Jennifer Lee

the part that always gets me is the third party traffic rules, those seem like somthing a lot of people dont even know about and could accidentally violate if theyre letting a non-ham friend talk through their radio. i think the bigger practical concern for most people is just keeping your license info updated with the FCC because if your address is wrong and they try to contact you thats its own problem. but yeah for normal operating mistakes i wouldnt lose sleep over it honestly

not a dumb question at all, this trips up pretty much everyone starting out. so the CTCSS tone in the directory is almost always the tone you need to transmit to open the repeater's squelch — think of it like a key that tells the repeater "hey this is a legit signal, let me through." you don't necessarily need to set a receive tone on your end, most people leave receive tone off so they can hear anything coming through the repeater without filtering. double check in the baofeng menu that your TX tone is actually saved to that channel and not just set in the general settings, because those radios can be a little weird about that — channel memory sometimes overrides what you think you set. as for the linking stuff, some repeaters are connected to systems like IRLP or EchoLink or Allstar which basically tie repeaters together over the internet so you can talk to people in other cities or even countries. practically speaking for you right now it just means when you key up you might hear a little beep or a courtesy tone before you talk, and there might be a short tail after you release the PTT before you hear the repeater drop. just wait for it before you start talking or you'll get cut off. good luck, you'll get it sorted

the generator to battery to radio approach is exactly what i do and it works great. the EU2200i is super clean power anyway but yeah running through the battery acts as a buffer and your radio never sees any fluctuation. just make sure your charger can handle the charge rate — if you're pulling say 20-25w on transmit and running a laptop and maybe a TNC you want to be putting back in at least what you're taking out or you'll slowly drain down over 12 hours. a 20-30 amp DC charger running off the honda should be more than enough, thing will barely be breaking a sweat. for the EFHW on a pushup mast in a parking lot, you'll want at least one counterpoise wire. i usually run about 17 feet of wire along the ground, doesn't have to be buried or anything, just laying on the gravel is fine. some guys stake it out in like a star pattern if they have room. the EFHW with a 49:1 unun really doesnt care that much about ground but a single counterpoise cleans up the feedpoint impedance a bit and keeps RF off your coax braid. sounds like a solid plan honestly.

yeah PSK31 nostalgia is real lol. i ran that mode heavily like 2009-2014 and there were always people to ragchew with on 14.070. now that waterfall is mostly quiet except for some RTTY contest activity. FT8 kind of ate everything i dont use JS8 much but from what i understand the Relay and group messaging stuff is the interesting part, not just the one on one contacts. theres some people using it for mesh-ish emcomm type experiments too which is kind of cool. might be worth looking at the JS8Call groups.io list to find when people are scheduling activity on your band

i went two years ago for the first time and honestly had no idea what half the stuff was but it was still really cool just walking around. ended up buying a random antenna tuner from some old guy who spent like 20 minutes explaining how it worked. never made it back since but been meaning to. how far of a drive are you coming from

pi is definitely overkill for just the switching but honestly once you go down that road you end up adding stuff anyway so maybe not a bad idea to start there. i built a whole shack automation thing on a pi 3b+ — remote PTT, rotor control, band switching, and a little flask web app so i can see whats happening from my phone. took way longer than expected but its really nice now. that said if all you want is the relay switching an arduino is way simpler to get running fast and you dont have to deal with linux and SD card corruption and all that pi headache. had a pi zero kill itself mid-contest once because the filesystem got corrupted and that was not fun. arduino just runs the loop forever and doesnt care.

Popular HF/6m radios in the $1k to $1.5k range include the Icom IC-7300, Yaesu FT-710, and Yaesu FT-DX10. I'm setting up my first serious HF base station and getting conflicting advice on receiver performance versus published specs. Some operators report the FT-991A digs weak signals out of noise better than the 7300 in high-signal environments, while the 7300 gets overwhelmed and needs RF gain reduction. Sherwood Engineering rates the IC-7300 receiver higher than the FT-991, but some experienced operators can't tell the difference in real-world conditions. What's your actual operating experience with these rigs?

CW Academy is absolutely worth the wait if you can get in. The structured approach and having an actual elmer guide you through the plateaus makes a huge difference. That said, if you're motivated, you can definitely do it solo - just takes more discipline and patience.

Had similar issues with my first dipole. A commercial balun like the LDG model runs about $30 and includes current balun protection from RF on your coax. Worth the investment for consistent results. Also verify your frequency - 40m phone and CW segments need different resonant points.

hamstudy is good like the other person said but i'd also throw out the ARRL Technician manual if you actually want to understand the material rather than just memorize answers. i know some people say just grind the question pool and thats fine for passing but if you actually want to get on the air and understand whats happening, the book helps. that said i know plenty of folks who just did the flash card method and passed first try so do what works for you. one thing i will say, dont stress too much about the math questions, a few of them you can just learn the formula and plug in numbers, its not like you're doing calculus. and once you pass tech dont wait too long to get on the air, thats the part where you actually learn stuff, the license is just the door

yeah that sounds like it could be the finals but dont rule out the driver yet. on the 857 the PA transistors are the Q1010 and Q1011 if i remember right, RD70HVF1 MOSFETs. what i'd do first is check the drain voltage on those with the rig in TX — should be somewhere around 13.8v obviously, but also check that gate bias is actually getting there. if the driver stage isnt putting out signal to the gates you'll get exactly what you're describing: ALC moves a little because the ALC circuit is seeing something upstream, but no actual RF makes it out. the other thing i'd look at is the LPF relay board. those relays can get flaky and i've seen them cause complete loss of output while everything else looks normal. if you have a way to inject a small signal and probe after each stage that's really the cleanest way to isolate where it's dying. don't just shotgun replace the finals before you're sure, those parts arent cheap and if the driver is toast and you put new finals in without knowing, you can take the new ones out too.