Mike74

the exact questions thing is true, I was surprised when I sat down for the exam and recognized every single one. just use the flash card mode on hamstudy and grind it for a couple weeks. honestly the hardest part for most new people is the ohms law and decibel stuff but even that isnt too bad once you see the pattern. dont overthink it

the RC car lipo repurpose is genius, im stealing that idea. i've been stressing about battery options for my setup and never thought about that. what connector did you end up using to hook it up to the rig?

congrats on the ticket first of all. so here's my honest take — the baofeng isnt bad for learning, it just has some quirks. the menu system is kind of a nightmare and the transmit audio isnt always great but plenty of people use them on repeaters every day without issues. if money is tight it gets you on the air and thats what matters. that said if you can stretch a bit the FT-60 is a rock solid radio. simple to use, tough as a brick, audio is noticeably cleaner. ive had mine for probably 8 years and dropped it more times than i want to admit. the VX-6R is submersible which is nice but honestly unless youre planning to be out in the rain a lot its maybe more radio than you need right starting out. dual band is worth it imo, 70cm repeaters are more common in some areas than you might think.

so ive been running a Diamond X50 on the roof for the past couple years and its been fine for local repeater work, hits everything within maybe 30-40 miles no problem. but lately ive been wanting to do more simplex and also work some of the weak signal stuff on 2m, like EME is probably a pipe dream right now but just SSB/CW tropo would be cool to try. my question is whether its even worth putting up a yagi if im still mostly doing FM and repeaters 80% of the time. like i dont want to give up the omnidirectional coverage because im also running a linked repeater net on thursdays and need to hit a couple of machines in different directions. someone mentioned i could just add a second feedline and switch between antennas but that feels like it gets messy fast on the roof. also open to hearing if anyone has run both and what the real world difference feels like on 2m ssb. numbers on paper are one thing but actually using it is another

I'm using a borrowed IC-9700 and the difference is night and day compared to my old dual-rig setup. No more chasing the bird across the passband - the radio does all the work while you focus on making contacts.

I've been dual registered for 15 years and it's paid off twice. During our major flood in 2019, having RACES credentials got me access to restricted areas that ARES alone wouldn't have. RACES operators are activated by jurisdictions and are the only amateur radio operators authorized to transmit during declared emergencies when the President invokes the War Powers Act. Better to have it and not need it.

yeah what he said about the SSID thing is spot on. I spent like two evenings debugging something almost identical last winter and it turned out the guy i was trying to message had recently changed his mobile SSID from -9 to -7 and i didnt know. felt pretty dumb once i figured it out. one other thing to check — are you running any RF-only message path or is everything going through the IGATE to APRS-IS and back? sometimes when both stations are on RF and the message goes up to the internet and tries to come back down it gets dropped if the destination station isnt being heard by a local igate on the receive side. bob bruninga used to write about this a lot, the whole messaging reliability thing on RF is honestly kind of a mess compared to just sending an APRS-IS message directly

so ive been using Log4OM for general logging for about two years now and honestly i like it a lot, the interface took some getting used to but the award tracking stuff is really nice and it plays well with WSJT-X through the JTDX integration or whatever its called. my issue is contest season is coming up and everyone keeps telling me i should just use N1MM for contests which i totally get, N1MM is basically the standard for that stuff. my question is whether its a pain to have both installed and switch between them or if there's some trick to keeping your logs synced up. like if i work a bunch of stations during a contest in N1MM, getting those QSOs into Log4OM afterward without duplicating stuff or messing up the ADIF import seems like it could be a headache. has anyone actually got a clean workflow for this? i tried importing an ADIF from a previous contest once and it was mostly fine but a few dupes snuck in and i had to clean it up manually which was annoying. also side question — does anyone run WSJT-X feeding into N1MM during something like a digital contest or do most people just log FT8 separately and merge later. feel like ive seen conflicting info on this.

so I've been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor is licensed and he's been bugging me to get my ticket for like two years. I finally decided to just do it but honestly I dont even know where to begin. I looked at the FCC website and it was kind of confusing. do I need to buy a book or is there free stuff online? and how hard is the test actually, I'm not great with electronics but I'm not totally clueless either. also is there like a fee to take the test or does it cost money to get the license itself, I saw some conflicting info about that. any help would be appreciated, feel free to point me wherever

Just picked up my first mobile VHF/UHF rig - a Yaesu FTM-400XDR for my F-150. I'm overwhelmed by all the mounting and antenna options out there. I know the center of the roof is supposedly the best spot for the antenna, but I'm hesitant to drill holes. What are some good compromises for installation? Also, should I run power directly to the battery or can I use the aux power in the center console? Any advice from experienced mobile ops would be greatly appreciated!

the latency thing with CW over RemoteHams is a known annoyance. what helped me was setting the audio buffer on the client side as low as it would go without constant dropouts - took some trial and error. also make sure youre not running the SDR sample rate higher than you need because that adds processing delay at the server end. i run mine at the lowest rate that still gives me a usable passband and it helped noticeably. the sidetone buffering you mentioned - yeah thats in the client settings, theres a local sidetone option that generates the tone on your machine independently of the roundtrip. it doesnt fix the actual transmitted timing but at least you stop second guessing yourself mid-QSO. for serious CW contesting though honestly remote just isnt ideal, the guys who do it well usually have very low latency dedicated links not just regular consumer fiber.

Just wrapped up our county Simulated Emergency Test last weekend and wanted to share some observations. This event was a booming success. Over five hundred messages with form-data were sent, along with nearly two hundred ICS-213's and almost a hundred shelter reports and staff assignment forms, but we had some real learning moments too. Our biggest surprise was how many operators struggled with battery management during the 48-hour scenario. It's a good idea to keep one of these available along with spare alkaline or lithium cells in your go-kit for a real-life EmComm scenario. Also learned that emergency stations work best if there are at least two operators on duty at all times. One should stay completely focussed on the radio traffic. What caught your group off-guard during recent exercises? Let's share lessons learned so we can all improve our preparedness.

Excellent first homebrew antenna! I'm just getting into HF and limited by apartment constraints. What gauge wire did you use and how did you calculate the initial coil inductance? My MFJ analyzer should help with tuning but I'd like to start closer to target.

so a few weeks ago there was a pretty bad storm system that came through our county and the local ARES group got activated to support the EOC and a couple of the Red Cross shelters. ive been a technician for about two years and only upgraded to general last spring, joined ARES maybe six months ago but hadnt done much besides the monthly nets and one tabletop exercise we ran at the fire station. when the callout came i honestly panicked a little. i knew where the EOC was and i had my go bag more or less ready but once i got there it was just kind of overwhelming — people everywhere, the EC was running around coordinating, someone handed me a clipboard and told me to check in operators as they arrived and log their assignments. not exactly glamorous but fine, i could do that. then about two hours in they needed someone at one of the shelter locations because the ham they had there had a family situation and had to leave. so i ended up going over there with my HT and a mag mount on my car and just... staffing the position. mostly it was checking in with the EOC net every 30 minutes and relaying a few messages about cot counts and supply requests. nothing technically complicated but i was hyper aware that if i screwed something up it would actually affect real people. made it through fine but im still thinking about all the things i didnt know going in. like i had no idea the shelter needed a specific ICS form filled out for message traffic, nobody mentioned that in any of the training i did. anyway curious if anyone else remembers their first real activation and how they felt about it after. and also if theres stuff you wish someone had told you beforehand

I just finished these courses myself! For non-governmental employees and others without access to classroom instruction, these courses are available as on-line independent-study courses that are free of charge. Start with IS-100 and IS-700 - they're pretty straightforward and give you the ICS basics. The EC-001 course really helped me understand how we fit into the bigger picture.

Complete roadmap for new hams wanting to learn CW: Start with apps like Morse Mania to learn letters a few at a time - it turns learning into an engaging gameSet practice tools to 25-30 WPM to train your ear to recognize the sound of each letter, not individual dits and dahsStay in the 'learning zone' where you're missing about 30-50% of characters - don't worry about perfection, this is where effective learning happensPractice sending with tools like CW Checker or VBand for immediate feedbackAs soon as you mostly know your letters and have your license, get on the air! Don't wait until you feel 'ready' - the best way to improve is by making real contacts.

yeah what he said about audio levels. i went through basically this exact thing when i first set up Vara HF and the fix was embarrassingly simple - my mic gain on the radio was cranked way up from using it for voice and i never turned it down for digital. the Vara waterfall looked fine to me but the gateway was getting garbage. one other thing to check - is the gateway you're connecting to actually active? the listing in Winlink Express can be a little stale sometimes. i've had better luck using the RMS Channels function in the client and sorting by last heard to make sure something is actually on the air in your area recently. some gateways go offline for days and nobody updates the listing right away.

yeah i did the same mod on mine about two years ago, no issues at all since then. the finals on the 7300 are pretty robust, all that stuff about degrading them is mostly from people who dont understand that the mod itself doesnt change output power or duty cycle, you still have to not do anything stupid with it. the radio doesnt care that youre on 29.800 vs 29.750. on your question about TX bandwidth — thats actually accessible through the set menu if you dig into it, theres a DATA MOD setting and you can push the bass/treble response further than the default SSB profile allows. its not a hardware thing. some people do external audio mods too like swapping the electret in certain mic setups but honestly the stock TX audio on the 7300 is already better than most rigs in its class, id mess with the software side first before touching anything physical.