John Martinez

Do a proper install with direct battery connection - this gives you reliable operation when you need it most. I know it's more work but worth doing right the first time. The voltage drop through multiple connections can cause issues.

yeah what he said about the filtering is no joke. i blew an afternoon trying to run my 7300 and an old Kenwood simultaneously without proper bandpass filters and basically just made both radios useless. there are some good writeups on the N6TR and K9CT sites about SO2R setups if you want to go down that rabbit hole but budget at least a few hundred bucks for the filter situation before you even think about software integration. one thing i'll add that nobody talks about much is the SO2R mental load is really different on phone vs CW. on phone you cant really monitor the second radio in your ear the same way you can with CW because your brain processes speech differently. some guys use one ear per radio on CW and it becomes kind of natural after a while. phone SO2R is a lot harder imo.

i used the gordon west book when i studied and it does explain the reasoning behind things which i liked. its not super deep but at least you understand why the answer is what it is instead of just pattern matching. that said i also did hamstudy on my phone whenever i had a few minutes, like waiting in line or whatever. the frequency and band stuff tripped me up at first because theres so many numbers to remember but they come up enough in practice that it sticks eventually. just pick one method and actually do it every day, thats the main thing, dont cram it all the night before

so ive been getting back into CW after probably a 15 year break and picked up a used Bencher BY-1 paddle a few months ago. nice paddle, feels solid, but something about my sending just sounds wrong to me when i play it back on recordings. the dits and dahs sound kind of mushy i guess? like they blend together more than i remember them doing back when i was actively on the air. im running it into a Yaesu FT-891 with the internal keyer set to around 18 wpm which is where i feel comfortable. ive messed with the weight setting a little bit but honestly im not sure what im actually doing there. does the weight adjustment change the dit to dah ratio or is that something separate? i feel like i understood this at some point and just forgot everything. also not sure if the paddle tension is adjusted right. it came used and i havent touched the screws. could that be part of it? sorry if this is a basic question im just trying to get my fist sounding halfway decent before i start calling CQ again

yeah its really just situational, theres no hard rule that says you have to use phonetics on every single exchange. when the band is quiet and signals are strong most people just rattle off their call without phonetics and everyone copies it fine. where it matters is when conditions are rough or theres QRM, thats when foxtrot and november start doing real work because your brain fills in the gaps easier with a full word than just a letter sound. the thing your friend mentioned about alternate phonetics is real -- some ops use things like "New York" or "Texas" instead of the NATO equivalents, you hear it a lot from older timers or guys who learned before NATO got standardized in the hobby. some of them will use whatever word is clear rather than stick to the official list. personally i default to NATO because everyone knows it and it avoids confusion but if youre in a pileup and nobody's copying Foxtrot you say Florida or whatever gets through. DX stations especially, if english isnt their first language the NATO words were actually chosen to be recognizable across languages so theyre usually the better bet

just passed mine last month so pretty fresh for me. the propagation questions tripped me up a bit at first but once you understand basically why skywave works the way it does it starts to click. i used the Gordon West study book which felt a lot more approachable than the ARRL manual for exam prep purposes, the handbook is great but its not really a study guide ya know. one thing nobody told me — after you pass there's a few days before your General shows up in the ULS database so dont try to operate HF the same day lol. learned that one from someone in my club who was super eager. 40m is good like the other person said, i've also been messing around on 17m which is kind of underrated imo

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest not too far from me, KFF reference. been meaning to try this for ages and just never got around to it. i threw my KX3 in a backpack with a 40m linked dipole, hiked in about a mile and a half to a nice clearing and just started calling CQ WWFF. honestly didnt expect much since ive mostly done POTA and figured WWFF would be quieter but i got a solid pile for about 45 minutes, mostly on 40m, couple contacts on 20m when things slowed down. logged about 67 QSOs total which felt pretty good for a first time. my question is around the logging side of things — do i upload to wwff.cc directly or is there somewhere else it needs to go? i see some references also get spotted on POTA which confused me a bit. and do contacts with other WWFF activators count double or is it just a bonus thing? i read the rules but they were a little confusing honestly.

so i heard the Tri-County ARC is doing their hamfest again in March, supposedly bigger than last year with more vendor tables. im thinking about hauling some gear down there to sell, got a old Kenwood TS-430 that's been sitting in the garage and a bunch of random coax and connectors i never use. anyone else planning to go? always fun to walk around and see whats there even if you dont buy anything

Following the PG5M/DX Commander design philosophy, I'm building a ground-mounted multi-band vertical using a 43ft telescoping carbon fiber pole. Planning to cover 40M through 10M using coil loading and switching. Current parts list includes the carbon fiber mast ($80), 18AWG stranded copper for radials, and homebrew 49:1 UnUn on FT140-43 core. The real question is radial system optimization - I have space for thirty-two 32ft elevated radials at 8ft height. Will this elevated configuration outperform ground-level radials?Should I vary radial lengths per band or stick with uniform 32ft?Also considering a remote antenna tuner at the base vs using the internal tuner in my IC-7300. Looking for real-world performance comparisons from anyone who's built similar systems.