Jennifer Wu

ok so my brother in law got me interested in ham radio and i decided i want to get my technician license but honestly looking at all the study material online is kind of overwhelming. there's like the ARRL handbook, hamstudy.org, some youtube stuff, gordon west books... i dont know which one is actually worth using or if i need all of them or what. i've heard the question pool is public which is cool but i'm not sure how to actually USE that effectively, like do people just memorize all 400 something questions or is there actual understanding involved? i work full time so i don't have a ton of hours to throw at this, probably a few weeks of spare time studying. just wondering what actually worked for people here

congrats on getting licensed! for a basic go kit you dont need anything too fancy to start with. if you have a mobile radio already, getting a battery box or power station is a good way to go. i use a bioenno battery pack with my ft-2980 and it works great. for antennas, a simple j-pole that you can throw up in a tree gets you going without breaking the bank. the key is having something that works reliably rather than having the most expensive gear

im in basically the same boat as you, been at it for about six weeks now. what helped me was using the Morse Mania app on my phone during random downtime, like waiting in line or whatever. the thing is i also started listening to really slow QSOs on the air even before i could copy much and just trying to pull out callsigns. theres a website called morse.ninja that has code practice that you can download as mp3s too, i think its similar to the old arrl code practice recordings. honestly some days feel like youre going backwards but then suddenly something clicks and you can copy a whole word without thinking about it, its a weird process

yeah both sides have to upload to LoTW for it to match, thats the part that trips everyone up at first. LoTW doesnt confirm anything in real time, it just holds your logs and when someone else uploads and their data matches yours — same callsign, band, mode, date and time within like 30 minutes — it shows up as a QSL. so if youre working a lot of FT8 youll actually get matches faster than you might expect because a huge chunk of FT8 operators are on LoTW already. just be patient, i sometimes see confirmations trickle in for weeks or even months after a contact. eQSL is kind of a different beast. its more of a social thing honestly, like people design their cards and its genuinely fun to browse. it does count for some awards but not DXCC which is the big one most people care about. some folks do both and theres nothing wrong with that. and paper cards — dont count them out. yeah people absolutely still send them for FT8 contacts. its a hobby thing, not strictly necessary but a lot of ops really appreciate getting a physical card especially from a rare entity or a nice DX contact. you can get simple cards printed pretty cheap these days, QRZ even has a printing service i think. you just include your card with a self addressed envelope if youre requesting one back from someone in the US, or use the bureau system for overseas which is its own whole adventure.

yeah the privileges chart is genuinely confusing the first time you look at it. so as a tech you do get some HF — you can use CW on a small slice of 80, 40, 15, and 10 meters. but for phone (voice) on HF you only get 10 meters, specifically 28.300 to 28.500 MHz for SSB. that part trips a lot of new hams up because they think they cant touch HF at all with a tech. the ARRL band plan chart is way easier to read than the actual part 97 text, i'd just look that up. it color codes everything by license class. the FCC rules themselves are technically the law but for day to day operating the ARRL chart is what most people use to sanity check themselves before transmitting somewhere new.

so ive been trying to get Winlink working for about two weeks now and i think i finally understand what im doing but wanted to check with people who actually use this regularly. my main confusion was around the RMS gateways and how message routing actually works. like i kept assuming the gateway i connect to stores my mail but thats not how it works right? it all goes up to the CMS in the cloud or whatever and the gateway is just a relay basically. anyway my current setup is a IC-7300 running into a SignaLink USB, using Winlink Express on a pretty old laptop running win10. i got VARA HF working after some pain with the soundcard settings but i can see nearby gateways in the map now. managed to send a test message to my own callsign and got it back so i think the path is working. the part thats still fuzzy for me is how to handle messages when im doing EMCOMM stuff and the internet is actually down. does the RMS gateway itself need internet to forward to the CMS? cause if so then like... whats the point during a real emergency when the backbone might be down. been reading about Winlink Hybrid network but got confused fast. anyone actually deployed this in a real or simulated exercise?

yeah the battery buffer thing works great, we do basically the same thing for our county EOC exercises. the trick is knowing your actual draw — the 7300 at 100w output is pulling somewhere around 22 amps on transmit but if you're doing typical emcomm traffic patterns with a lot of receive time the average consumption is way lower than that. i logged ours once and we were averaging maybe 8-9 amps over a few hours of actual exercise traffic. 100ah lithium should be more than enough to get you through the quiet periods without the genny running, especially if you're not pegging the finals the whole time. i'd just watch the laptop — those things sneak up on you if you're running wifi and screen brightness cranked. throw it on a separate small AGM or at least account for it, i once drained about 15ah more than expected because of a laptop i kind of forgot to factor in properly. linked dipole on a jackite is solid choice for that kind of deployment. if the ground is soft i usually just stake two or three tent stakes in a triangle and tie the base of the pole to those, works surprisingly well unless it's truly waterlogged mud. good luck with the exercise.

The ComJot device sounds promising but I'm skeptical after what happened with RFinder. Heard Bob cancelled Dayton last minute due to refund issues. Hope this new company has better backing and software development.

Just upgraded to General and looking to build my first HF base station. Budget is around $1500 for the transceiver. I'm seeing lots of recommendations for the IC-7300, but also considering the FT-991A for the all-band capability. Will mainly be doing SSB phone and some digital modes - no contesting or DXpedition work planned. How important is built-in antenna tuner vs external?Worth paying extra for VHF/UHF in the same rig? Thanks for the guidance!

short answer: low dipole vs a vertical with good radials, the vertical usually wins for DX on 40m, yeah. a dipole at 25ft on 40 is basically a cloud warmer — most of your radiation is going nearly straight up which is fine for NVIS and regional stuff but for working europe or japan you really want a lower angle. the 6BTV is a decent antenna if hes actually got a good radial system under it. a lot of guys throw one up with 4 or 5 radials and wonder why its underperforming but if he took the time to lay out 30-40 radials at least 0.2 wavelengths long then yeah it will likely beat your low dipole for DX every time. the flip side is verticals hear more noise in a lot of suburban environments, so you might actually have a better receive situation even if you cant quite match him on transmit. if you cant get the dipole up higher, maybe look into an inverted-V configuration if you can get the apex up higher than the ends. still not perfect but better takeoff angle than flat-top at 25ft.

so i got my technician license a few months ago and ive been reading that a lot of people really recommend learning CW even though its not required anymore. i tried downloading one of those apps a while back but honestly i just tapped out after like a week because i had no idea if i was doing it right or making any progress at all. like i could sort of recognize E and T but everything else just sounded like noise to me. is there a specific method people actually use to learn this from scratch? i keep seeing references to something called the Koch method but i dont really understand how that works compared to just memorizing the dit dah patterns on a chart. also how long does it realistically take before you can actually copy anything on the air, not looking for a magic number just a rough idea because right now it feels kind of hopeless

ok so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater. i programmed my baofeng with the input/output frequencies from the repeater directory and i can hear people talking just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or acknowledge me at all. i just say my callsign and say im monitoring and nothing. so i did some reading and i think maybe its a CTCSS issue? the repeater listing shows a tone of 100.0 hz but im not totally sure if thats the tone i need to transmit, receive, or both. i set my radio to transmit that tone and tried again and i think it worked once because someone said my signal was a little low but i was definitely getting into the repeater. anyway now im second guessing myself because sometimes it opens the squelch and sometimes it doesnt. also is there some kind of standard way you're supposed to identify yourself when joining a conversation? i dont want to step on anyone and i also dont want to just lurk forever without ever actually talking to anyone