Susan Johnson

haha yes absolutely my first one was a disaster too. i drove an hour to the park, set everything up, called CQ for like 20 minutes and couldnt figure out why nobody was answering me. turns out i had the mic gain turned all the way down from when my wife was using the shack and complained about feedback. zero audio going out. i was just transmitting silence into the void for 20 minutes like an idiot. the counterpoise thing is real though, i keep a spare coiled up in my kit bag now just because i know ill forget the main one eventually. for what its worth 22 contacts on your first time out with a compromised antenna is actually pretty solid, dont be too hard on yourself. the pileup panic is just something you have to work through a few times before your hands stop shaking lol

so ive had this radio for maybe three weeks now and figured id share some impressions since i spent like two months reading every thread i could find before buying it. came from an old FT-450D which served me well but the waterfall on that thing is basically useless compared to what icom did with the 7300. first thing i noticed is the touchscreen is actually responsive, like i was expecting it to be laggy or whatever but its genuinely snappy. the real time spectrum scope is just... i dont know, its addictive. i find myself watching it more than actually operating sometimes which is probably a problem. audio out of the box sounded a little harsh to me on SSB receive, spent some time in the menu tweaking the treble rolloff and the passband and its much better now. transmit audio reports have been really good, people keep asking what mic im using and its just the HM-219 that came in the box which surprised me. only gripe so far is the fan kicks on pretty aggressively at 100w. not a dealbreaker indoors but if youre in a quiet room it notices. also the menu system is deep, like genuinely deep, i keep finding settings i didnt know existed. anyway if anyones on the fence about this vs the 7610 or even waiting for something else, happy to answer questions. just my two cents from a fairly casual HF op who mainly does 40 and 20m SSB with some digital thrown in.

Just passed my Tech exam last week and I've been listening to the Tuesday evening ARES net on our local repeater. I'd like to check in next week but I'm a bit confused about proper procedure. Do I need to wait for the NCS to ask for check-ins from my call area, or can I just jump in when they ask for any stations? Also, should I say anything more than my call sign and location? The NCS seems pretty formal and I don't want to mess up the flow.

one thing that tripped me up early on was that some of these get used kinda loosely on voice vs cw. like on phone people will just say "QRM" as a word rather than spelling it out, but on cw obviously its sent as the code. also QRP technically means reduce power but in the hobby it basically became shorthand for low power operation in general, like "im a QRP operator" doesnt mean theyre asking you to reduce power it just means they run low watts. context matters a lot with these

I've been making excellent PSK31 contacts lately - most are macro-based but real keyboard conversations do happen. Both modes allow proper conversations if that's your style, but PSK31 is more straightforward to learn.

so this has been a frustrating few weeks. we had a pretty nasty storm roll through and i had everything unplugged or at least i thought i did, the coax was disconnected but apparently the power supply was still tied in and something came through the AC line i guess. the 7300 powers on, the display lights up and i can even get into the menus, but there's zero receive. like completely dead silent, no noise floor at all, nothing. transmit seems to work based on the power output meter moving when i key up but i honestly havent verified that with anything external yet. ive been poking around and the first thing i checked was the preamp and attenuator settings, all normal. tried resetting to factory defaults, no change. the antenna connector looks fine physically. im starting to wonder if one of the frontend protection diodes got cooked and is now shorted across the rx path. anyone dealt with something like this on an icom or similar SDR-based rig? i dont have a full service manual yet but im trying to narrow it down before i decide whether to send it to a shop or try to fix it myself.

the eu2200i is genuinely pretty clean for what it is, we've run HF off one during a few go-kit deployments and never had serious issues as long as you keep it at least 30 feet away and bond the frame. use a good ferrite choke on the output cord and youre mostly fine. that said if you're net control and running 8+ hours i'd honestly just bring both — the battery for primary and the generator as a trickle charger, not direct to the radio. that way you're not dealing with whatever noise the inverter puts out getting into the rig. on the antenna question the linked dipole is solid and hard to beat for quick setup time vs performance. only thing i'd add is make sure your feedline situation is thought out ahead of time, i've watched guys spend 45 minutes messing with coax when the antenna itself took 10 minutes. if you have a good feedline run with a 1:1 choke balun already made up it goes up fast.

yeah the 10m opening was real, I worked a few JA stations Tuesday evening which honestly shocked me because I barely had the antenna pointed that direction. just a dipole up about 25 feet nothing fancy. solar flux was sitting around 180 something which is pretty solid for this point in the cycle. feels like we might actually be hitting the peak or at least getting close to it. on the Icom thing i saw the same photos, somebody on one of the dx forums was saying it might be a replacement for the 7300 but who knows, that thing has been around forever and sells like crazy so hard to imagine them rushing a replacement. probably just a new entry level HT or something. i'll believe specs when i see an official press release honestly.

oh man i had the exact same problem when i started, spent like two weeks wondering why nobody could hear me and it turned out i had the offset wrong on top of the tone issue lol. repeaters are kind of a lot to figure out all at once. anyway sounds like you're on the right track now

yeah mic position is huge, agreed. also worth noting that on phone contests i've heard guys with obviously cheap mics running decent audio just because they had the speech processing dialed in sensibly and werent trying to sound like a broadcast station. intelligibility is really what matters for SSB, not hi-fi. one thing i do that helps in pile ups is run the TX bandwidth a bit narrower than i normally would, like 2.4kHz instead of 2.8, keeps you out of the adjacent slice a little more and the DX station seems to copy you cleaner when there's a lot of QRM around. probably not something you'd do for ragchewing but for actual operating it makes a real difference

so I've been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it got me curious. I looked it up and apparently you need a license just to transmit which makes sense I guess. I found the FCC website but honestly it was kind of overwhelming and I dont really know if I should just take the test first or study first or what the process even looks like. do you just show up somewhere and take a test? is there a class you have to take? I'm not an electronics guy at all, like I passed high school physics but that's about it, so I'm a little worried about the technical stuff. any advice on where to start would be really helpful

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i upgraded to general last month. i know i have more privileges now but honestly looking at the band plan chart is kinda confusing me more than it helps. like for 40 meters specifically i see different sections listed but i cant tell if those are hard limits or just like... suggestions? my elmer told me the ARRL band plan is different from the actual FCC allocations and now im even more lost. is there like a simple way to think about this because i dont want to key up somewhere im not supposed to be

I've seen this with CP210 bridge drivers on Windows. Even if Device Manager shows the port working, try uninstalling and reinstalling the Silicon Labs drivers. Sometimes Windows updates break the USB-serial bridge communication.

yeah what he said about the sideband thing is the big one people miss. i was operating 20m for like a month before someone explained to me that USB means your signal goes UP from your dial frequency so on the upper band edges you gotta be even more careful. burned me once during a contest when i was tuning around fast and got a note from the club advisor lol the unwritten mode stuff is pretty real too, like good luck calling CQ phone down around 7.040 area, you'll have CW ops pretty annoyed with you even if technically some of that is in the general phone allocation depending on how you read it. just kind of learn where the action is on each band and stick to those spots until you get a feel for it

so i finally got around to building a dipole for 40 meters after running a random wire forever and honestly should have done this years ago. cut it to length using the 468/f formula, ended up around 66 feet total, split in the middle with a SO-239 chassis connector i had in the junk box. used 14 gauge stranded wire from the hardware store, nothing fancy. the thing actually tunes up pretty well across most of the band but i noticed SWR climbs up past 2:1 toward the high end of 40. i was expecting that but now im second guessing whether my feedpoint connection is actually the problem or if thats just normal dipole behavior. the solder joints look ok but i rushed the weatherproofing, basically just wrapped it in self-amalgamating tape. should i be worried about the feedpoint or just live with it and use the tuner? also curious if anyone has done a fan dipole to cover 40 and 20 with the same feedpoint, ive seen it mentioned but never tried it

The grey stations in the propagation list are ones that havent been heard recently by the system, so they might be offline or just not beaconing at the moment - doesnt necessarily mean you cant reach them, just means the map data is stale. Green means its been active and reported into the CMS recently. Your gmail thing is almost certainly a spam filter issue. Winlink outbound to regular email addresses gets flagged constantly, especially gmail. The delivery receipt just means the message left the RMS and hit the Winlink CMS servers fine, but that doesnt tell you anything about the last mile delivery to the actual inbox. Tell whoever you sent it to check their spam folder, or better yet test by sending to another Winlink account instead of a commercial address. For running your own gateway - RMS Trimode is what you want for HF, it handles Pactor, Winmor, and Vara. RMS Relay is more for packet and VHF stuff. They are separate installs from Winlink Express, youll find them on the winlink.org downloads page. Fair warning though, getting Trimode configured and registered as a proper sysop gateway takes a bit of back and forth with the Winlink team.

so ive been on HF for about 8 months now and one of the things that keeps bugging me is how wildly different everyone sounds on SSB. like some guys come in crisp and punchy and i can copy them through a pile of noise no problem, and then other guys — sometimes running way more power — just sound like theyre talking through a wet paper bag. ive started paying way more attention to this because honestly my own audio is probably not great and i want to fix it. my current setup is a ts-590sg into a sure-e something mic that came with a starter kit. VOX is on because i got lazy and never really set up a footswitch properly. compression is at like 4 or 5 on the rig. im running USB on 40m mostly, some 20m. ive had a couple guys tell me my audio is fine and one guy last week said i sounded a little muffled. so clearly something is off, at least some of the time. what actually makes the biggest difference? is it mic choice, position, the room your in, compression settings? i feel like ive read a billion things online and everyones advice contradicts everyone else. someone says max the speech processor, someone else says leave it at zero. who do i trust here

I've been running a Diamond NR770HB on a trunk lip mount for local repeater work, but I'm considering moving to a roof-mounted NMO setup for better performance. How much of a difference does antenna height really make for VHF/UHF mobile operation? I'm mainly doing 2m/70cm FM, some simplex, and accessing repeaters within 50 miles. The trunk mount is convenient but I wonder if I'm giving up too much signal. Has anyone done a side-by-side comparison?

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new generals. so the short version is: as a general you have phone privileges on 40m from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz. below 7.175 is extra class only for phone. the CW/digital portion goes from 7.025 to 7.125 for general, and 7.000 to 7.025 is extra only. the "dont go below 7.125" thing you heard is probably someone mixing up the voice vs data/cw segments, or maybe they were talking about a specific regional convention. the ARRL band plan is technically voluntary but most people stick to it because it keeps things from getting chaotic. the FCC part is the actual law though, so thats what matters legally. the band edge thing -- basically your signal has sidebands that extend a few kHz either side of your carrier depending on the mode. if you transmit too close to the edge of your allocation your signal can leak outside the legal limits even if your dial frequency is technically inside. most people say stay at least 3 kHz from the edge to be safe, some rigs drift a bit too so thats another reason to give yourself some room.

I consistently decode down to -22dB on 40m with my FT-991A and homebrew interface. Key is proper audio levels - keep that bar graph in the green zone. If it's hitting red, back off RF gain or add attenuation. Also make sure your PC clock is NTP synced to within 1 second.

congrats on the first one, 4 contacts counts just as much as 40. and yeah 40m during the day on a domestic summit is rough unless youre doing NVIS and even then its kind of hit or miss depending on conditions. 20m is your friend for daytime activations most of the time, especially if you want to work chasers who are farther away or even pick up some S2S contacts if other folks are out. the spot thing is huge though. seriously, post an alert on sotawatch or the SOTA goat app before you leave the car, put your planned frequency and a rough time window. chasers are literally sitting there watching the alerts and some of them will camp on a frequency waiting for you. i had a summit once where i had 12 contacts in the first 8 minutes just because i posted a good alert the night before. makes a massive difference compared to just showing up and calling blind

the EQ stuff you're doing is the right move, most people ignore it completely and then wonder why their audio sounds like they're talking through a coffee can. i spent way too long blaming my microphone before i actually dug into the 7300's TX menu and realized the default settings are basically optimized for nothing in particular. on the bandwidth question — yeah 2.8k is kind of the standard SSB passband but i've found running around 2.4k actually cuts through pileups better when conditions are rough. you lose a little of that full audio sound but honestly nobody is listening to you for the fidelity on 40m, they just want to pull your call out of the noise. if youre doing ragchewing with a good signal then sure go wider, it sounds nicer. but DX work i almost always narrow it down. the HM-36 thing, honestly, the capsule in those is not terrible its just that the handling noise and the proximity effect are all over the place if you're not consistent with mic distance. i switched to a desk mic and my audio got noticeably more consistent just because i stopped varying my distance by 3 inches every time i keyed up. might be worth trying before spending money on a new mic.

so ive been working on a 40m CW transmitter for the past couple months, pretty basic crystal controlled design i pulled from a QST article from like the 80s. most of it came together fine, the oscillator stage is clean and i can see it on the scope no problem, but the output stage is where things get weird. im using a 2N2222 in the driver and a IRF510 MOSFET for the final, which i know isnt the most elegant choice but i had a bunch of them in the junk box. the problem is im only getting maybe 800mW into a dummy load when i should be closer to 3-4 watts based on the design. ive already checked the drain voltage (its right), swapped the IRF510 twice thinking i killed one, checked the gate bias resistor values and they match the schematic. low pass filter is wound on a T68-2 toroid and i calculated it for 40m but honestly the wire count might be off, i counted twice but still not confident. harmonics look okay on the spectrum analyzer at the club, nothing crazy there. just frustrating that the efficiency is in the tank and i cant figure out where the power is going. anyone dealt with this before with the IRF510 final or have a gut feeling what im missing?

Keep that coax run as short as practical and make sure all connections are tight. Your LMR-240 is good cable choice. Also do your final tuning with doors and tailgate closed - changes the ground plane.

Can someone explain the 60-meter band rules? I understand we have specific channels, but I'm getting conflicting information about where to set my dial frequency for different modes. I want to try some PSK31 and maybe some phone, but I need to understand: Exact channel center frequencies Where to set my radio for USB vs digital modes Power limitations and one signal per channel ruleMy rig is a Yaesu FT-991A and I want to make sure I'm compliant with the NTIA requirements.