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?

so ive been doing single op for a few years now, mostly ARRL contests and some CQ WW, and i keep reading about SO2R and how the top contesters swear by it for rate but honestly every time i dig into it i get overwhelmed by the station engineering side of it. like the filtering alone sounds like a nightmare if youre not running separate antennas on a big lot. my current setup is a K3 and an IC-7300 sitting on the desk collecting dust basically, so i already have two radios, which is how i started going down this rabbit hole. the question is whether its actually worth the hassle for someone running a modest suburban station. ive got a tribander at about 45 feet and a dipole for 40/80. not a big gun setup by any means. what i really want to know is — does SO2R actually improve your rate if youre not in a great location, or does it mostly help the guys with stacked yagis who are already running 50+ QSOs an hour? feels like the complexity might outweigh the gains for me but maybe im wrong. anyone gone through this same decision?

had almost the exact same issue with mine last year. turned out i had manually entered coordinates when i was first playing with it indoors and the radio was using those instead of the live GPS fix. took me embarassingly long to figure that out. just double check under the GPS menu that it actually says it has a fix and the coordinates there match what aprs.fi is showing — if they dont match then yeah its sending the static ones.

so ive been a tech for about 2 years now mostly just doing 2m and some aprs stuff and i finally decided to buckle down and go for general. been using hamstudy.org which is great but some of the questions are tripping me up, mainly the propagation stuff and the phone privileges sections. like i understand the basic concept that HF goes further but the questions about which bands i can actually use as a general vs extra are kind of confusing because the charts in the study material all look the same to me at a glance. also the electrical stuff, like the questions about reactance and impedance, i passed trig in high school but that was 15 years ago lol. do i actually need to understand that stuff deeply or is it mostly just memorizing which answer to pick? i feel bad saying that but im being honest. the test is in 3 weeks and im probably at like 70% on the practice tests right now. anyone gone through this recently and have advice on what to actually focus on?

the FM birds are honestly kind of brutal for getting your first contact because everyone and their brother is on them and the transponder just gets hammered. SO-50 especially. my first few times i had the exact same experience — crystal clear audio on the downlink, total silence from my end going up. turned out i wasnt holding the PTT long enough before talking, the subaudible 67hz tone on SO-50 needs a moment to open the squelch on the bird and if you just key up and immediately start calling youre already halfway through your callsign before the repeater even opens. try keying a beat early and see if that helps. also the polarization thing is real but honestly at 5w into an arrow youre probably fine there. the bigger thing is just timing your doppler correction — on the uplink you want to be a little high at AOS and work your way down, opposite of what you do on the downlink. gpredict can actually drive a rig via CAT if you have the right cable, worth setting up if you havent.

yeah 40 has been solid for me too, usually catch it around 9 or 10pm local and its wall to wall signals some nights. had a nice long chat with a guy in new mexico last week which was cool, we talked for like 45 mins about nothing really just life stuff. thats the part of this hobby i dont think i appreciated until recently honestly

yeah the test is multiple choice and honestly hamstudy.org is probably all you need for the technician exam, thats what most people use now. the question pool is public so the site just drills you on the actual questions that will show up. once you're consistently passing the practice tests like 80-85% or better you're probably ready to just go take it. on the license levels thing — tech gets you VHF and UHF which is mostly local repeaters, some people are totally happy with just that for years. general opens up HF which is where you get the long distance stuff, talking across the country or even internationally on certain bands. extra is the top tier but thats more for if you really get into it and want access to the full band segments. a lot of people do tech first just to get their feet wet and then study for general a few months later. the general isnt that much harder honestly, especially if you just came off studying for tech. some folks do go straight for general but i wouldnt stress about that, just take it one step at a time unless you already have an electronics background or something

did the same mod on mine probably two years ago now, running 1.30 at the time. honestly didnt notice anything weird with the ALC but i wasnt specifically looking for it either. the power output does taper a bit naturally past the band edges just because the LPF switching and the finals arent optimized for those freqs — thats by design really, not a mod artifact. icom tunes those stages for the ham bands so anything outside is gonna be a little less linear. wouldnt worry about it unless you're seeing actual distortion on a spectrum analyzer or your IMD numbers look bad. one thing i will say is after the mod i went ahead and also did the ref clock modification, swapped in a TCXO for better frequency stability. that one made a much more noticeable real-world difference than the MARS mod honestly. if you havent done that one yet its worth looking into, especially if you do any weak signal digital modes.

so i've been kind of casually watching the solar flux numbers for the past few weeks and yesterday i just happened to sit down at the radio around 2pm local and 10 meters was absolutely alive. worked a couple stations in Brazil and one in Spain which honestly i wasn't expecting at all given how the last few weeks have been kind of mediocre. flux was sitting around 180 or so which isn't crazy high but i guess that was enough. i'm still pretty new to understanding all the propagation stuff, like i get the basics — higher flux means better HF conditions generally — but i never really know when to actually sit down and check a band versus when it's just going to be dead. is there a good time of day to watch or does it just depend on what path you're trying to work? i've been using dxmaps and pskreporter but honestly i'm not always sure what i'm looking at. anyone else catch that opening yesterday or know what's been going on with the sun lately?

so ive been at this for a while now, started learning morse back in the spring and got up to about 13wpm pretty quickly using the Koch method and just hammering away at it every day. felt great at first, like i was actually making progress and could see the light at the end of the tunnel. but now its been probably 3 months and i just cant seem to break through to the next level. im doing 30-45 minutes a day with lcwo.net and sometimes Just Learn Morse Code on my laptop. i can copy clean text okay at 13 but as soon as i push it to 15 everything falls apart and i lose the whole sentence trying to figure out one letter i missed. anyone else hit this wall and figure out how to get through it? id really like to get to 20wpm eventually, i know people say thats where it really clicks and you stop counting dits and dahs. starting to wonder if im doing something wrong or if this is just how it works.

just chiming in because im in basically the same boat lol, sitting around 8wpm and feeling like 20 is a million miles away. one thing my elmer told me was to get on the air even before i feel ready. like just jump into some of the slow speed nets, there are a few on 40 and 80 that run around 10-13wpm and people are super patient. actually copying real QSOs with real fists is way different than practice files and it somehow makes the practice sessions feel more worthwhile too. havent tried it much yet myself but thats the advice i keep getting