Jennifer Wu

yeah get it on a real spectrum analyzer if you can, even just once. a buddy of mine built a similar rig and was convinced his LPF was fine based on sdr checks and then borrowed someones SA at a hamfest and found a third harmonic that was only like 25dB down. not catastrophic but not great either. he ended up adding another stage and it cleaned right up. the IRF510 in class E is kind of sensitive to the exact load impedance too so if your output network is slightly off the harmonic performance can shift from what you calculated. anyway sounds like a cool build, post some pics if you get a chance

80mV of ripple is definitely going to cause you grief in a direct conversion rig. the problem is the audio frequencies you care about are literally the same frequency range as the ripple artifacts so they mix right into your demodulated audio in a way that a superhet would mostly reject. slap a 78L09 or even just a LM317 set to around 9V with some decent filter caps right at the board, like 470uF followed by a 10 ohm resistor followed by another 220uF, and see if that clears up the hum. seriously that alone might fix 90% of it. the hand capacitance thing on the coil is pretty normal for an unshielded oscillator sitting out in the open. once you get it in a metal enclosure and maybe put a small can around the VFO section that'll settle down a lot. i built a similar thing a few years back and spent two weeks chasing hum before i realized my bench supply had a bad filter cap. always suspect the power supply first with audio stuff.

yeah dont give up. one thing nobody told me when i was learning was to set your character speed higher than your overall speed in lcwo. so like run characters at 20wpm but only 5 or 6wpm effective speed with the farnsworth spacing. your brain learns the actual sound of each letter at speed instead of counting, then you just gradually close up the spacing over time. made a huge difference for me once i switched to doing it that way

weight adjustment is one of those things that trips people up when they first start tweaking keyer settings. basically it controls the ratio of mark to space within each element — if you push the weight too high the dits get fatter and start running into each other, too low and they sound thin and choppy. the default 50% weight is usually where you want to start and honestly most people never need to move it much from there. what i'd check first though is the spacing on the paddle itself. if the gap between the contact and the paddle arm is too small you're probably getting accidental extra contacts especially as you speed up. benchers are pretty forgiving but they do need a little gap. also try the iambic mode settings — mode A vs mode B behaves differently at the end of characters and some people have a strong preference. took me a while to figure out i was a mode A guy.

so ive been a tech for like 3 years and just upgraded to general last month and I really want to get into CW. I know its not required anymore but something about it just appeals to me, probably from watching old war movies lol. anyway i picked up a used Bencher BY-1 paddle and a MFJ keyer that i found at a hamfest for pretty cheap. my problem is i cannot get the feel right. like when i try to send, my dits and dahs come out all mushy and run together. ive been messing with the weight and speed settings on the keyer but honestly i dont really understand what weight does vs just changing the speed. im currently trying to practice around 12-13 wpm which feels slow but i get lost faster than that. also my squeeze keying is a disaster, i keep accidentally triggering the wrong element. is this just a practice thing or am i missing something with how i have the paddle adjusted? also any tips on how to actually start hearing code better would be appreciated. ive been using the LCWO website but after a few characters i just fall behind and lose it completely.

so ive been at this CW thing for about four months now and im kind of stuck. started with the Koch method using LCWO and got up to copying most letters pretty reliably at 5wpm, but every time i try to push the speed up even a little it just turns into a wall of noise in my head. like i can almost hear the letters but then i miss one and then im two words behind and it all falls apart. been doing maybe 20-30 minutes a day which i read is better than cramming. not sure if im just being impatient or if there's something i should be doing differently. a few guys at the club said to just jump straight to 15 or 20 and let my brain catch up but that sounds kind of terrifying honestly. is that actually how people do it? or do you grind it out slowly and build up? i really want to get to 20wpm eventually, maybe do some QRP CW stuff on the air. any advice from people who've actually been through this would be great

this is actually my first year going, my elmer dragged me into it. not sure what to expect but kind of excited? he keeps saying dont buy anything from the first two rows which i thought was weird but apparently thats a thing

so ive been messing around with a raspberry pi zero w for the past few weeks trying to get it to handle some of the more tedious parts of my shack setup. right now its just sitting there running a small python script that watches my IC-7300's CI-V output and auto-logs contacts into a CSV but i feel like im barely scratching the surface of what this thing can do. the idea i had was to also tie in an arduino nano to handle some physical stuff — like maybe switch antenna relays based on the band the radio is on, or trigger a fan when the amp hits a certain temp. i know you can talk to the nano over serial from the pi pretty easily but ive never actually chained the two together in a real project like this and im not sure if there's a cleaner way to do it or if im just overcomplicating things. anyone here done something similar? doesnt have to be exactly the same setup, just curious what kind of roadblocks people have run into when mixing pi and arduino stuff in the shack. also wondering if the zero w is even powerful enough for this or if i should grab a pi 3 or 4.

koch method is genuinely the way to go and yeah it does feel slow at first but thats kind of the whole point. the idea is your brain learns the sound of each character at full speed from day one so you never have to unlearn the habit of counting dots and dashes which is what kills most people later on. if you start slow and count, you get stuck at like 5 wpm forever. i used the lcwo website, its free and you just work through the characters one at a time. set it to like 20 wpm character speed even if the word speed is lower, that farnsworth spacing thing helps a lot in the beginning. honestly just do 15-20 minutes a day consistently and dont skip days. i was making actual qsos somewhere around 3-4 months in but i was pretty dedicated. some people take longer and thats fine. the first contact is kind of terrifying no matter how ready you think you are but you just send qrs and most cw ops are really patient with new people

ok so the inverting transponder thing trips everybody up the first time. basically what happens is the passband is flipped — higher on the uplink becomes lower on the downlink. so when doppler makes your downlink appear to slide up during a pass, you actually hear other stations going down on the passband relative to each other if that makes sense. the typical approach most guys use is to tune your downlink rig to wherever you want to hear yourself, and then adjust your uplink to find your own signal. the doppler correction in gpredict when you have CAT set up will try to keep a fixed offset between the two but you still kind of have to babysit it especially on a bird like FO-29 which has a pretty wide doppler swing. AO-73 is a bit more forgiving for starting out. honestly just get on a pass and find the beacon first, confirm youre hearing it, then try calling in the passband and just hunt for your own echo. once you hear yourself once it all clicks into place real fast. the latency through the bird is basically nothing so you hear yourself almost instantly.

went last year and honestly it was smaller than I remembered from like 2019 but there were still some decent tables in the flea market section. guy was selling a bunch of old Kenwood gear, not sure if it was all working but the prices were reasonable. think they kept the swap stuff outside but had some tents set up. worth going if you dont have anything better going on, probably wouldnt drive 2.5 hours for it personally

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and just got into chasing DX a little bit. a buddy at the club mentioned DXwatch and i've been poking around on it but honestly im not totally sure im using it the right way. like i can see the spots coming in and i can tell its showing me callsigns and frequencies but i dont really understand the filtering well enough to make it useful. right now im just staring at a wall of spots and trying to find ones that are on bands i can actually work also someone mentioned there's a QRZ thing for this too? i use QRZ for lookups all the time but didnt know it had cluster functionality. is that a seperate subscription or is it part of the regular account? im on the free tier right now any tips for someone just getting started with this stuff would be great, i have a technician ticket but im studying for general so my HF is limited to what i can do on 10m and a few other spots for now

so ive been running my station remotely for about 8 months now using RemoteHams and honestly most of the time its fine but i keep getting these random disconnects that just kill whatever im doing mid-transmission. its not the internet on my end, ive got fiber and the ping to my home QTH is like 12ms which is basically nothing. the rig is an IC-7300 and im using the RCForb client on a windows 10 laptop at the remote end. the weird thing is it doesnt happen on a schedule or anything predictable, sometimes i can run a pileup for an hour no problem, other times it drops every 15 minutes like clockwork. ive looked at the logs and they dont really tell me anything useful. started wondering if maybe its something with the router at the home end doing some kind of session timeout or the ISP there being flaky — that end is on cable which is probably the weak link honestly. also running Echolink through the same machine for some local linking and i wonder if theres some kind of port conflict going on. has anyone tried juggling both on the same box and run into weirdness. or is this just a RemoteHams thing and i should look at other options for the SDR side of it

that percentage-point dropout thing is actually a pretty classic symptom with Pactor 2 and longer messages -- what size are the messages you're trying to send? if they're over maybe 3-4k bytes you can sometimes hit an ARQ timeout issue especially if propagation is even slightly marginal. the protocol is doing all its error correction and if the gateway response latency ticks up even a little the session just gives up. first thing i'd try is bumping down your audio drive a little more than you think you need to. the IC-7300 ALC can look fine on the panel but still be pushing the TNC input into a region it doesn't love. also check your COM port settings in Winlink Express, specifically the RTS/CTS handshaking -- ive seen that bite people with the KAM when the timing gets out of sync mid-transfer. also worth trying a gateway thats geographically closer to you if possible, the ones with lower path loss will have better ARQ throughput. what part of the country are you in, there might be a P2 gateway with better coverage for your area.

this is really making me want to get more involved with my local ARES group. ive been a tech for about a year and a half and keep hearing about these exercises but always felt like i didnt have enough experience yet. sounds like thats kind of the point though, you learn by actually doing it not by waiting until youre ready. question — do you need like specific equipment to participate or can you just show up with a basic HT and figure it out from there?