Mark Johnson

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and done a fair bit of HF DX but ive always had this thing about EME in the back of my head. like the idea of bouncing a signal off the moon is just... i dunno, it still blows my mind that people actually do this on a regular basis. anyway i talked to a guy at our club last month who does 2m EME and he made it sound almost approachable but i honestly have no idea what kind of station you need to pull this off. my current setup is pretty modest, i've got a yaesu FT-991A and a 5 element yagi for 2m that i use for satellite work sometimes. im guessing that's not gonna cut it for moonbounce but how far off am i really. the guy at the club mentioned something about JT65 and said the digital modes changed everything for smaller stations but i dont really understand the link budget side of things. like how much antenna and how many watts are we actually talking to make a first contact realistic. any pointers would be great, ive been going down rabbit holes on the web but a lot of the info is old and i cant tell whats still relevant

honestly the technician exam is way more approachable than most people think going in. the math is pretty minimal, mostly just ohms law stuff and a couple signal calculations, nothing you cant handle with a basic calculator and a few hours of practice. the question pool is public which is kind of a huge deal — theres only like 426 questions that the actual exam pulls from so you can literally just study the exact questions youll see. hamStudy.org is what i used and i think it's still free, you just drill questions until your practice scores are consistently above 80% or so and youre probably ready. theres also the ARRL technician manual if you want actual explanations behind the answers rather than just memorizing, which i think helps it stick better long term. most people pass the tech exam with two or three weeks of casual studying, maybe 30 mins a day. find a local club and they usually hold exam sessions pretty regularly, some clubs even do license classes if you want a more structured thing.

just went through this same confusion a few months ago honestly. what helped me was realizing theres two separate things, whats legal (FCC part 97) and whats the gentlemens agreement (band plan). you can get the Technician/General privileges chart straight from the ARRL website and its color coded which makes it way easier to read than trying to parse the actual regulations. the band edge thing is real though, had a guy at a club tell me he got a nastygram from a neighbor station once because he was basically sitting right on 7.300 and his audio was spilling over. not worth the hassle just stay a couple kHz down

Hey all, so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (Tech) and ive been listening to a couple local repeaters but honestly im still pretty confused about how the whole thing works in practice. I understand the basics - input and output frequencies, offset, all that - but the CTCSS tone stuff is where i start to lose the thread. Like I understand its a subaudible tone you transmit to open the repeater but what i dont totally get is do you need to also have tone squelch set on your radio to only hear traffic that has the tone, or is that separate? My HT is a Baofeng and I set the transmit tone to what the repeater directory says but im not sure if i should also set the receive side to the same tone or leave it open. Also kind of a separate question but what is the etiquette for just... jumping into a conversation that's already going? I heard two guys ragchewing the other night and wanted to say hi but wasnt sure if you just key up between overs or if thats rude. Feels weird to interrupt but also the repeater sits quiet for like 10 minutes sometimes and it seems like a waste not to use it.

yeah that tingle is almost certainly RF on the braid, get a choke balun on there before you do much more operating. seriously dont mess around with that, its not dangerous in the way people dramatize it but its also just not great and it means your coax shield is probably radiating which messes with your pattern anyway. for a 40m inverted-V a simple ugly balun — just coil up 8-10 turns of the feedline at the feedpoint — works surprisingly well and costs you nothing since you already have the coax. on the height question, yeah the apex matters more than the ends for your radiation angle. the ends being low is fine, they contribute less to the far field pattern than the center portion of the dipole does. if you can get that apex to 30-35ft youll notice a real difference on DX but for stateside stuff on 40m at 19ft honestly youre not missing that much, especially inverted-V which already has a higher angle anyway. good first build though, 1.4:1 at resonance is solid.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and just starting to get into DXing a little bit, nothing serious just trying to work some new countries when i can. someone at the club mentioned DXwatch and i pulled it up on my phone and honestly it was a little overwhelming at first. all these spots flying by and i wasnt sure what half the filters meant. anyway i figured out you can filter by band and mode which helped a lot. but my question is — when i see a spot on there for like a rare DX station, by the time i find the frequency and get my radio tuned up is it already too late? feels like i missed a few this way. also does QRZ do something similar or is that just for callsign lookups? i feel like ive seen people mention it for spotting too but not sure if im thinking of something else. using an android phone btw, happy to try other apps if theres something better for this kind of thing

yeah the waterfall on the 7300 is kind of a game changer if you havent had a panadapter before. i came from an FT-897 which obviously had nothing like that and the first time i used one i felt like i'd been operating blind for years. the RF direct sampling architecture icom went with is what gives it that clean noise floor you're noticing, its not just filtering doing the work. one thing i'll mention — if you havent dug into the settings yet, spend some time with the NR and NB adjustments. the defaults are pretty conservative and depending on your local noise situation you might find a combination that cleans things up even more on 80m. took me a while to find a spot i liked but it made late night 80m nets a lot more readable. enjoy it, solid radio.

this is actually really encouraging to hear, im only a few months into being licensed and 10m is the band i can actually run some power on with my current antenna setup. gonna have to spend some more time up there this weekend and see what i can find. what time of day has been working best for you for the DX stuff?

so i passed my technician exam last tuesday and honestly still kind of in shock that i did it, studied for like three weeks on and off using hamstudyorg and just went for it. got my callsign a few days later and ive been glued to my baofeng ever since just listening mostly. managed my first actual QSO yesterday on a local 2m repeater with a guy named gary who was super patient with me when i fumbled through my callsign like four times. he gave me a 59 and i was shaking a little lol. anyway just wanted to introduce myself, this hobby is way more interesting than i thought it would be and im already looking at HF stuff which is probably getting ahead of myself but here we are

so i finally finished my first real scratch build, a 40m single band CW rig loosely based on the pixie design but i swapped out a few components and added a small audio filter stage because the pixie's audio was driving me nuts. took me about three weekends of fiddling around on the bench and one magic smoke incident with a transistor i wont name out of shame. been running it at about 500mW into a wire dipole hung between two trees in the backyard and i made contact with a station in ohio last tuesday, im in virginia, so not a huge distance but still pretty cool for half a watt. the CW is a little chirpy still and im not totally sure why, might be the VXO drifting or just my power supply being noisy, havent tracked it down yet. anyway just wanted to share because i was pretty skeptical QRP would be worth the effort but its kind of addictive now. thinking about trying to do a SOTA activation with it once i figure out the chirp situation. anyone built something similar and dealt with chirp on a simple VXO rig?

4 contacts still counts, you activated it. dont stress. i did my first one and only got 5 and one of them was my buddy who was specifically listening for me so like... yeah. it gets easier once you figure out your kit and stop bringing stuff you dont need

yeah the timing issue with relay boards and the pi is a known headache, the OS scheduler on raspbian just isnt real-time so you'll always get that jitter under load. the arduino as dedicated relay controller is actually the right move honestly, most people end up there eventually. the serial dropout thing though — are you using hardware serial or the software serial library on the arduino side? software serial is garbage above like 9600 baud and even then it can get flaky. if youre on an uno or nano just make sure youre on the hardware UART pins and use a reasonable baud rate, 115200 should be fine. also double check your ground reference between the pi and arduino, ive seen weird serial issues that were just a floating ground between the two boards the other thing id look at is whether your relay board is pulling more current than the pi GPIO can handle cleanly. some of those boards need a separate 5v supply for the relay coils, if youre powering the coils off the pi's 5v rail thats probably causing noise on the logic side too

so ive been messing around on 15m the past couple weeks and honestly the conditions have been all over the place. like last tuesday i was hearing europe super strong around 1400 UTC, worked a handful of stations no problem, then the next day at the same time it was basically dead. nothing. i checked the solar flux index and it was sitting up around 180 which i thought meant good conditions but maybe im misreading what that actually means for that band specifically. been hamming for about 3 years now and i still dont fully understand how the flux number translates to which bands will actually open up. like i know higher SFI is generally better but is there a threshold where 15m really starts to come alive versus just being marginal? and does the K index matter more than the flux in terms of day to day variation? ive been watching both on the DX cluster but honestly sometimes the two numbers seem to contradict each other from what im seeing actually happen on the air. anyway if anyones been having good luck on 15 lately or knows a better way to interpret this stuff id love to hear it. feels like im always one step behind the good openings.

yeah the LM386 hum thing got me too on my first build, took me forever to figure out it was a ground loop thing more than the power supply. try running a dedicated ground wire straight from the audio stage back to your main ground point instead of relying on the PCB trace. star grounding basically. made a huge difference on mine. also how are you powering it, if its a wall wart that thing could be injecting all kinds of noise

same boat as you a few months ago lol. i ended up going down a rabbit hole with this stuff. one thing that helped me was setting up filters on the cluster so im not drowning in spots for bands i cant work — DXwatch lets you do that, and so does DX Summit which is another one worth bookmarking. the QRZ thing is useful but yeah sometimes the pages are super bare, especially for rarer DX entities where the operator just put up a basic page. havent really cracked the mobile logging thing either tbh, i just take notes on paper when im portable and sort it out later which is probably terrible practice but it works for me so far

i passed mine like three months ago and was in basically the same spot as you. what helped me was the Gordon West technician book, its not expensive and it actually explains the why behind stuff instead of just the answers. i went through that and then used hamstudy for practice and passed no problem. the test itself was way less stressful than i expected honestly, the VEs were super friendly and not intimidating at all

If you are interested in providing emergency communications, having access to most HF bands almost is a necessity so that you can pass or receive traffic depending on the propagation at various times on each band. Even for local nets, many ARES groups use HF for backup when VHF repeaters go down.

this is actually my first year thinking about going, is it pretty beginner friendly or is it mostly for people who already know what theyre looking for? i just got my tech ticket like two months ago so i dont really know what half the stuff on those swap tables even is yet

yeah 10m has been absolutely cooking lately, its been a while since ive seen it this good consistently. the solar flux and the k-index are really measuring different things -- flux is basically how active the sun is putting out radio-affecting radiation, higher is generally better for HF especially the higher bands. k-index is about geomagnetic disturbance, and you want that LOW, ideally under 3. when k goes above 4 or 5 the higher bands can get real ugly real fast even if the flux is high. for prediction i honestly just check spaceweather.com every morning and also the NOAA 45 day forecast they put out, its not perfect but gives you a rough idea of where the flux is trending. WWV broadcasts the solar data every hour at 18 minutes past if you want to actually tune in the old school way. the ZL2 contact is great, from the midwest on 10m thats a solid path, usually opens up late morning your time depending on the season.

There are ALC interface circuits you can build or buy that help control this, but honestly for SSB operation it's not worth the trouble. Just back off your drive power a bit from maximum and you'll be fine. The tube amps are pretty forgiving anyway.

so ive been running my 7300 stock for about two years now and honestly its been fine but i kept reading about people swapping in the Collins mechanical filters on older rigs and started wondering if there was anything comparable worth doing to a modern SDR based radio like this. ended up going down a rabbit hole and found a few threads about tweaking the DSP filter settings and also some people doing hardware mods to the front end for better IMD performance. what i actually ended up doing was the front end mod where you bypass part of the stock input filtering and add a low noise preamp stage. took me a weekend and honestly the difference on 40m in the evening is noticeable. the noise floor dropped maybe 3-4 dB by my measurement, might be confirmation bias but i dont think so. also reflashed the firmware to an older version someone recommended because apparently the newer ones have some AGC behavior that people dont love. anyone else been messing with the 7300 hardware or is everyone just leaving them stock and using the DSP? curious what actual improvements people have gotten vs just tweaking software settings

oh man yes i hit that exact same wall, right around 13-14wpm, its like running into a glass door. what finally worked for me was something my elmer told me which felt counterintuitive at first — he said stop practicing at the speed youre comfortable at and force yourself to copy at 18 or even 20wpm even if you only get maybe 40 or 50 percent of it. the idea is youre training your ear to hear characters as sounds instead of sequences. took me a few weeks of feeling really frustrated and dumb before things started clicking but once they did i jumped pretty fast. also the Farnsworth method is good but honestly i think a lot of people lean on it too long. if you're doing farnsworth at like 20wpm character speed with 13wpm word speed, try bumping the overall speed up even when it feels uncomfortable. your brain will catch up. takes longer than youd want but it does happen. and get on the air and just listen to actual QSOs even if you cant copy em fully, real code has a different feel than computer generated stuff.

welcome to the hobby, youre gonna have a blast with nets once you get the hang of it. the best place i always point new folks is the ARRL net directory online, you can search by state and frequency and it'll show you what nets are active in your area and what days and times they run. most local clubs also run their own weekly nets which are usually pretty relaxed, those are honestly the best ones to start with because the net control guys know a lot of the checkins personally and they're patient with new folks. as far as etiquette goes its pretty simple — when net control asks for checkins you just wait for a pause, key up and give your callsign phonetically, then unkey and wait. dont try to talk over anyone and if you miss your turn just wait for the next checkins window, net control usually does a few rounds. some nets are traffic nets which are a little more structured but you dont have to worry about that starting out. just jump into a casual club net first and listen a couple times before you checkin, you'll get the feel for it real quick

not dumb questions at all, i remember being totally lost when i started chasing awards too. ok so for LOTW, yeah it does match automatically once both sides have uploaded — you'll see the QSL status change to confirmed in your log. you do have to apply for the actual award credit though, that part isnt automatic. you go into your LOTW account and submit an application and pay a small fee and it checks your confirmed QSOs against what you need. the mixed vs phone vs digital thing — those are separate endorsements basically. mixed is the main one and counts any mode, so if you're just going for the base DXCC certificate mixed is the way to go. once you have that you can apply for mode-specific endorsements if you want. getting 100 confirmed on SSB only or CW only is a separate achievement. and yes your club buddy is right, the same QSO absolutely can count toward multiple awards. a contact with a station in Wyoming is credit for WAS (Wyoming), could be WAZ credit depending on the zone, and counts as that DXCC entity too. thats why people talk about being strategic — some rare entities are also in rare zones or hard to work states so one good contact does a lot of work for you. 87 confirmed is a solid start, you'll get to 100 faster than you think once you're actually paying attention to what you need

i passed mine last year and basically just did hamstudy for like 2 weeks every night before bed. maybe 20-30 min a session. failed a practice test the first night, was passing them consistently by like day 10. the real test felt easier than the practice ones tbh the one thing i wish someone told me is dont skip the rules and regulations section even if its boring, there are a lot of questions from that part and its easy points if you just read through it once