John Martinez

so ive been running an RTL-SDR v3 for a couple years now, mostly just poking around on HF in direct sampling mode and doing some airband stuff, and honestly it works well enough that i keep talking myself out of upgrading. but the RSP1B keeps showing up in my browsing and the price point isnt insane.
main thing i do is just wideband monitoring, some WSPR decoding with WSJT-X piped through SDR#, occasionally ill run it through SDR-Console when i want the waterfall to not look like garbage. not really doing anything serious, just like to see whats happening across the bands.
the direct sampling mode on the RTL-SDR always felt like a compromise to me, like yeah i can hear stuff on 40m but the dynamic range is obviously not great when theres strong local stations around. wondering if the RSP1B actually makes a meaningful real-world difference or if its one of those things that looks good on paper and in practice youre like oh its slightly better i guess.
anyone whos actually used both and not just read the spec sheet?

congrats man. my first contact was also on a 2m repeater and i was shaking the whole time for no reason whatsoever. the guy i talked to ended up becoming someone i chat with almost every week on the local net now so you never know. stick with it

so i've had my FT-857D for probably 6 years now and just got around to doing the mars/cap mod and enabling the extended receive. took me maybe 20 minutes once i actually found the right pads to short and stopped second guessing myself. used the mod guide over on mods.dk which i think most people know about already.
the extended rx is honestly pretty nice, picking up stuff down in the lower HF range and even poking around some of the utility freqs is fun when bands are dead. the TX mod i mostly did because our local ARES group sometimes operates on freqs just outside the ham bands during activations and it's a pain not being able to hit those.
my question is more about whether anyone's done the fan mod on the 857 too. mine gets warm running digital modes for any extended period and i know there's a resistor swap you can do to make the fan kick in earlier or just run constantly. anyone done that and did it help? the fan noise doesnt bother me at all, i just dont want to cook the finals on a long FT8 session

oh man I had no idea 10m was open like that, I'm pretty new to HF — got my general a few months ago and have mostly just been sitting on 40m because thats where all the activity seemed to be when I was first getting started. gonna have to actually try 10 this weekend. do I need to do anything different antenna wise or will my dipole cut for 40 at least pick up something on 10? I know it wont be resonant but just curious if its worth even trying before I mess with anything.

yeah the 10m opening thing is real, i noticed it too. been running just 50 watts into a wire dipole and working stuff i normally wouldnt touch without a big antenna setup. had a qso with a station in Italy that was just booming in, S9 plus, it was almost surreal compared to what that band sounded like two winters ago.
as for the Icom rumor i wouldnt hold your breath too much. ive seen that "7300 replacement" rumor float around like three times in the past two years and nothing ever came of it. that said Yaesu did drop the FT-710 kind of quietly and people slept on it at first so who knows. might be worth waiting to see what actually shows at Dayton if anything. the hamvention announcements are usually where the real stuff drops anyway.

ok so ive been licensed about 4 months now and i mostly do 2m FM through the local repeater and occasionally some HF when conditions are decent. my question is about phonetics — like i know the NATO ones, Alpha Bravo Charlie etc, but i feel like nobody on the repeater actually uses them consistently. sometimes people spell out their callsign just saying the letters normally and its fine, other times someone goes full phonetic the whole way through.
is there a rule about when you have to use them vs when you can just say the letter? i looked through part 97 and didnt really see anything specific. my elmer told me to always use phonetics when giving my call but then i hear plenty of guys on the repeater just rattling off their letters and everyone seems to understand fine. just wondering if im overthinking this or if theres actually a standard people are supposed to follow

I use all three! eQSL integrates with logging software and automatically sends cards which is convenient for casual contacts. You can design your own eQSL card which is fun. Just remember it won't count for ARRL awards, but eQSL has its own awards system.

Check your audio buffer settings in RCForb - try reducing both transmit and receive buffer sizes to minimum values your connection can handle without dropouts. I had similar issues until I dropped mine to 256 samples.

yeah what the other guy said, also just double check you have the offset right too. 2m repeaters usually use a 600 kHz offset and you need to make sure your radio is set to shift up or down the right direction depending on the repeater's output frequency. repeaterbook should have that info. i forgot to set my offset correctly my first week and was confused why the repeater wasnt responding even after i got the tone sorted lol

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and the signal reports come in fine but honestly after a while it feels like im just clicking buttons and not really talking to anyone. like theres no actual exchange happening beyond grid squares and signal reports.
started poking around JS8Call last month and the concept is interesting — basically takes the weak signal capability of FT8 but lets you actually type messages back and forth. latency is rough though and the protocol feels kind of clunky compared to WSJT-X. anybody here running JS8Call regularly and finding it worth the time investment? i keep hearing people use it for EMCOMM stuff which makes sense to me but for casual ragchewing on HF it feels like it hasnt really caught on the way FT8 did.
also curious if anyone still runs PSK31 for the low-power ragchew thing. i remember that being the go-to before FT8 kind of ate everything. my old IC-7300 decodes it fine and fldigi works but the bands feel pretty quiet on PSK frequencies most of the time now.