HF Hunter

yeah same thing happened to me when i first got my tech, i spent like an hour trying to read 97.301 and just gave up. the ARRL band plan chart is genuinely the move, it color codes everything by license class and you can see at a glance what youre allowed to do. i printed mine out and taped it next to my radio for the first few months. one thing i'll add is dont stress too much about accidentally going out of band when youre first starting out — just double check your frequency before you transmit and youll be fine. the FCC isnt sitting there waiting to pounce on a new tech who drifts 2 kHz. that said its still worth knowing the rules properly eventually, just dont let it paralyze you from actually getting on the air.

yeah part 97 is rough to read through if youre not used to regulatory language. the ARRL has a pretty decent summary in their handbook and also on their website, thats usually where i point new hams first. for tech privileges specifically on HF, you basically have CW on portions of 80, 40, and 15 meters, and then phone and image on 10m from 28.300 to 28.500 MHz. thats the big one people actually use. the way i think about it is your tech license is mostly VHF and up, and the HF stuff is kind of a bonus to get you interested in HF before you upgrade. honestly just go get your general, the exam isnt that hard if youve already done tech and it opens up so much more. but yeah ARRL website, look for the band chart, its a lot easier than staring at the actual CFR.

yeah CTCSS is definitely what you're missing. basically the repeater has a small subaudible tone that has to be present on your signal or the repeater just ignores you completely — which is exactly what you're describing. the tone is set by whoever runs the repeater and they dont all use the same one. best place to find it is either the repeaterbook website or the RepeaterDirectory app on your phone, just punch in your zip code and look up 146.940, itll show you the tone and the offset. for a negative offset repeater like that one youre probably looking at -600 khz offset which is standard for 2m. the CTCSS could be anything, 100hz, 127.3, 88.5 — just depends on the trustee. once you have the tone set in the Baofeng under the T-CTCS menu option and you have the offset right, key up and wait a second or two after the repeater tail drops before you transmit again. that's kind of a thing with repeater etiquette, jumping on while the tail is still going is considered pretty rude by some folks. good luck, you'll get it figured out.

so ive been trying to get my APRS setup working for about two weeks now and im just about ready to throw the whole thing out the window. running a Kenwood TM-D710G which has the built-in TNC and supposedly handles all of this natively, beacon is set to every 5 minutes on 144.390, and i can hear packets coming through on the speaker so i know the radio is receiving something. but my own position just does not show up on aprs.fi no matter what i do. ive gone through the menu like four times and set the callsign with the SSID (-9 for mobile), the symbol is set to car icon, smart beaconing is on. the TX light flickers sometimes which i think means its transmitting? but nothing shows up. tried with a fixed beacon interval too just to rule out smart beaconing being weird. my antenna is just a mag mount on the car so maybe 3dB gain or so, should be totally fine for local digis. is there a way to tell if the radio is actually keying up and sending a proper AX.25 packet or is it just... doing something that looks like transmitting but isnt. not sure how to even diagnose this without a second radio to monitor myself. anyone run into this with the D710

push-pull modulator is almost certainly gonna help you, class A single ended is real inefficient and if you're anywhere near the limits of that tube you'll clip before you know it. but honestly the first thing id check before rewiring anything is whether your modulation transformer is actually rated for audio or if its just a generic output transformer somebody slapped in there. old handbook designs sometimes assume you already have specific parts and substituting stuff that looks close on paper can get you in trouble fast. also worth checking your screen voltage on the final, if thats sagging under modulation it'll cause all kinds of weirdness that sounds like audio distortion but isnt really coming from the audio chain at all. throw a voltmeter on it while youre talking into the mic and see if it moves around. if it does you probably need a stiffer regulated supply or at least a bigger cap on the screen line.

so i've been studying for my general and kind of fell down a rabbit hole reading through part 97 and now im confused about a few things. like if you accidentally key up on a frequency you're not supposed to be on, maybe you didn't realize you were a couple khz off or whatever, is the FCC actually going to come after you for that? i know the rules say you need to operate within your license class privileges but how strict is this in practice. ive heard stories of people getting letters but also people who just did whatever for years and nothing happened. not saying i want to push limits just genuinely trying to understand how enforcement actually works vs what the rulebook says

So ive been reading about WWFF for a few months now and finally decided to just go do it. Picked a local nature reserve thats already in the database, KFF-something i forget the exact number, and im heading out tomorrow morning with my KX2 and a wire antenna ill throw up in a tree hopefully. Main thing im wondering is whether 44 QSOs is really that strict or if theres some wiggle room for the basic activation credit. Also not sure if i need to be doing anything special on the air like announcing the reference or if just operating portable counts. I did a POTA a while back so i kind of get the general idea but WWFF seems a little different in how they handle the logs. Any tips from folks who have done a few of these would be great, specially for someone whos not the fastest operator in the world. Mostly do SSB so ill probably hang around 14.244 or wherever the action is that day.

yeah the listening part is so underrated. i spent years just hammering away and wondering why i couldnt break anything competitive. the 2kHz offset thing is real too, a lot of DXpedition ops kind of drift their listening spot during a run and if you can catch where theyre trending youre way ahead of the pile. one thing that helped me was shortening my callsign send to just the minimum. like if the op is clearly getting partial calls and is asking for more, fine, send it full. but if they're pulling full calls out of the pile, sending just your suffix or even just the last two letters when conditions are marginal can punch through better. controversial i know, some guys hate that, but it works. also your point about timing is huge, its basically the whole game when conditions are equal between stations. thats why paddle keyers who can anticipate the gap do better than the guys with their F-key macros set to fire on a fixed delay. with 100w and a hex youre not at a huge disadvantage on a good path, ive worked some pretty exotic stuff with similar setups just by being patient and smarter about it than the guys just throwing power at the problem

im kind of in the same boat as you, been doing lcwo for about 6 weeks now. one thing that suprised me is how different copying on the air sounds vs the practice audio on the computer. like real signals have QSB and interference and stuff. made my first CW contact last week and i totally froze lol, but the other guy was super patient and we got through it. just wanted to say youre not alone in finding this hard

yeah i built something similar last winter and had basically the same problem. turned out my toroid winding for the input transformer was off — i had the phasing wrong and was losing like 6dB before the signal even got to the mixer. pulled it apart and rewound it and suddenly it was like someone turned the volume up. worth double checking how you wound that if you have one in there. also 40m during the day can be pretty dead depending on where you are, have you tried it in the evening when propagation opens up more, might just be a timing thing on top of everything else.

i was in the same boat when i got my tech, the FCC part 97 document is kind of a nightmare to read if you're not used to legal/regulatory language. what finally clicked for me was realizing that 97.301 lists the frequency allocations by license class and 97.305 tells you what emission types you can use where. once you cross reference those two sections it starts making more sense. and honestly just operate, if youre on 146.520 calling CQ you are absolutely fine, the HF stuff is where it gets more nuanced for techs

So ive been running a Diamond X50 on my roof for a couple years now and it does fine for most things but ive been thinking about throwing up a yagi for 2m. The thing is I dont really do any serious DX, mostly just the local repeaters, some simplex with a buddy about 35 miles out, and occasionally I check into a couple nets. So I keep going back and forth on whether a yagi actually makes sense for my situation or if im just chasing specs I dont need. The X50 gets me into everything I need most days but theres this one repeater about 55 miles away that I can only hit when conditions are decent and that bugs me. I figured a yagi pointed that direction might fix it but then id lose the omnidirectional coverage and have to either rotate it or just accept im giving up one direction for another. Anybody dealt with this kind of tradeoff? Is there some middle ground im not thinking of, like a longer collinear or something? The roof situation isnt terrible, I could probably get away with a small rotator but that feels like a lot of effort for occasional use.

so ive been messing with APRS on and off for a few months now and finally got my Kenwood TM-D710G set up with the built in TNC, beacon is going out every few minutes and i can see myself on aprs.fi which is cool but the position its reporting is like 3 miles northeast of where i actually am. the GPS is internal to the radio and i assumed it would just... work. lat/lon in the menu looks correct when i check it but something is obviously getting mangled between there and what ends up on the network. anyone run into this before? im wondering if its a NMEA parsing thing or maybe i fat-fingered something in the symbol/position setup. also not totally sure if the path im using (WIDE2-2) is right for suburban area, i see some people argue about that constantly on here.

i went through the same thing a few months ago, the doppler correction while manually pointing an antenna is genuinely hard at first. i ended up just doing the uplink doppler correction by hand and letting the downlink drift a little rather than trying to tune both at once while also tracking. some people rig up a counterweight system for the arrow to free up a hand but i never bothered. gpredict is what most people use for the tracking and pass prediction side of things if you arent already, it can drive a radio's VFO automatically if you get the CAT setup right which helps a lot with the doppler

hey dont sweat it, we've all been there honestly. most nets want you to give your call sign phonetically at least the first time, then your name and location — something like "Whiskey Alpha one Echo Bravo, this is Mike in Springfield" or however your net does it. the pause thing can vary a lot, some net controls are just slow to write things down and that awkward silence doesnt necessarily mean you did anything wrong. the best thing you can do is just listen to how the first few check-ins handle it and copy exactly that format. also some nets have a specific check-in procedure they announce at the start, easy to miss if youre nervous. seriously just get back on there, net controls generally love having new people check in and even if you fumble it they usually just ask you to repeat. the only way to get comfortable is to do it more.

so this has been bugging me for about two weeks now and i finally decided to post about it because i cant figure it out on my own. my 7300 started acting weird where if i tune to say 14.200 the signal im hearing is clearly not what everyone else is hearing — like i'll be in a net and people are talking and i can tell im slightly off even though the display says the right frequency. transmit seems okay, people copy me fine, but receive is just... slightly off. maybe 1-2 kHz? hard to tell exactly. ive already done the TCXO thing (i have the optional unit installed) and i calibrated it a while back so i dont think thats the issue. also tried a factory reset which didnt help. the radio is maybe 3 years old and i run it pretty hard, like 8-10 hours a day sometimes for work from home background listening. anyone seen this before? wondering if its something in the IF chain or maybe a filter issue. really dont want to send it to icom if i can avoid it because the turnaround from the service center near me has been brutal lately.

our club usually sets up a table there, might see you around. we do a free license exam session in the afternoon too if you know anyone who needs to test

yeah the Q codes can be a bit overwhelming at first but honestly you only need to know maybe a dozen of them to get by on most bands. QRM is specifically man-made interference, like another station bleeding onto your frequency or electrical noise from equipment, whereas QRN is natural static like from lightning. QSB is when the signal fades in and out which happens a lot on HF with skywave propagation. QTH just means your location, so "my QTH is Ohio" or whatever. and 73 isnt really a Q code, its just old telegraph shorthand for best regards and its used at the end of almost every contact. most people say it or type it just as a friendly sign-off. theres also 88 which means love and kisses and is usually sent between operators who know each other well or sometimes to a YL which means young lady, basically any female operator. the ones youll hear constantly on HF are probably QSL meaning acknowledge or confirm, QRZ meaning whos calling, and QSY which means change frequency. once you start actually making contacts it clicks pretty fast, just takes some listening time

congrats on sticking with it, 10wpm is a real milestone especially if you got there on your own. the straight key vs paddle thing is kind of personal but most people do find paddles more comfortable once you get moving faster. the repetitive motion on a straight key gets tiring after a while and your fist tends to get sloppy. the iambic vs single lever debate is one of those things that can go on forever. iambic mode (mode A or B in your keyer settings) lets you squeeze both paddles together to automatically alternate dits and dahs which is efficient once you learn it, but a lot of people — including some very fast operators — just use single lever or even use dual lever paddles in non-iambic mode. i personally went back to single lever after years of iambic because i was making too many squeeze errors. for budget paddles i'd say look at the Begali Traveler if you can stretch a little, or honestly a used Bencher BY-1 is a classic and you can find them for pretty reasonable on qrz.com classifieds. the Bencher is a dual lever but you can just use it in single lever style if you want. main thing is get something that feels solid and adjustable — the cheap amazon stuff usually has too much slop in the pivot and it drives you crazy.

yeah the courtesy tone thing got me too when i first started. i kept jumping in too fast and clipping the front of my audio. took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what i was doing wrong lol. now i just wait for the beep and then count like one beat in my head before i key up and it works fine.

corporate networks are almost always the culprit, they do all kinds of weird QoS and traffic shaping that murders real-time audio. the buffer settings in RemoteHams wont save you if the network itself is adding jitter. i had the same thing at a previous job, turned out their firewall was doing deep packet inspection and basically treating the UDP audio stream like garbage tier traffic. one thing worth trying is see if you can get the RemoteHams client running over a VPN that routes around the corporate filtering, though obviously that depends on your work situation and whether thats allowed. if you just want to monitor i honestly think youre right to consider the SDR route, just spin up SDR++ server at home and connect to it, the overhead is way lower and you can tune it aggressively for bandwidth. TX remote is a different animal and RemoteHams is still probably the better path for that once you sort the network side out.

the timing thing is huge and i dont think enough people talk about it. everyone just keys up and holds their breath but the operators that are worth their salt running a DXpedition have a rythm and if you cant hear it youre just adding noise. i spent a long time running split on 40m chasing a west african station a while back and honestly the biggest thing for me was getting a second receiver going on the dx stations tx frequency so i could actually hear what he was working, not just when he came back to someone. once you hear the full exchange you understand the pacing way better. also fully agree on the power thing. more power doesnt always mean more signal in a pileup, it means more interference. people running legal limit into dipoles and wondering why they cant break through when some guy with a modest beam and 100w punches through clean.

yeah the wire is fine dont overthink it. i built my first 40m dipole with wire i pulled out of an old extension cord and worked half the country with it lol. the balun thing is real though, i skipped it on my first build and had RF feedback into my mic on certain frequencies, was a pain to track down. just wind like 8 turns of your feedline coax into a coil about 4 inches diameter right at the feedpoint and tape it up, thats basically a choke balun and it solved my problem instantly. also when you go to tune it after you hang it, cut it a little long first, maybe 2-3 feet extra per leg, and trim from there. way easier than trying to add wire back. and your SWR will shift depending on height and nearby objects so what works on the ground wont be exactly right when its up in the air.

so ive been licensed for about 12 years and done a fair bit of DX on HF but a buddy of mine at the club keeps going on about EME and honestly i always thought it was for guys with like 10 element yagis and a NASA budget but he's telling me the digital modes have changed things a lot. im mostly a 2m operator and have a pretty decent station, running about 200w into a single 9 element yagi right now which i know is basically nothing for this but curious how far off i really am. i guess my main question is what's the realistic minimum to actually make contacts, not just hear someone occasionally but actually complete a QSO. ive read some stuff that says JT65B changed everything but that was written like 10 years ago so not sure if Q65 is the thing now or what. and is there any point even trying 2m or should i look at 23cm where i hear the path loss is actually worse so that probably answers itself. also does antenna polarization matter as much as people say or is that one of those things that sounds important in theory but you compensate with power anyway

Digital modes like FT8 and DMR are becoming increasingly popular due to their reliability over long distances, and I'm seeing more repeaters going digital every month. My local club is split - the old timers want to stick with FM while newer hams are pushing for DMR and System Fusion. The hobby is experiencing a clear shift toward digital modes, touchscreens, and software interfaces. Anyone else seeing this tension in their area?