Brazil Ham

so ive been listening on HF for a few weeks now and everyone is throwing around all these weird abbreviations and i can only figure out some of them from context. like QSL i get, that means like confirmed or acknowledged right? and QRZ i think is someone asking whos calling? but then theres QRM QRN QSB and a bunch of others that i cant always tell what they mean just from how people use them in a sentence. also sometimes people just say them out loud on voice like they say the actual letters queue-arr-emm instead of just saying interference or whatever. is that just tradition or is there a practical reason for it. i was on 40m last night and someone said they had a lot of QRM from a neighbor or something and i figured it out from context but im curious if theres like a master list or a way people actually remember all of these without looking them up every time

oh man i totally missed it, i was at work when apparently everything opened up. this keeps happening to me lol. i just got my general a few months ago and im still trying to catch my first real DX on HF so every time theres an opening i seem to be staring at a spreadsheet somewhere instead of the radio. i dont know much about the Icom announcement stuff but i will say i spent like three weeks researching radios before i bought my current one and every time i got close to deciding something new got announced and i had to start over. its kind of exhausting but also kind of fun i guess? my elmer keeps telling me to just buy something and stop reading reviews but easier said than done.

yeah hamStudy is the move, thats what i used. just do the practice exams over and over until you're consistently hitting like 85-90% and you'll be fine on test day. the real exam is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass so theres actually more wiggle room than you'd think. one thing i'd say is dont stress too much about fully understanding every single topic before your test date. you can always dig deeper into the stuff that interests you after you get your ticket. i barely understood anything about antennas when i passed and now its like my whole thing. the license is just the door, the learning kind of happens after

so i've been wanting to do QRP for a while now and finally pulled the trigger on an Elecraft KX2 kit back in december. took me about two weekends to put it together, mostly because i kept second-guessing myself on the toroids and had to rewind one of them after i lost count of the turns. honestly thought i ruined the whole thing when i first powered it up and got nothing on receive, but turns out i had the volume knob confused with the RF gain which... yeah. anyway. once i actually got it working i took it out to a state park last saturday with a random wire antenna just strung up in a tree and made 4 contacts on 40m running 5 watts. one of them was a station in texas and im in ohio so that felt pretty good to me. the whole setup including the radio, battery, and antenna stuff fit in a small backpack with room for lunch. my question for the folks who have been doing portable QRP stuff for a while — how do you deal with the noise floor when youre out in the field? even at the park there was some QRM that made weaker signals hard to pull out. im using the built in filters but wondering if theres something else im missing or if this just gets easier as you get better at cw

just did this like 4 months ago, im also an IT person fwiw. the subnetting stuff in networking actually does help weirdly with some of the math concepts but dont overthink it. i just used HamStudy and passed with an 87 or something. the impedance questions look scary but theres really only so many ways they can ask it and once you see the patterns its fine. 40m is great to start, thats where i spend most of my time still tbh

ok so ive been trying to get Winlink going for a few weeks now and i think i finally understand the basics but the gateway side is still tripping me up. im running Winlink Express on a windows 10 box, got a Signalink USB hooked to my IC-7300, and ive been able to send and receive emails over HF using Vara HF which is honestly pretty cool once it actually works. my question is about the RMS gateway thing. when i look at the map theres like dozens of gateways in my region, so do i just pick the one with the best signal report or is there some logic to which one you should use? and also i keep seeing stuff about "propagation" affecting which gateway to connect to which makes sense in my head but in practice i dont really know how to decide. like do people just scan through a few and see what connects? also separate thing -- whats the deal with message handling if youre doing this for emcomm purposes? i know ICS-213 forms are a big thing in that world but im not clear on how those get formatted and sent through Winlink vs just sending a regular plain text message. is there a specific way coordinators expect to receive them or does it just come through as an email attachment or what

Welcome to contesting! Your setup is fine - I've worked plenty of stations running similar power levels. Different-country contacts within any continent get 2 points and same-country contacts get 1 point, so focus on working new countries. Start slow and don't worry about your rate - we all started somewhere!

I did POTA last summer at a state park near me and had a similar experience. Only had a dipole and an old FT-891 running off a big LiFePO4 battery which was kind of overkill for what I was doing but whatever it worked. The pile up I got on 40m in the afternoon was way more than I expected, people really chase these parks. Might try SOTA next, seems like more of an adventure type thing.

the radial system question is really the crux of it honestly. ive seen verticals with 4 or 8 radials get smoked by a modest dipole and ive seen a proper 60+ radial field absolutely kill a low dipole for DX. the problem is laying enough radials to really make the vertical shine is more work than most people want to do. if you can get 32-60 radials down, decent lengths, your vertical is going to be tough to beat for low angle stuff on 40. if you're only going to do like 8-10 radials dont bother, you'd be better off just raising the dipole even if it's a hassle. also worth thinking about noise. verticals pick up a lot more local noise in my experience, depends on your QTH obviously but if you're suburban that can really hurt you even if the antenna technically has better low angle gain on paper.

so i've had this 857D for probably 4 years now and always ran it stock because i was kind of nervous about opening it up. finally bit the bullet last weekend and did the mars/cap mod to open the TX range and also swapped out the stock fan for a quieter one while i had it apart. the fan swap was honestly the best thing i ever did to this radio, that stock fan is obnoxious and the replacement i got off amazon (some 12v noctua-style thing, cant remember the exact part number) is dead silent and seems to move plenty of air. ran it at 100w for like 20 minutes on FT8 and it barely got warm. the TX mod itself was straightforward, just moving a diode, but i was sweating the whole time because the board is packed in there pretty tight. no issues though and it came right up on the first power-on. just nice to have the flexibility even if i never actually use the extended freqs. anyone else done any other worthwhile mods to the 857? ive seen some stuff about firmware but wasnt sure if it was worth it or if theres anything else that actually improves day to day usability

dont think you can go wrong either way really. n1mm is still the gold standard for serious contesting especially cw and the support is incredible. log4om is nice for casual operating and mixed stuff but when im doing something like cq ww i always go back to n1mm. the muscle memory and all the little features just cant be beat. but yeah if youre doing more ft8 than contesting maybe log4om makes sense

oh nice didnt know about this one. im still pretty new and havent been to a hamfest yet, is it worth going even if you dont really need any gear? like is there other stuff to do or is it mostly just tables of old equipment

Check your power supply first - I had similar issues that turned out to be a noisy USB hub. Also try different sample rates, some dongles work better at 2.4MHz versus 2.75MHz. The V4's internal upconverter might be conflicting with your Ham It Up.

I'm still learning proper phonetics and this is confusing! The only reason for using phonetics is to make understanding what was said easier. Using a 'standard' phonetic alphabet just means that the phonetics are usually going to be familiar with most of the people using them. Should I just memorize NATO first and worry about alternatives later?

I was terrified my first time too! After a suitable period, he/she should then acknowledge those received and ask for any additions or corrections to call signs. Keep it simple and don't worry about being perfect - the net will flow naturally.

Working on an Arduino Nano-based band decoder for my ICOM IC-7300 and getting inconsistent BCD outputs when switching to 20m. The CI-V interface works fine for other bands but 20m seems to output incorrect hex values. Using the standard pin configuration with optocoupler isolation - anyone else run into similar issues with ICOM CI-V band data? Currently using the KW5GP decoder sketch with minor modifications for my antenna switch. Power supply is stable at 5V, and I've verified the CI-V cable wiring multiple times.

so i finally did it, been putting off studying for like two years and just buckled down and passed the tech exam last thursday. picked up a baofeng uv-5r to start just to get my feet wet and today i actually made contact with a guy about 40 miles away through the local repeater. i was so nervous i forgot to say my callsign at the end and he had to remind me lol. anyway just wanted to introduce myself i guess, im KD9 something i always forget the last two letters of my own callsign which is embarrassing. super excited to get into this hobby properly. thinking about upgrading to general soon so i can get on HF but thats a whole other thing

The FTM-400 is a great radio for mobile, the waterfall display is actually useful for finding activity on a band you're not super familiar with. I ran one for about three years before I moved to the 500 series. On the voltage drop thing — good call going to 8 gauge. A lot of people underestimate how much difference that makes especially if you're running any kind of digital mode or even just transmitting at full power for any length of time. I always tell people to run the heaviest wire they can reasonably get through the firewall and not to cheap out on the fuse holder either, the crappy blade fuse holders can add resistance over time especially if they get any corrosion under the hood. ANL fuse right at the battery is the way to go if you haven't already done that.

oh man yes this is so real, i hit the exact same wall around 12-13 and i was ready to give up on CW entirely. what helped me more than anything was just forcing myself to stop writing everything down. like literally put the pencil away. your brain is spending so much energy trying to get the letter on paper before the next one comes that youre already behind before you start. took me a while to trust that i could just listen and let words form in my head instead of on paper. also the farnsworth spacing you mentioned — that 20/13 thing — is actually good practice but at some point you need to bump both numbers closer together, the gap can become a crutch. keep at it. 20wpm felt impossible to me two years ago and now i actually prefer it to slower speeds because the rhythm is more natural somehow.

I'm using IZ2UUF Morse Koch app on my phone during commutes - great for building those reflexes. Started at lesson 1 three months ago, now solid on 15 characters at 20WPM. Don't skip the fundamentals though - prosigns and numbers are just as important as letters!

hamstudy is still great, honestly just grind that until youre consistently hitting 85% or better on the practice exams and you should be fine. the Smith chart stuff looks scarier than it is on the actual test, at least in my experience. most of the questions are pattern recognition once youve seen them enough times rather than actually sitting there doing the math in your head. the parts that actually got me were some of the digital mode and emission type questions, and a couple of the amplifier stability things. the filter stuff i thought would be brutal but the questions are pretty specific and once you memorize the key formulas for Q factor and bandwidth they come up in pretty predictable ways. dont overthink it, the pool is finite and hamstudy will expose you to all of it eventually. took me about six weeks of maybe 20-30 mins a day and passed with only a couple wrong.

so ive been messing with this for like three days now and im going a little crazy. running a TM-D710G with the internal TNC, got it set up on 144.390, SSID is -9 which should be mobile. the radio shows it's transmitting the beacon every 2 minutes, i can even hear the burst on the audio, but when i go to aprs.fi and search my callsign theres nothing there. not even old packets. i checked the path and it's set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which should be fine for my area. i know there are igates around because i can see other stations near me showing up fine on the map. at this point i dont know if its a TNC config thing or if maybe my audio levels are screwed up or what. the manual for this radio is kind of unhelpful on the finer points of this stuff. anyone run into this before with the D710? or just APRS in general where the radio thinks its beaconing but nothing gets through?

ALC pinning is such a common thing and youre right that most people dont even know it's happening. the rule of thumb i always heard is set your mic gain so ALC just barely moves on voice peaks, not sustaining. once it's riding the ALC limiter constantly you're already generating splatter and your audio is getting clipped hard. as for the built in compression on the 7300, it's actually not bad when used conservatively. i run mine around 4-5 out of 8 or whatever the scale is and it does genuinely help average power on SSB without turning everything into mush. go too high and yeah it sounds processed and harsh, especially on crowded band conditions where it all blurs together anyway. mic choice matters but maybe not as much as people think relative to the gain staging. i switched from the stock HM-207 to an SM-50 desk mic and it did clean things up noticeably, more presence in the midrange, but if your levels were set wrong before they're still gonna be wrong. get the gain structure right first then worry about the mic.

yeah the 13-15wpm wall is super common, i went through the exact same thing a couple years back. what helped me was forcing myself to listen at speeds i couldnt actually copy yet — like i bumped LCWO up to 18wpm even though i was only getting maybe 60% of it. the idea is your brain starts learning the rhythm of the whole character instead of counting dits and dahs. took maybe 3 weeks before things started clicking again. also one thing nobody told me early on — if youre still writing every single letter down while you practice, try stopping that. just listen and let it go if you miss something. copying by hand keeps you focused on the wrong thing at higher speeds. its uncomfortable at first but it made a bigger difference for me than anything else.

congrats on the build man, MTR-3B is a great little rig. the RF on the key thing is almost always a counterpoise issue with random wire setups — i run a 17 foot counterpoise laid on the ground and that usually clears it right up. some people use a longer one but i've found that length works well for 40 and is manageable in a park without tripping over it constantly. for antennas i really like the end-fed half wave for portable work. you can get a decent EFHW transformer kit for not much money or wind your own if you're already building stuff. i use a 40m EFHW (66ish feet) with a 6 foot coax jumper to my rig and it tunes up on 20 and 15 pretty well with a little matchbox. setup is just throwing the wire over a tree branch which sounds easy until the branch you want is always just out of reach but anyway sounds like you're hooked now. welcome to the rabbit hole where tiny radios somehow feel more satisfying than big ones