Michael Torres

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about QSL cards and LoTW and eQSL and honestly im not sure if i need to be using all three or just one or what. like i made a bunch of contacts during a contest last month and someone told me to upload to LoTW but then another guy said eQSL is better and then theres the whole physical card thing which looks really cool but also seems like a lot of work and postage. my main question is — do most people do all three or do you just pick one? and does it matter for awards? i was kind of interested in maybe going for DXCC someday but i dont really understand how the confirmation process works yet. any help appreciated, still figuring all this out

so ive been a tech for about two years and just upgraded to general a few months ago and i told myself id finally learn morse code properly this time. not because i have to obviously but because it just seems like something i want to do. anyway i got a cheap set of paddles off ebay and a little keyer built into my old radio (its an FT-450D) and ive been practicing with that. the problem is my sending sounds terrible when i play it back. like i can copy okay at maybe 10-12 wpm if im really concentrating and the other station isnt rushing, but when i try to send anything my letters just sound wrong. the spacing feels off and some characters just run together. i dont really know if its my technique or the keyer settings or what. i havent actually made any CW contacts yet because im kind of embarrassed to get on and sound like a complete disaster. is that dumb? should i just jump in? also does anyone have tips for getting paddle technique down because i feel like i never really learned how to hold my hand right or whatever

honestly it sounds scarier than it is. yeah there's some math, like filter calculations and reactance stuff, but the question pool is published so you're really just studying the actual questions you'll see. i used hamstudy.org and just grinded through it over maybe 6 weeks while watching some youtube videos on the theory parts i didn't get. the hardest bit for me was the antenna theory and some of the RF propagation questions but once you see how the math works it clicks. the extra privileges on HF are actually pretty nice even if you think you dont need them, like the phone portion of 75m and extra spectrum on 20m where its a bit less crowded. worth doing imo

there's no FCC rule that says you have to use phonetics, you just have to ID with your callsign every 10 minutes and at the end. how you say it is up to you. on a local repeater where everyone knows your voice half the guys just rattle off their call sign like normal speech and nobody cares. phonetics really shine when conditions are marginal or youre working someone who doesn't speak english as a first language, or honestly any DX situation where your call could get garbled. i've heard guys on 40m get their callsign completely mangled because they didn't go phonetic and the other station logged them wrong. so use your judgment basically, if it's a scratchy contact or you're working someone far away, go phonetic. casual ragchew on the local 2m machine, not really necessary.

VP8 on 100w and a dipole is solid, nice work. i had a similar thing happen back during the last solar cycle peak, worked ZL on 10 with a vertical and barefoot rig and couldnt believe it. there's something about chasing DX on 10 when the band is hot that's just addictive, way more fun than grinding out contacts on 40 in my opinion haha. anyway yeah flux has been trending up for a while now and were getting pretty deep into cycle 25 which has honestly exceeded most of the early predictions so hopefully this keeps up for another year or two at least

yeah AO-73 has that quirk where the transponder output can shift depending on how much load is on it. if theres a pileup or a few strong stations on the passband at once the AGC on the bird backs things off and everything kind of squishes together. happens more around AOS and LOS when the geometry is better for more stations to hit it. mid-pass at high elevation is actually when the most people can access it simultaneously so thats probably what youre seeing. the other thing i'd check is your doppler correction rate in gpredict — make sure its actually feeding correctly to SDR# because if that handoff lags even a little bit the signal drifts and sounds like the bird is doing something when its really just your rx chain. i had that problem for weeks before i figured out the virtual audio cable routing was introducing latency in the correction loop. once i sorted that it was way cleaner.

the pi and arduino over serial is actually not that bad, i run that setup for my APRS digipeater thing. pi handles the network side and runs aprx, arduino does the actual hardware interfacing and feeds NMEA from a GPS. communicate over /dev/ttyUSB0 at 9600 baud and its been rock solid for months now. only gotcha is the pi's 3.3v GPIO if you go I2C route — arduino is 5v logic so you need a level shifter or you'll fry the pi's pins eventually. serial through USB avoids all that since the USB-serial chip on most arduino boards handles the level conversion for you. honestly for what you're describing id just keep it on USB serial and not bother with I2C, simpler and you can debug it way easier.

WAS is probably the most satisfying one to knock out early just because you can actually make progress on it pretty quickly, especially if you're on 40m and 20m during evenings. all 50 states is totally doable in a few months at a decent solar cycle like we've got now. and LoTW counts for WAS through ARRL so if people are uploading you're already building credits without knowing it. just log into your LoTW account and check under the awards section, you can see what you've got confirmed already. DXCC is the big one and honestly once you get the bug it kind of takes over your life a little, not gonna lie. the 100 entity threshold for the basic certificate isnt that hard to hit if you're active and chasing DX, but getting the confirmations is where it slows down. LoTW is accepted for DXCC credits, and a lot of the common entities do upload, but yeah the rarer ones are paper QSL or nothing sometimes. some guys use a QSL bureau which is slow but cheap, others just direct card the rare ones. WAZ i'd probably leave for a bit later, working all 40 CQ zones sounds simpler than DXCC but some of those zones are legitimately hard to get and can take years depending on propagation and who's active. it's a good ongoing project once you have the other two underway.

ok so i passed my technician exam like two months ago and ive been on 2m mostly but i keep reading stuff online that contradicts other stuff and im genuinely confused about what bands i actually have access to. like someone in my local club said i can use HF on 10 meters but only certain parts of it? and then someone else said something about 15 meters too but i couldn't find that in part 97 or maybe i just didnt know where to look. also what about digital modes, do i need some kind of extra authorization for that or is it just whatever as long as im in my band privileges. i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt and get a notice of violation or whatever the FCC calls it. just trying to understand the actual rules here not a summary someone wrote on some random website

not a dumb question at all, everybody goes through this. QRM is interference from other stations, like another signal stepping on yours, whereas QRN is natural static and noise, think lightning crashes or atmospheric stuff. easy way i remember it is QRM = man-made, QRN = nature. and 73 just means best regards, its been used since the telegraph days actually, way before radio. there's a whole list of what they called Phillips codes back then and 73 was one that stuck around. as for learning them, honestly just print out a Q code reference sheet and keep it next to your radio for a while. you'll stop needing it faster than you think. the ones that come up constantly on HF are QRM, QRN, QSB which is signal fading, QRZ which is who is calling me, and QSY meaning change frequency. those five probably cover like 80 percent of what you'll hear day to day. the rest you just absorb gradually.

the thing about 5 wpm is actually real, you dont want to learn at that speed because your brain starts counting dits and dahs instead of hearing the whole character as a sound. look up the Koch method, thats what most people swear by these days. basically you start with just two characters at like 20 wpm character speed but with extra space between them so you have time to think, then you add more characters one at a time as you get them down. LCWO dot net is the site most people use for this, its free and you can set it up exactly that way. took me probably 3 months of like 15 minutes a day before i could actually copy a slow QSO but it does work. the key is consistent practice, even just a little bit every day beats doing an hour once a week by a lot.

i was in the same boat a few months ago honestly. what helped me was just downloading the ARRL band plan and keeping it open on my phone for a while. also the technician question pool for the exam actually covers a lot of this stuff even after you pass, worth rereading some of those questions because they explain the logic behind the rules a bit. the HF stuff on 10m is real and worth exploring when the band opens up, which it does a lot more now with the solar cycle being decent lately

yeah what he said about LoTW being important for DXCC is spot on. i will add though that the bureau system for paper cards is super slow — like waiting months sometimes — but its basically free if you dont mind the wait. direct cards cost you a few bucks in postage and sometimes a green stamp for the other station if theyre overseas but you get the card way faster. honestly i do all three just because different stations prefer different methods and i want the confirmation no matter how it comes. some guys only upload to eQSL, some are LoTW only, some only do paper. if you wanna make sure you get credit for your contacts its kind of worth covering all the bases. once its set up its not much extra work at all really

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general class) and i keep running into situations where im not sure if what im doing is actually allowed. like the other day someone told me i was transmitting too close to the edge of my band allocation and i honestly wasnt sure if they were right or wrong. i looked up part 97 and honestly its kind of dense to read through, i feel like i need a law degree to parse some of it. my main questions are around like, how strict is the FCC actually about this stuff, are they actively monitoring or is it mostly other hams that police it. and also whats the deal with encrypted transmissions, someone in my club mentioned you cant encrypt anything but then someone else said theres exceptions. i dont want to accidentally do something wrong and lose my license over something dumb

honestly the Heil PR-781 made a noticeable difference for me compared to stock mics, its voiced more for communications use so it already has a bit of that mid-range presence baked in. but you can definitely get the 7300 sounding decent with the stock mic if you dig into the menus, i just never had the patience for it lol. one thing i will say is mic gain matters more than people think — running it too hot introduces all kinds of distortion that sounds like mud on the receive end even if your ALC looks fine on your end.