Jennifer Wu

so ive had this 897 for about 6 years, picked it up used and it's been solid until maybe two months ago. started noticing my signal reports dropping off and finally got around to putting it on a dummy load with a wattmeter and yeah, it's only pushing maybe 20 watts on HF when it should be doing 100. VHF seems fine actually, or at least closer to spec, haven't measured that as carefully. already checked the obvious stuff -- PA fuse is good, supply voltage is solid at 13.8, no ALC weirdness on the meter that i can see. the driver board is my next suspect but honestly i haven't cracked one of these open before and im a little nervous about getting into the PA section. anyone dealt with this specific fault on an 897? is there a known weak point i should be looking at first before i start probing around in there

honestly i still mess this up sometimes and ive been licensed way longer than you lol. my general thing is i phonetic my callsign on first contact and then just say it normally after that once we've established we can hear each other ok. and yeah if the band is rough i go back to full phonetics. nobody's gonna get upset either way, worst case they ask you to say it again.

I had similar problems with my FT-991. Audio compression introduces harmonic distortion, creating harmonics at 6kHz, 9kHz and beyond that cause splatter if not filtered properly. Ended up disabling internal processing entirely and using external audio processing instead.

had basically the exact same issue with a Mobilinkd a while back and it turned out the bluetooth connection was dropping intermittently and APRSdroid doesnt always make it obvious when that happens. it'll look like its connected but packets just disappear into nowhere. try watching the TX indicator on the TNC itself when you expect a beacon to go out and see if its actually keying the radio. thats how i figured mine out — the light just wasnt blinking when it should have been.

good news, youre asking the right questions before just stomping on people so youre already ahead of most newcomers honestly. the CTCSS tone — you want to set that as your transmit tone only to start. basically what it does is tell the repeater "hey this is a legit signal, open up" because without it the repeater's controller just ignores you. the receive tone setting on your radio is a different thing, thats for YOUR radio to only unsquelch when it hears a certain tone from the repeater, which most people leave off or set separately. for just getting into a repeater you just need the TX tone set. as for etiquette, yeah dont call CQ on a repeater, thats kind of a thing people notice. you just say your callsign and say youre monitoring, or if you want to chat just say something like "W1ABC listening" and see if anyone comes back. some repeaters have a courtesy tone that beeps after someone unkeys, you wait for that before you respond. if you transmit while someone else is still talking (called doubling) it just makes noise for everyone. just listen for a bit before jumping in and youll get the hang of it fast.

i actually just got my general last month so all this 10m stuff has been super exciting to watch, i made my first HF contact ever on 10m last week and it was to argentina which blew my mind. just a baofeng.. wait no obviously not, i have a little ft-891 i picked up used. anyway the point is even as a new person this band opening has been incredible to experience right at the start. dont know much about the contest rule changes but someone in my local club mentioned something about FT8 scoring being adjusted? not sure if that was the ARRL thing or a different organization. might be worth posting a separate thread about it if you find out more

could also just be the volume knob itself, those encoders get dirty and the contact gets flaky. try spraying a little deoxit in there and working it back and forth a bunch of times. fixed two of my radios doing that. cheap fix before you start pulling it apart anyway.

yeah 17 has been surprisingly good this week, worked a few EU stations on Tuesday evening which i wasnt expecting at all given how the week started with that CME messing things up. the flux has been hovering around 150 or so which is solidly good territory, definitely not the peak days we had a couple months back but still plenty to work with. on your K index question — so basically a K of 2 is totally fine, still get good propagation especially on the lower bands and mid range HF. 3 starts to be noticeable, you might see the higher bands get a little flaky but 20 and below usually hold up okay. once you hit 4 and above thats when it really starts falling apart, especially for high latitude paths. a path from the US to somewhere like VK or ZL is gonna suffer a lot more than a path to South America. the auroral zone kinda acts like a wall when K gets high. the OA4 contact is awesome by the way, Peru can be tricky from certain parts of the US depending on your location. what time of day was that?

so i finally got my TM-D710G set up with APRS and its been running for about two weeks now. been using it in the car mostly but i also left it on at home connected to a magmount on the roof just to see how it works as a fill-in digi or whatever. the problem is i think i had the smart beaconing settings messed up and it was transmitting like every 30 seconds even when i wasnt moving at all. just sitting in the driveway basically spamming 144.390. i checked aprs.fi and yeah my station was showing up with timestamps like every 30 seconds, sometimes faster. i know thats way too aggressive for a stationary station. ive since turned the rate way down but i guess my question is what are people actually running for beacon intervals when parked or at home? i dont want to disappear from the map entirely but also dont want to be that guy clogging up the channel. running a whip on the car and a j-pole at the house if that matters, no dedicated digi just the radio doing its thing.

congrats on the first activation, 35 contacts after spotting yourself is actually a really solid first outing honestly. the logging question -- so the POTA adif needs the SIG and SIG_INFO fields, SIG should be POTA and SIG_INFO is the park reference like K-4882. most logging software handles this automatically if you set up a POTA activity but if youre exporting manually from something generic you might need to add those fields by hand. i use HAMRS for all my activations just because its built for exactly this and the adif comes out clean every time, no fussing around. as for how long you need to stay -- you dont, there's no minimum time requirement once you hit your 10 QSOs youre done and can pack up whenever. the 10 is the only threshold that matters for a valid activation. for park to park just keep an eye on the POTA spots page filtered by P2P, when you see another activator spotted you can call them and both of you get credit. 20m is great for it because you can work parks that are states away which is kind of the fun part.

so ive been running a center-fed 40m dipole at about 30 feet for the past couple years, inverted-V configuration, apex tied off to a tree in the backyard. its worked okay but lately the noise floor has been driving me nuts, sitting around S5-S6 most evenings and i can tell its picking up a ton of local QRM from the neighborhood — neighbors LED lighting, some kind of switching supply someone runs, the usual suburban nightmare. been thinking about trying a vertical instead, maybe something like a trap vertical or just a homebrew quarter wave with a decent radial field. the idea being i could mount it out back further from the house and maybe get a lower angle of radiation for DX which would be a bonus. but i keep reading conflicting stuff — some guys swear their vertical is noisier than a dipole, others say the opposite. im guessing a lot of it is site-specific but curious what people here have actually experienced going from one to the other on 40. also not sure how many radials is actually enough. ive seen everything from 4 to 120 mentioned and obviously 120 isnt happening in my yard but whats a realistic number before you hit diminishing returns for a typical suburban lot.

for what youre describing i'd probably bring both honestly. a yagi doesnt have to be huge — a 5el on 2m can break down pretty small if you build it with a split boom and it makes a massive difference on weak signal. the x50 is fine for local stuff but youre right that the gain isnt there when you really need it. i use a homebrew 6el on a cheap tripod and can swing it around by hand, just eyeball it toward where the signal is coming from and work from there. for repeaters at that distance the yagi wins every time. the collinear is nice for operating portable without thinking about aim but once youve worked a station 80 miles out with 5 watts and a yagi it kinda spoils you. cushcraft stuff is decent but heavy for portable work, most of the homebrew designs you find on the ntms or the old k5ogi pages are lighter and build in an afternoon

Log4OM is honestly underrated, i switched to it from DXKeeper about a year ago and the WSJT-X integration is dead simple once you get the UDP port sorted out. dont overthink the contest side of things too much if youre just starting out, even Log4OM can handle a casual contest entry, its not N1MM but for a weekend sprint or something its totally fine only thing id say is make sure you back up your ADIF file somewhere other than just your laptop, i learned that one the hard way

the ARRL website has a pretty decent reference page for this, also the back of most license manuals has a Q code table. but honestly dont stress about memorizing all of them at once, there's like hundreds of official Q codes but most of them you will literally never hear on amateur radio. QRM, QRN, QSB, QSY, QTH, QSL, QRZ are probably 90% of what you'll actually encounter day to day. oh and QRP gets thrown around a lot too especially if you get into that side of the hobby. i was in the same boat as you when i started, just listened a lot and it clicked after a few weeks

I've been practicing with apps and can send around 18 WPM fairly cleanly, but my receiving is stuck at about 15 WPM. Learning to receive is by far the hardest part - when starting out, you'll be able to send much faster than you can receive. There's always debate over speed, with many hams happy at 16-20 WPM or slower. But I'd like to get comfortable copying real on-air QSOs. Most messages are sent at 12+ WPM, often 20+ WPM, so improving speed is necessary for proper CW operation. What practice methods worked best for you to break through that receiving plateau?

ha i did the exact same thing with forgetting my callsign, like three times in my first week. welcome to the hobby man, it gets way less awkward pretty quick

I went through this exact same thing! After using a straight key, a paddle takes practice to get used to the sideways movement and timing, but with a little practice it becomes second nature. Try practicing common letter combinations like 'AR', 'SK', and your callsign over and over until the muscle memory kicks in.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff trips up a lot of new hams. the broadcasting thing — the way it works is that broadcasting means you're transmitting intended for the general public with no specific intended recipient, like a radio station does. just talking to your buddy on 2m even if others can hear is totally fine, thats just normal amateur operation. the FCC isnt gonna come after you for that. the obscene language thing is kind of vague by design honestly, there isnt a specific list, its more of a community standards type thing. basically just dont say stuff youd be embarrassed to say in front of a room full of people. in practice nobody is monitoring your local repeater looking for slip-ups. third party traffic is the one that actually has some teeth to it — basically its when a non-licensed person uses YOUR station to communicate, like if your neighbor asks you to relay a message to someone. thats allowed under certain conditions domestically but if youre talking to a country that doesnt have a third party agreement with the US you need to be careful. your control op is responsible for everything that goes out over the station. theres a list on the ARRL website of which countries have agreements, worth bookmarking

so ive been trying to get winlink working for a few weeks now and i think i understand the concept but the actual setup is tripping me up. i have a signalink USB hooked to my 7300 and ive got vara FM installed and i can see the waterfall and stuff in winlink express but when i try to connect to a nearby gateway it just times out every time. the gateway shows up in the channel selector and the frequency looks right but nothing happens. what i dont totally get is how the RMS gateway piece fits in. like is the gateway operator running pat or winlink express on their end or is it a completely different software stack? i looked at the winlink.org site and it talks about RMS relay and all these different modes and im not sure which one applies to my situation. im just trying to send a test email to my gmail through a local VHF gateway to start. also do i need to have my callsign registered somewhere before any of this works or does the system just figure it out from my FCC license

so i got my technician a few months ago and ive been on 2m mostly just doing local repeater stuff and i notice some people use the NATO phonetics like alpha bravo charlie and some people just say the actual letters when theyre giving their callsign. im a bit confused about when youre supposed to use one vs the other. like is there a rule or is it just preference? i asked on the repeater and got kind of a vague answer so figured id ask here. also i notice some guys use different words sometimes, heard someone say London instead of Lima the other day which threw me off. is that a regional thing or just old habits?

The wider the bandwidth, the better it sounds, but limiting to frequencies that contribute to intelligibility helps impact. Reducing response to 300-500 Hz bottom and 2.7 kHz top can help. For DX work, I use 1.8 kHz on receive.

so ive been putting off doing a proper mobile install for way too long, just been using a mag mount on the roof which works fine but i want something more permanent. got a Yaesu FT-7900R sitting on my workbench waiting to go in and i cant decide where to put the antenna. truck is a 2019 F-150, has the full metal roof which should be great for ground plane but theres also a sunroof in the middle which kind of limits where i can put a lip mount or anything like that. was thinking about doing a NMO mount through the roof somewhere toward the rear but my wife is not thrilled about drilling a hole in a truck we still have payments on, which honestly is fair. also looked at the stake hole mounts on the bed but i've heard mixed results with those for VHF/UHF, something about the cab being in the way messing up the pattern toward the front. anyone dealt with this on a newer F-150 or similar? how much does it actually matter in practice, im mostly doing local repeater stuff and some simplex when im out hiking with my handheld and want the truck as a base nearby

Hey everyone! I'm planning to take my Tech exam in August 2026 and just found out about the new question pool that takes effect July 1st. If I'm testing after July 1, 2026, I'll need to study the new 2026-2030 pool instead of the current 2022-2026 pool. Can anyone recommend the best study resources that are already updated for the new pool? I've been looking at HamStudy.org but want to make sure I'm using current materials. Also, I heard the 2026 pool modernizes some questions around digital modes and clarifies regulatory details, but it's not a dramatic overhaul - is this accurate? Should I focus on any particular areas that changed significantly?

honestly the hand mic vs a good headset mic makes a huge difference and nobody talks about that enough. i switched to a Heil headset probably two years ago and the reports got way better almost immediately just from the mic element being more consistent distance from my mouth. with a hand mic you're moving it around and the level changes constantly. also if you're in a room with hard floors and walls it kind of echos weirdly into the mic and that can muddy things up too. not saying go buy a $200 headset right now but maybe borrow one and see if your reports change, that'll at least tell you if the problem is the mic itself or the radio settings.

Started with similar settings on my 7300 but found setting TX bandwidth to 400-2600 Hz for DX work and leaving processor off with slightly higher mic gain actually gives cleaner results. Use a second receiver to monitor your signal - makes a huge difference in getting it right.