Susan Johnson

yeah no morse code requirement anymore, that went away back in 2007 so youre good there. the technician license is definitely where everyone starts, its the entry level one and honestly the test isnt that bad at all. the question pool is publicly available which is kind of a big deal because that means you can literally study the exact questions that will be on the exam. i used hamstudy.org and just did practice tests every night for maybe two or three weeks and passed no problem. some people knock it out in a weekend if theyre motivated. the tech license gets you all the VHF and UHF privileges which is plenty to get started, most people do local repeaters and stuff like that. once you pass that if you want HF and more frequencies you go for general class but thats a whole separate test. just start with tech though, dont overwhelm yourself

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and finally decided to really commit to learning CW. im using a cheap set of paddles i picked up off ebay and a MFJ keyer built into my radio (IC-7300). i can receive okay at like 12-13 wpm if the sending is clean but my own sending is all over the place. sometimes my dits and dahs sound fine and then i'll hit a rough patch and it just sounds like mush. i read somewhere that you should set the keyer speed a bit faster than you're comfortable with to force yourself to learn the rhythm but honestly that just made things worse for me. been practicing with the paddles every night for maybe 20 minutes but im not sure im building good habits or bad ones. anyone been through this and come out the other side?

honestly its mostly just feel after a while but the rough rule i use is -- if the band is noisy or youre not sure the other station copied clean, go full phonetics. on a quiet local repeater with decent signals you can usually get away with just saying the letters, but the moment somethign sounds off just switch to phonetics without waiting to be asked the NATO alphabet exists for exactly the situation you described, B and D sound almost identical over a marginal signal, same with M and N, S and F sometimes. on HF especially during a pileup or if propagation is being weird i always go full phonetics for my call. takes a half second longer but saves way more time than repeating yourself three times some guys get a little sloppy on the local repeater because yeah, they know each other and the signals are usually good, dont let that become a habit though if you ever get on HF youll thank yourself for building the reflex early

i passed mine about 4 months ago doing basically just the app thing. arrl has one, hamstudy has one, i just did like 20-30 questions a day for maybe 3 weeks and that was enough. the math scared me too but there are only maybe 5 or 6 questions on the actual exam that involve any real calculation and if you just practice those specific ones youll be fine. dont overthink it

so ive been licensed for about eight months now and i finally got comfortable enough to actually check into a net instead of just listening. did my first check-in on the local 2m repeater net last tuesday and honestly it wasnt as scary as i thought it would be, the net control was really patient when i fumbled my callsign the first time lol anyway now im kind of hooked and want to find more nets to participate in, especially on HF since i just got my general and i want to actually use those new privileges. ive heard there are some good ones on 40m in the evenings but i dont really know where to start looking for schedules. is there like a central place where nets are listed or do you just have to know people also saw something about a special event station for a local hamfest coming up next month and im curious how those work, like do you just call them like a normal QSO or is there some kind of certificate you can get afterward? sorry if these are dumb questions just trying to learn

Not required at all, at least not in the US under part 97. The rules just say you gotta ID with your callsign, doesn't specify phonetics. Phonetics are a tool, not a law. On a clear local repeater where everybody already knows you, saying your call once normally is totally fine. That said on HF it becomes way more useful, especially on SSB where the audio can be rough or you're working stations far away who aren't familiar with your call. I've had people completely mishear my suffix even on a decent band day so I tend to use phonetics more there just out of habit. DX especially — if you're trying to work some rare station and the pileup is a mess, you want your call to be unmistakable. The guys who do it every single time on a local repeater are probably just old habits from HF or maybe they came up through EMCOMM training where phonetics are drilled pretty hard. Not wrong, just... yeah, a bit much for a quiet 2m ragchew.

honestly the theory looks worse than it is. i put it off for like three years thinking the same thing and then sat down with the ARRL Extra Class License Manual and a lot of it started to make sense after a couple weeks. the LC circuit stuff and the filter questions especially, once you see why the formulas work they arent so bad to remember. there are a few questions in the pool that are just straight up memorization and yeah those are a grind but the question pool is finite so you kind of just grind through it. the privileges are worth it, especially if youre doing any HF and want to get into the CW segments or those phone sub-bands you mentioned. also some of the extra segments are noticeably less crowded which is a nice bonus. i'd say just start studying and see how you feel after a month, you might surprise yourself

dont forget there's also the ARRL band plan on top of the FCC allocations, they're two different things. the FCC stuff is what's legally required, but the band plan is more like gentlemens agreement about where to find certain modes. like around 7.040 is pretty much understood to be FT8 territory now even though thats not in any rulebook. worth downloading the ARRL band plan pdf and just keeping it handy for a while until it clicks

yeah the "baker" thing is the old Joint Army/Navy phonetic alphabet, it was what people used before NATO standardized everything in the 50s. you still hear it from guys who learned back then, baker, able, charlie, dog... some of them never switched over and honestly at this point nobody's gonna tell them to. it works fine, the whole point is just that the other person understands you. for when to use them -- on a clear local repeater with people you know, honestly most folks dont bother spelling out every letter phonetically. but if theres any noise, if youre making a contact with someone you havent worked before, or especially on HF where conditions can get rough, full phonetics for your callsign is just good practice. contesting is a whole other thing, people get pretty fast and sloppy with them but thats just the nature of it. id say just default to NATO phonetics when theres any doubt whether youre being copied clearly, and dont stress about it otherwise

for a one or two day exercise id skip the generator honestly. 100ah lifepo4 with a 7300 at reasonable power is plenty, ive done 14+ hour activations on similar setups and still had 40% left. the generator becomes worth it when youre talking multi-day or if you need to run 100w consistently or youve got other loads like a laptop, lighting, maybe a second radio. the eu2200i is a great unit but its another thing to fuel, maintain, haul, and the noise thing is real — people complain, it draws attention, and in some venues they wont let you run it at all. on the antenna, chameleon emcomm III is solid but if you can get any kind of wire up in a tree even a random length end fed with a 9:1 unun and your tuner will probably outperform it just on efficiency. that said the convenience factor of the chameleon is real when youre trying to set up fast under pressure which is kind of the whole point of an exercise

been lurking this thread and just want to say the latency thing on RemoteHams really depends on where the server node is geographically relative to both you and the rig. i had a terrible experience early on becuase i was being routed through a node that was like cross country for no obvious reason. once i figured out how to pin to a closer relay point it got a lot better. still not as good as a direct VPN tunnel but workable. one thing i havent seen mentioned — if your remote site has halfway decent upload bandwidth you might look at whether you can just run a direct HTTPS connection with something like Hamlib and a custom audio stream rather than going full VPN. bit more exposed security wise but some guys do it and it cuts out a layer. i dont do it personally but ive seen it come up on the RemoteHams groups.io list a few times.

so I've been interested in ham radio for a while now mostly because my neighbor has a big antenna setup and it looked cool and he told me to just go get my license and join him on the air but I have no idea where to start. like do I need to take a class or can I just study on my own? I looked up the FCC stuff and it was a little overwhelming. is the technician exam hard? I don't have a background in electronics or anything like that, I barely remember anything from high school physics. any advice would be really appreciated, I just don't want to waste money signing up for a test and then fail it

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals, dont feel bad. the short version is the FCC part 97 rules are the legal limit — so yes 7175 to 7300 is where you're allowed to do SSB as a general. but the ARRL band plan is more like a gentlemens agreement on top of that, it tries to keep different modes from stepping on each other and carves out space for things like digital and weak signal stuff lower in the band. the band edge thing is real practical concern. if youre operating at say 7300 on upper sideband, your actual signal has sidebands that extend a few khz above your carrier frequency, so your transmitted signal could be going out past 7300 even if your dial says 7300. thats why people say stay a bit below the edge, maybe 7295 or so to be safe depending on your rig. its not a written rule exactly but going over the edge is a violation so the buffer is just sensible. and yes the europe thing is real — ITU region 1 has a narrower 40m allocation, i think it goes up to around 7200 for them which is why you sometimes hear dx stations calling from frequencies that would be in our cw/digital portion. they're operating legally in their region, just weird from our end.

so i got my general back in 2014 and honestly just never bothered with CW since it wasnt required anymore. but ive been watching some videos lately and something about it just looks really satisfying, like there's guys making contacts all over the world with like 5 watts and a wire and i want in on that. problem is i have zero idea where to start with the actual keying side of things. i borrowed a straight key from a buddy at the club and i've been practicing a bit but my wrist gets tired fast and i know everyone says to eventually move to paddles but i dont even understand how paddles work with a keyer vs just a straight key. is the keyer a separate box thing or is it built into the radio? my ic-7300 might already have one i guess? i honestly dont know what im doing here lol also any tips on just learning to receive are welcome, i can copy maybe 5-6 characters and then my brain just turns off

JS8Call is genuinely worth trying if you want something that feels like actual communication. I run it pretty regularly on 40m in the evenings and theres usually a handful of people around, its not as dead as you might think but yeah its nowhere near FT8 in terms of raw activity. the message store-and-forward stuff is kind of neat too once you figure it out. the sensitivity gap is real though. JS8Call in normal speed mode is something like 10-12dB worse than FT8 which is significant — basically means you need a noticeably better path to make it work. there are slower speed settings that close that gap some but then your typing is painfully slow. for regional stuff on 40m your setup should be fine most of the time, its really when you push into marginal dx paths that you notice it. id say just fire it up and hang out on the calling frequency for a bit, you'll find people pretty quick on 40m evenings especially on weekends