of overlap to keep track of but just make sure you know which portions of HF bands general gets vs extra and youll be okay for those questions. once you get it you'll want a radio immediately lol, 40m at night is something else

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into the local 2m net last night, been licensed for about 3 months now and have mostly just been listening. the net control called for check-ins and i keyed up and gave my callsign but then wasnt sure what to do next. like do i just wait? do i say anything else? i think i said my callsign twice and then just kind of dropped off which felt awkward. net control acknowledged me which was great but then there was this whole procedure for passing traffic that i had no clue about. nobody got mad or anything but i definitely felt like i was the only one who didnt know what was going on. is there like a standard way nets work that i should know before i try again? also i wasnt sure when it was okay to just jump in vs waiting to be called on

i'm pretty new to chasing DX seriously and honestly reading stuff like this is really helpful. quick question though -- when you say split operation, the DX station is transmitting on one frequency and listening on a different one right? i think i understand that but i got confused once when i saw a spot that said like "14.195 up 5" and wasnt sure if that meant i should transmit exactly 5 khz up or somewhere in that range. felt stupid asking on the cluster chat lol

this is actually really helpful to read because im pretty new and still trying to understand how all the solar stuff connects to what i actually hear on the radio. like i know higher flux number good, high k-index bad, but i dont really have a feel for it yet in practice. what app or website do you guys use to check those numbers in real time? ive been using spaceweather.com but not sure if thats the best one for ham stuff specifically

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i mostly do 2m FM through a local repeater and occasionally some HF when conditions are decent. my question is about phonetics — like i know the NATO alphabet, Alpha Bravo Charlie etc, but when is it actually required vs just optional? someone on the repeater last week just rattled off their call sign normally without using phonetics and nobody said anything but then another time someone asked me to use phonetics when i was giving my call and i felt kinda embarrassed because i wasnt sure i was doing it right
also is there like a rule about it in part 97 or is it just a convention thing? i cant find a clear answer anywhere and the ARRL handbook kinda glosses over it

Consider the OCF Masters approach with center loading capacitors to selectively raise lower band resonances while keeping high band coverage. This could solve your 12m issue without compromising other bands.

so ive been a ham for about 3 years now and keep telling myself ill get a proper go-kit together and just... never do it. then we had a pretty bad storm roll through last month and our local ARES group got activated and i showed up with basically my HT and a half charged power bank and felt like a complete idiot standing next to guys with these organized pelican cases and everything.
so im actually doing it this time. ive got an FT-857D which i figured would be good since it does HF/VHF/UHF all in one, and i have a decent LiFePO4 battery from a previous project thats like 30Ah. what i dont really know is how to think about the whole thing — like how long should i be planning to run for without recharging, what antennas make sense to have ready to go, do people typically pre-program everything or rely on their memory in the field. any advice from people who have actually deployed would be really helpful. im not even sure if i should get a second radio for redundancy or just focus on making the one kit really solid first.