Repeater King

that reboot behavior when you key up is almost certainly a protection circuit triggering, not an actual component failure — at least not yet. the 7300 has overcurrent protection that can cause exactly that symptom if the PA stage is drawing too much on TX. could be a bias problem with the finals, or one of the driver transistors is getting weak and causing the PA to work harder than it should to make power. before you do anything else, try transmitting into a dummy load if you have one, and dial the power way down to like 5 watts. if it still reboots at 5W into a dummy load then yeah youre probably looking at something in the PA chain. if it holds at low power but fails when you crank it up that narrows it down a bit differently. also worth checking if it does this on all bands or just certain ones, because a finals issue sometimes shows up worse on certain frequency ranges depending on which transistors are stressed. i fixed a similar issue on an older 746 years ago, turned out to be a cold solder joint on one of the driver board connections that only opened up under the thermal load of transmitting. not saying thats your problem but its worth having someone probe around with a scope before just swapping the finals blindly.

omg yes i was on 10m saturday too, first time ive actually heard real DX on that band since i got my general last spring. i had no idea what i was doing honestly just tuned around and started hearing these loud signals with european accents and kinda froze up for a second lol. managed to make one contact into germany which is now my furthest ever so that was pretty exciting. still learning the whole DX thing but days like that make me want to actually study up on it more seriously.

nice work getting it done, most people just talk about it forever. im still finishing mine up tbh so i probably shouldn't give too much advice but one thing i read somewhere was to actually run the kit through a full test before you need it — like set it all up in the backyard or wherever and see if anything doesnt work or youre missing a cable or whatever. i did that and found out i had the wrong PL-259 adapter and would have been totally stuck. better to find out on a Sunday afternoon than during an actual activation

i just passed mine like six weeks ago so fresh in my mind. the theory is intimidating looking at it but the question pool is finite so just grind the practice tests on hamexam or wherever and the answers start to click eventually. i probably did two weeks of evening sessions. some of the electrical theory i actually understood by the end which surprised me. the stuff about op-amps and mixing products was genuinely interesting once it started making sense. extra segments on 20m are where i noticed it most, theres a slice at the bottom that general cant touch and thats where a lot of the DX hangs out calling. so if you do any chasing that matters a lot. anyway just do it, worst case you retake it

ok so ive been studying the band plan stuff and i thought i understood it but now im second guessing myself. i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. like i know generals dont get the whole band but the chart in the handbook is kind of confusing to me, theres like phone and cw segments and then the voice portion seems different depending on whether youre in ITU region 1 or whatever. also somebody on the repeater mentioned something about staying away from the band edges and i didnt really understand why. like if 40m phone starts at 7.175 for generals, can i just park right there at 7.175 or is that a bad idea for some reason? i dont want to step on anyone or cause problems, just trying to understand the etiquette i guess

Three weeks of hamstudy is plenty for the Tech exam, you're probably overthinking it. I've helped administer probably a hundred of these sessions over the years and the people who fail are usually the ones who barely studied or just tried to memorize answers without understanding anything at all. Sounds like you've actually put in the work. For the math stuff, yeah just know your basic Ohm's law triangle and remember that power is voltage times current. Most of the formula questions on the Tech exam aren't that deep. The regulations questions are honestly where people lose more points than the theory sections in my experience, things like band privileges and what frequencies Technicians can actually use. Worth reviewing that section one more time before you go in.

35 feet is going to be fine for 40m as a center support, honestly for an inverted V you'll have better results than you might expect. the angle of the legs matters a lot — try to keep it above 120 degrees included angle between the two legs if you can, going too steep makes it more of a dummy load than an antenna. at those heights you're not going to be a DX machine but for regional stuff and even some decent skip you'll be surprised. on the balun question — run a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint, not a 4:1. the impedance of an inverted V at that height usually lands somewhere in the 45-60 ohm range depending on soil and leg angle, so a 4:1 would be transforming you in the wrong direction. a few turns of coax wound into a choke or a proper ferrite choke balun does the trick. and honestly compared to fighting a vertical with marginal radials the wire dipole is going to be a revelation, dont overthink it and just put it up.

your math is a little optimistic honestly. the 7300 at 50-60w out is pulling more like 18-20A on transmit from a 13.8v supply, and even if your duty cycle is low you gotta factor in the laptop and accessories. i usually plan for about 25-30Ah per operational hour for a similar setup just to have headroom. two 100ah lifepo4 in parallel gets you there for a 4-5 hour op but not with much to spare — i wouldnt feel totally comfortable without a way to top them off or a backup plan. that said if its truly a 4-5 hour window and you start fully charged you're probably fine. lifepo4 has pretty flat discharge so you'll know fast if something's off. id still bring the honda just in case and leave it in the truck. on the antenna side the silver bullet works but for NVIS on 40 a simple inverted-V at 30-35 feet is gonna eat it alive if you have any way to get wire up. even a 40m dipole on a fiberglass mast would be better for close-in stuff. the coil antenna is convenient but you give up a lot.

i built something similar a while back except i used an arduino nano instead of a pi for the rotator interface part and then had the pi just act as the controller sending commands over serial. worked fine but in hindsight i probably shoulda just done it all on the pi and skipped the extra board. anyway the point is the voltage stuff the other guy mentioned is real, dont skip that step. one thing i'd add — watch out for the motor relay timing on the G-450A if you're sending lots of small corrections. those old controllers dont love being jogged rapidly, mine started making a weird clicking noise after a while and i had to add some deadband to the control loop so it doesnt try to correct every half degree. probably obvious but it wasnt to me at first.

so ive been running a diamond X50 on my roof for a couple years now and it works fine for the 147 repeater about 18 miles out, but i keep dropping into the noise when conditions get a bit rough or if theres weather. a buddy of mine says just put up a yagi and point it at the repeater but that feels like overkill for just working local. the X50 is up about 25 feet on a pushup mast. the repeater is roughly east-northeast from my QTH. i dont really need omnidirectional coverage that badly — i mostly use that one repeater and maybe one other that's more or less in the same direction. so part of me is thinking maybe a small 5 or 6 element yagi on 2m would actually solve the problem and then some. but then i'd need a rotor if i ever want to work anything else, or i just fix mount it aimed at the repeater. has anyone gone through this same thing? curious what people actually found made the difference, whether it was antenna gain, feedline, height, whatever. im running about 40 feet of LMR-400 to the radio right now.

this is actually making me want to get more involved with my local ARES, ive been licensed for two years and mostly just do casual HF stuff but disaster prep is kind of why I got my license in the first place if im honest. do most groups welcome people who are still pretty green or is there a baseline skill level expected before you show up to a drill

the ALC thing is worth looking at more closely — on the 7300 a lot of guys run with too much mic gain and the ALC is constantly working hard to pull it back, and that can definitely cause that squashed or distant sound you're describing. what you want is the ALC barely moving, like just kissing the bottom of the scale on peaks, not riding it. try dropping mic gain to maybe 35-40 and see if that cleans things up first before touching anything else. compression on the 7300 is actually decent when set conservatively, like 4-5 dB of compression is useful for punching through a pileup or whatever, but if you crank it to 10 expecting more audio it just starts sounding processed and weird. the guys on the other end can tell. also make sure your SSB bandwidth is set to something reasonable, ive seen people leave it at the default and the defaults arent always ideal out of the box. the PR-40 is a good mic so its probably not that, its almost always the gain structure when people describe the tunnel effect.

ive only been licensed about a year so i wasnt at an exercise like that but reading this makes me realize how much i dont know about actual emergency operation. like i can work a repeater and ive made a few HF contacts but the whole ICS structure and message handling stuff is kind of intimidating. is there a good way to get involved without feeling completely useless at a drill? i looked at my local ARES group online but their website looks like it hasnt been updated since 2019 so not sure if theyre even active

so i've been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for about 3 months now trying to get it to handle some basic shack automation stuff and honestly i dont know if im making this harder than it needs to be or if this is just how it is the basic idea was to have it monitor my IC-7300's band activity via rigctld, then automatically kick on the amp and switch the antenna relay depending on what band i qsy to. seemed simple enough on paper. i got rigctld talking to the radio fine, python script is reading the frequency, but the GPIO side is where things keep getting weird. the relay board im using is one of those cheap 4-channel jobs off amazon and it seems like whenever the pi is under any load at all the relay timing goes wonky. like it'll fire 200-300ms late sometimes which isnt the end of the world but it means the amp is keying before the antenna is fully switched and i can hear it in the audio ive tried moving the relay control to a separate thread, tried a small arduino nano as a dedicated relay controller communicating over serial from the pi, that actually helped a lot but now im dealing with occasional serial dropouts and i feel like im just adding complexity to fix complexity anyone else running a setup like this or am i reinventing the wheel when there's already some smarter way to do it

I had almost the exact same thing happen when I put a Kenwood TM-V71A in my Tacoma a few years back. Drove me absolutely crazy for like a month. Turned out in my case the main culprit was the coax shield not being bonded to the vehicle chassis properly — the mag mount was sitting on a spot that had some kind of paint or coating underneath and wasnt making great contact. wiped it down with some isopropyl and suddenly like 80% of the noise just went away. worth checking before you go adding a bunch of chokes everywhere. also the constant buzz that doesnt track the RPM, in my truck that ended up being the LCD backlight on the radio itself getting picked up, which sounds weird but apparently its a thing with some installs.

yeah the weight adjustment can really mess you up if its not set right. basically it changes the ratio of the dit length to the spacing between elements -- if its too heavy the dits start bleeding into each other and everything sounds mushy like you're describing. on most rigs default weight is 50 which is supposed to be neutral but some people prefer 45-48 for a cleaner sound especially at slower speeds. worth setting it back to 50 and starting from there. the paddle gap is a big deal too. a lot of used paddles get set up for someone elses hands and preferences. the Bencher is pretty adjustable so id look up the adjustment procedure and start fresh -- snug but not tight on the contacts, maybe a business card width of gap to start and go from there. takes a bit of fiddling but once its dialed in for you it makes a huge difference. and honestly at 15 wpm the muscle memory stuff takes a few weeks to come back, dont get discouraged

yeah thats pretty much just what a dipole does, 40m is a wide band and a resonant half wave dipole isnt going to cover all of 7.0 to 7.3 with flat SWR unless you're running something like a fan dipole or a trap setup. 1.4 at your resonant point is honestly really good for a first build especially with stranded wire and a field expedient center insulator. the slope probably shifts resonance a little and changes the pattern somewhat but nothing to worry about. your tuner should handle the band edges just fine if your radio has one, and even without a tuner most rigs wont care about 2.8:1 as long as its consistent and not bouncing around. the Ontario contact kind of proves it works, 40m wire antennas punch above their weight especially at night. if you want to flatten it out eventually you could try a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint, sometimes with coax you get common mode current issues that mess with the readings a bit.

yeah i went through exactly this about two years ago. ended up just bringing both for a while until i figured out what i actually needed. the arrow is genuinely solid for satellite and occasional ssb contacts but you're right that aiming it in wind is annoying, i ended up zip tying mine to a cheap camera tripod which helped a lot but added to the pack weight obviously. honestly for most hilltop repeater work the x50 or any decent collinear is probably fine and the gain difference isnt going to matter much if the repeater is 30 miles away with a clear shot. where the yagi really earns its keep is tropo or meteor scatter where every db counts. if you're not specifically chasing that stuff i'd say stick with the collinear and enjoy the fast setup. if a tropo opening happens you'll work what you can work and itll still be fun. one thing i will say though — the arrow's build quality is totally acceptable for portable use but i wouldnt trust it in sustained high winds. had a element bend on me once during a storm activation, wasnt fun.

haha the first one is always like that, i remmeber mine i was so nervous i forgot my own grid square. dont worry about it being a repeater contact, everyones gotta start somewhere and honestly working local guys is how you actually learn the ropes before you jump into HF chaos. welcome to the hobby man, it only gets worse from here in the best way possible

so ive been using an RTL-SDR v3 for about two years now, mostly scanning local repeaters, some aircraft stuff with dump1090, and just poking around HF with the direct sampling mod. its been fine for what it is but im starting to feel the limits of it especially on the lower HF bands where everything just kind of sounds muddy and the noise floor is pretty rough. been looking at upgrading and kind of torn between the SDRplay RSPdx and a HackRF One. i know they're pretty different tools but hear me out — i mostly want better HF receive, maybe some light transmit experimentation if i ever get around to it, but receive is the priority. the RSPdx seems like the obvious choice for pure rx given the specs and the 14bit ADC but the HackRF does tx which is tempting even if its only at like -10 to 0 dBm or whatever. anyone actually used both or switched from one to the other? im running SDR++ most of the time now, moved off SDRuno because it kept crashing on my linux box. wondering if the RSPdx driver situation on linux is decent these days too because i remember it being kind of a pain a while back.

the interaction thing is just kind of unavoidable with fan dipoles, the elements are close enough that they do couple to each other especially on harmonically related bands like 40 and 15. spreading the angle helps up to a point but past maybe 45 degrees youre basically just fighting the geometry one thing that helped me was making the elements slightly different lengths than the textbook numbers and then trimming from there rather than trying to nail it on paper first. also what height are you at? mine behaved pretty differently once i got the apex above 35 feet, the 20m element in particular seemed to settle down SWR-wise your choke balun choice is solid btw, FT-240-43 with that many turns is probably good through at least 10m. some guys use two cores stacked but i havent found that necessary below 20m

not sure about the CI-V specifics but for the relay timing issue have you looked at using a hardware interrupt instead of polling? might get you tighter response times. also the raspberry pi 4 has way more headroom if the mega starts feeling cramped, ive been running a whole logging and digital mode pipeline on one and its barely breaking a sweat. though for something this timing-sensitive maybe stick with the arduino since you dont have an OS in the way messing with latency.

so i finally did my first activation last weekend, been chasing for about 6 months and figured it was time to actually get up on a summit myself. picked W6/NC-397 because someone on here mentioned it was a fairly easy hike and i could drive partway up. brought my KX2 and a 40m end fed, figured id be up there for a couple hours no problem. well the hike was longer than i expected, like way longer, and by the time i got to the activation zone i was pretty wiped out. set up the antenna strung between two scrubby pines which took forever because the branches kept grabbing the wire. got on 40m and called CQ SOTA for maybe 10 minutes with nothing. starting to panic a little, then remembered i hadnt posted my spot on SOTAwatch before leaving the car because i had no cell signal. so there i am on a summit with zero chasers knowing im there. switched to 20m just kind of hoping and managed to snag a couple contacts including one guy in Colorado who gave me a 57, which felt amazing honestly. then a W1 came back to me which i still cant believe. ended up with 4 contacts total, just barely qualified the summit. the hike down in the fading light was a little sketchy but i made it. already planning the next one and this time im going to actually self spot before i lose cell coverage.

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. i know the NATO phonetic alphabet, like Alpha Bravo Charlie etc, but i feel kind of weird using it all the time because sometimes it seems like overkill? like if someone asks me to repeat my callsign and its pretty clear already do i still spell it out phonetically every single time or is there some unwritten rule about when you do and dont bother also i was listening to a net the other night and one guy kept using non-standard phonetics, like he said "America" instead of Alpha and "Boston" instead of Bravo and nobody said anything so i wasnt sure if thats actually fine or if its frowned upon. genuinely dont know the etiquette here and didnt want to ask on the air and look dumb

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it since january and just cracked 13wpm on LCWO last week which felt huge. what helped me recently was switching from copying letters to copying whole words and just accepting that im going to miss stuff. theres a site called morse.kjwenger.com or something like that with common word lists and i just run those over and over. also started just tuning around 40m in the evenings and copying whatever i can, even if its just call signs and signal reports, just to hear real operators and not a computer. feels more real somehow