David Kim

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, went up to a local summit that only qualifies by like 200 feet of prominence but hey it counts. took my ft-818 and a linked dipole i built from a kit a while back and just kind of winged it. wasnt sure how the spots would work out but i threw myself on sotawatch before i left the car and by the time i got to the top i already had a couple chasers waiting which was honestly kind of surreal. worked 6 contacts on 40m SSB which i know is the minimum but the band was doing weird things and i had to fight some QRM from what sounded like a net that wasnt paying attention to the dx window situation. anyway got the 4 points for the summit and i already want to go back and try it on CW because i think the QRM situation would have been way better. also somebody spotted me on a second cluster i didnt even know about so that helped. anybody else find that 40m gets really crowded around lunch time on weekends or is that just my area

yeah the thermal compound thing is real, did the same thing on mine about a year ago. the stock stuff on those yaesu radios from that era is pretty mediocre. i used arctic silver which is probably overkill but whatever i had on hand. the fan mod is worth doing if you run any digital modes for more than like 10-15 minutes at a stretch, the stock fan curve is pretty conservative and the radio will throttle before it should on a warm day. its not a hard mod, just a resistor change if i remember right, or some people wire in an external fan controller. i did the resistor version and it made the fan kick on a bit earlier and run faster. radio is a little louder now but runs noticeably cooler on JS8Call sessions. one thing i will say, double check your output power on all bands after you do any board work. mine was slightly off on 10m after i had it open once, turned out i bumped a trimmer pot. nothing a quick tweak couldnt fix but if i hadnt checked i wouldnt have known.

i was in the same boat when i first got my ticket, part 97 reads like it was written by lawyers for lawyers lol. one thing that helped me was just downloading the ARRL band plan and keeping it saved on my phone. also dont stress too much about accidentally going out of band when youre on a repeater because youre just using whatever frequency the repeater is on and those are pretty much always in the right segments. the place where people mess up is on HF and usually thats more of a general or extra class thing to worry about for now.

N1MM interface looking old is actually kind of a feature if you ask me, everything is right where you need it when youre running 200 contacts an hour and you dont want to go hunting through menus. but thats a different conversation. the WSJT-X to N1MM integration works pretty well actually, there's a UDP port thing you set up and contacts just appear in N1MM in near real time during FT8 if thats your thing during a contest. not sure it matters much for everyday logging though. if youre not doing serious contesting and mostly want something that tracks your awards progress and looks decent Log4OM is probaly fine as your main logger and you just fire up N1MM when a contest weekend rolls around.

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just ragchewed on 40m and did some local stuff but lately ive been getting really into DX and people keep mentioning DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly it's a little overwhelming trying to figure out how all of it works like i understand the basic idea — you work entities or states or zones and log them and eventually submit for the award. but the part i dont get is how the credits actually get confirmed. someone told me LoTW is basically essential for this and i set up an account a while back but never really used it. is that the main way people get their contacts confirmed or do QSL cards still matter? and whats the deal with the different DXCC bands — do you have to submit separately for each band or is it all one big pool also curious how people actually prioritize which entities to chase. do you just work whatever you hear or is there a smarter way to go about it

so this has been driving me nuts for about three weeks now. picked up a used 7300 from a guy at the club, worked fine for maybe two months then one day i noticed the ALC was pegged and output had dropped to maybe 8-10 watts on any band. tried a fresh calibration, checked the antenna port, swapped cables, even tried a dummy load just to rule out SWR stuff. same result no matter what. the radio receives fine, no weird noises, TX audio sounds normal on the monitor, it just wont make power. display looks normal, no error codes or anything like that. fans come on when it should. i poked around inside briefly and nothing looks obviously burned, no smell, caps look ok visually at least. anyone run into this on a 7300 specifically? im wondering if its a driver stage issue or maybe one of the finals is partially gone. not sure if its worth sending to icom or finding someone local who does rig work.

I went through the same process last month - took about 6 weeks to get authorization. The team is all volunteer so be patient. While you wait, configure everything else and test using VARA FM in digipeater mode for P2P messaging. This gives you real-world experience with the system before going live.

These instructions, and the TH-7800 programming software from grapevineamateurradio.com are what worked for me. For some reason the software I got from TYT and from MTC would not recognize my radio. Give that a try - sometimes third-party software works better than the official versions.

hamstudy.org is honestly all you really need, i used the ARRL book too when i studied but looking back i probably couldve passed just doing the flash cards on that site every day for a couple weeks. the question pool thing is real yeah, the FCC publishes the exact pool they pull from so you're not guessing at mystery questions or anything. there's like 400 something questions and the test is 35 of them so if you can get consistently scoring in the 80s on the practice exams you're probably good to go. the electrical stuff tripped me up too at first, mostly the ohms law questions but theres only so many ways they can ask it and once you see the pattern it clicks. dont stress too hard about understanding every single concept deeply, some of it you'll learn way better just by actually getting on the air after you pass

yeah this is pretty much exactly what i do. N1MM is just the contest logger, full stop. nothing else comes close for serious contest work, the bandmap, the rate meter, the way it handles dupes in real time — Log4OM cant really compete with that stuff during a fast pileup. but i still use Log4OM as my main shack log for everything else. the import isnt that bad actually. after the contest ends N1MM exports an ADIF and you just bring it into Log4OM, takes maybe two minutes. i was worried about dupes too but Log4OM has a decent dupe check on import, it'll flag anything that looks like a conflict and you just review it. ive done this after maybe a dozen contests now and only had a couple weird edge cases, both times it was because i had already manually logged something from a contest QSO before importing. just dont do that and youre fine. the WSJT-X thing — i keep that completely separate from N1MM, i dont even try to bridge them during a contest. if im doing a digital contest like the RTTY Roundup i use N1MM's built in RTTY support anyway which is actually pretty solid. for FT8 stuff thats just not a contest mode i bother with so the workflow question never really comes up for me personally.

yeah the single yagi thing is real, im not gonna lie to you. i worked my first EME contact on 144 with a single 14el M2 and about 700w, took a while to find someone calling but it happened. the key is really the digital modes changed everything, JT65B especially. before that you basically needed a serious array to even hear yourself think off the moon. the LNA question is important though and people underestimate it. you want as low a noise figure as possible right at the feedpoint, like within a foot of the connector ideally. im running a Kuhne MKU LNA 144 AH and its probably the best upgrade i made to the whole station honestly. NF around 0.3dB or something in that range. the coax loss between the antenna and your first amplifier kills you on receive and EME is very much a weak signal game so that front end noise figure matters more than another couple hundred watts on tx in a lot of cases. what elevation range does your az-el setup cover, or are you still on a fixed mount trying to pick windows?

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech, studying for general) and i keep hearing people on the air and in forums use stuff like QSL, QTH, QRM and a bunch of others and i kind of piece together what they mean from context but i dont actually know most of them. like QSL i think means like... confirmed? and QTH is location? but then theres QSB and QRN and QRZ and honestly i have no idea where to even start. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just memorize them over time. also are there other abbreviations that arent Q codes that i should know, because people say things like 73 and i figured out that means goodbye basically but then someone said 88 to someone else and i have no idea what that one is. and whats the deal with using these on digital modes vs voice, do people actually say the letters out loud on SSB or is it more of a CW thing

yeah what he said. i'll just add that i was in the same boat when i started and i kind of ignored LoTW for like the first year which i regret now because i lost all those early confirmations. even if youre not chasing awards right now just log everything and upload to LoTW regularly, future you will thank you. the setup is a pain once but after that its pretty much automatic if you use WSJT-X or most of the popular logging software, it can upload for you. eQSL i use mostly for the digital modes contacts, a lot of ft8 guys use it. but honestly for anything serious LoTW is the one.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, drove out to a little summit about an hour from home, nothing crazy like a 10 pointer just a 2 point hill basically. brought my kx2 and a end fed half wave i built from a kit, figured id be up there for maybe 2 hours tops. well the wire kept catching in the trees on the way up and i ended up with a pretty bad kink in it near the feed point, still worked but the swr was reading kinda weird. managed to get my 4 contacts to qualify but it took way longer than it should have, had one guy just not come back after i sent his callsign twice which was annoying. also forgot my notepad and had to log on my phone which i hate doing. anyway i qualified the summit so thats what matters i guess. anyone else have a disaster first activation story

yeah what he said about the preamp is exactly right, learned that the hard way. i was running a pretty decent 2x9el setup and couldnt figure out why my echo tests were so marginal and it turned out my preamp was mounted like 8 feet from the antenna with RG-213 in between. moved it to the boom and it was like a different station. one thing nobody really warns you about is the azimuth/elevation rotator situation, that stuff gets expensive and complicated real quick especially if you want to track smoothly. some guys get by with manual elevation settings and just doing fixed-elevation passes but its a pain. the G-5500 combo is the usual budget starting point but even that requires some fiddling to interface with tracking software properly

honestly i went through this for almost a whole year after i upgraded to extra. felt like i climbed the mountain and then there was just... nothing at the top lol. ended up getting into WSPR just to have something running in the background and that kind of re-sparked it for me weirdly enough. now im obsessed with seeing how far my little 100mw signal gets which is maybe dumb but whatever it works

Set up a dedicated FT8 monitoring station using Pi Zero 2W + RTL-SDR v4 + WSJT-X for automated band monitoring and spotting. Surprisingly good performance on 20m/40m - decoding 50-80 stations simultaneously during peak hours. Running headless with custom Python scripts for PSK Reporter uploads and local database logging. CPU usage averages 60-70% during heavy FT8 activity. RTL-SDR V4: 14.074 MHz ±3kHz windowModified WSJT-X for scripted operationPostgreSQL for contact loggingNginx for web dashboardConsidering adding 15m/17m monitoring. Anyone running multi-band FT8 decode on Pi hardware?

honestly the rate improvement depends a lot on your operating skill before you even think about SO2R. if you're not already pretty comfortable managing a pileup and doing efficient S&P transitions on a single radio, adding a second one is just going to split your attention and hurt your score. i went through a phase where i thought SO2R was the magic bullet and my scores actually went down for two contests before i got my head around the workflow. that said, once it clicks it really does work. the classic use case is you've got a good run going on 15m and 10m is opening up but you dont want to abandon your frequency. second radio lets you cherry pick the mults without giving up the run. at 100w you're probably not going to be pulling 150/hr rates anyway so the absolute gain in QSOs per hour might be modest, but the mult efficiency can really add up especially in something like CQWW where a new zone on the second radio while you keep running is basically free points. re your filter question -- yeah the 857 and 7300 on the same tower is going to need at least some bandpass filtering if you're transmitting both simultaneously. the 4O3A or Dunestar filters are the usual recommendations, not cheap but not insane either. if you're only doing a few contests a year you could probably get away with being careful about which bands you pair and just accepting you wont transmit both at exactly the same time, which is what a lot of casual SO2R ops do anyway

the NR770H is a decent antenna, nothing wrong with it, but yeah vertical collinears are all kind of fighting the same battle — you get gain on the horizon but its omnidirectional so youre spreading it around. if the guys sounding stronger on the net are running something like a 5/8 over 5/8 or a longer collinear up higher thats probably where the difference is coming from, not some magic antenna just good height and maybe a bit more gain. for the hilltop idea though a yagi makes a lot of sense if you know roughly where the people you want to work are. even a 3 element beam on 2m will give you maybe 7 or 8 dBd and you can feel that difference instantly compared to a whip. i built a cheap PVC tape measure yagi years ago off the ARRL design and honestly for portable ops its hard to beat, weighs almost nothing and you can tune it pretty easily. if youre doing SSB weak signal stuff thats a whole different conversation but for FM simplex into town it would absolutely get the job done from a hilltop.

so i've been on HF for about 8 months now and honestly the band conditions have been kind of hit or miss for me but yesterday afternoon i just happened to tune across 10 meters and it was absolutely alive, i mean i was working stations in south america and even heard a couple europeans coming through and i only run like 100 watts into a dipole so i was pretty shocked i've been watching the solar flux index on spaceweather.com and it was sitting up around 180 or so which i guess is pretty decent? i'm still figuring out what the numbers actually mean in terms of what to expect on different bands. like i know higher flux is generally better for the higher HF bands but is there a rough rule of thumb for when 10m and 12m actually get usable vs just dead? and does the A and K index stuff matter as much as the flux number or is that more about geomagnetic stuff throwing things off anyway it was just a really fun afternoon, worked about 14 countries in a couple hours which is more than i'd done in the previous month combined probably

so this has been sitting on my bench for about two weeks now and im starting to lose my mind a little. picked up an ft-857d at a hamfest for cheap because the guy said it had 'some tx issues', which i figured meant maybe a bad connection or something simple. not so simple. the radio receives fine, actually pretty decent on most bands. when i key up it shows like 2-3 watts on the internal meter on 40m and basically nothing on 20 and up. the finals look okay visually, no burn marks, no smell. already resoldered the PA board connections because one looked a little cold. checked the voltage rails and theyre within spec, 13.8v at the main connector. ALC looks like its doing something but maybe clamping too hard? honestly not sure. i pulled the driver board and inspected it under magnification, nothing jumped out at me. checked Q1035 which is a common failure point on these from what ive read and it measured fine out of circuit. im kind of wondering if one of the LPF relays is flaky, i can hear them clicking when i change bands but that doesnt mean theyre actually switching cleanly i guess. anyone gone down this road on an 857? before i start throwing parts at it i want to make sure im not missing something dumb.

nice work. i did my first one earlier this year and yeah the hunters find you SO fast once youre spotted. kind of wild actually. i was nervous about the pileup too but you just settle into a rhythm pretty quick. what park was it if you dont mind me asking

so ive been wanting to learn CW for a while now, like probably a year of just thinking about it and never starting. finally sat down last week and tried a few things and honestly im more confused than before about the best way to go about it. i downloaded like three different apps, tried just memorizing the dit-dah patterns from a chart, watched some youtube stuff, and nothing really clicked. feels like theres too many methods and everyone swears by their own thing. my goal isnt even to get super fast, maybe just enough to make a few contacts someday and not completely embarass myself. do most people start with the alphabet first or just jump into words? also is koch method actually worth sticking with or is that just something old timers push because its what they learned on? any advice appreciated, im starting totally from scratch here

yeah the Es was absolutely firing, i caught the tail end of it around 7pm local and even managed a couple of contacts into the caribbean which i havent done in ages. my old IC-746 was handling it fine but i kept wishing i had something with a better waterfall display just to see what was actually happening across the band. as for the 905, i talked to a guy at the local club meeting last thursday who said his dealer told him maybe another 4-6 weeks before stock really arrives but who knows, dealer ETAs are basically fiction half the time. still really curious about the microwave bands on that thing though, the idea of doing 10 ghz from a handheld-ish form factor is wild to me

Got me thinking after last weekend's ARES drill - I realized I hadn't actually powered up my complete go-kit in almost 6 months. The battery was dead, one of my BNC connectors was corroded, and I couldn't remember the frequency for our local emergency net. Pretty embarrassing when we're supposed to be the backup communications! How do you all stay on top of go-kit maintenance and practice?