Radio Geek

so ive been licensed for about 3 years now and mostly just done HF but i finally got a decent dual band yagi setup on an az/el rotor and figured id try working some of the linear transponder birds. specifically been looking at FO-29 and AO-73 passes over my QTH. my question is about the doppler correction — i get the concept, the satellite is moving toward you so the uplink frequency shifts one way and downlink the other. but when i use gpredict to track the pass and it feeds into my rig via hamlib, it seems like the offsets it applies are way more aggressive than what ive read about. like on a good overhead pass the total swing is something like 10kHz on 435 downlink? that seems like a lot but maybe im wrong also the other thing thats confusing me is the inverting transponder thing on FO-29. so if i tune up in frequency on my uplink the downlink goes down? ive read about this several times and i sort of understand it mechanically but in practice when im on a pass im losing track of what im doing. does anyone have a tip for internalizing this that actually works or is it just muscle memory after a few passes

i was in the same boat about a year ago honestly. what finally made it click for me was realizing they kind of serve different communities. LoTW is the serious award chaser system, eQSL is more casual and has some neat digital card designs people actually put effort into, and paper cards are just... kind of a tradition that a lot of operators genuinely enjoy. i have a whole box of cards i've gotten from people all over the world and i like flipping through them. dont stress too much about having all three perfect right away. get LoTW sorted, maybe sign up for eQSL too since its free and easy, and if someone sends you a paper card just enjoy it. you can always send cards through the bureau which is way cheaper than direct mail if you eventually want to do that side of things too.

i literally just passed mine like two months ago so this is fresh for me. i only used hamstudy.org and nothing else, did it on my phone during lunch breaks for maybe three weeks and felt ready. the electronics questions tripped me up at first but there are only a handful of actual math questions and once you see the pattern they're not bad. i think i spent way too much time worrying about it honestly

Getting ready to start my CW journey (currently unlicensed but studying for General). I'm hearing great things about both CW Academy and LCWO.net for learning from scratch. CW Academy seems more structured with mentors, but there's a waiting list. LCWO I can start immediately and it's free. Has anyone used both? Which would you recommend for going from zero to 20 WPM? I'm pretty self-disciplined but also like having guidance.

honestly for a 200ft ridge obstruction a yagi might be overkill depending how far those towns are. if we're talking 8-10 miles the collinear might already be marginal there and a moderate gain yagi like a 6 or 8el would help a lot, but if the towns are only 4-5 miles out and its just the ridge blocking them you might get away with just tilting the antenna or even just a better feedline run to reduce losses first. old G7s can have pretty sad feedpoints after 6 years of weather, worth checking the SWR on the existing antenna before buying anything new.

I went through basically the exact same thing last year, stuck at around 13 for what felt like forever. what finally got me moving again was actually just getting on the air and making real contacts even when i wasn't confident. SKCC has slow speed nets and the guys there are incredibly patient, like genuinely patient, nobody made me feel bad for asking for repeats. hearing real fists instead of machine-generated tones made a difference i didnt expect. the rhythm of how people actually send is different from a trainer and your ear adjusts. good luck, it does get better eventually

QRZ is one people forget — its what you say when you're asking who's calling you, not just a website lol. i made that mistake early on, heard someone say QRZ and thought they were talking about looking something up. the website just took its name from the code. also QRP means low power operation which is a whole rabbit hole if you ever get into that stuff, lots of people who only run 5 watts or less really identify with that term. dont stress too much about memorizing every single one, the obscure ones like QUF or whatever you might literally never hear in your whole ham career

three weeks and you know a handful of letters, thats actually fine dont stress it. the thing your elmer said about not learning visually is real though, you dont want to be picturing dashes and dots in your head every time you hear something because at any real speed that falls apart fast. what most people swear by now is the Koch method, basically you start with just two characters at full speed, like 20wpm or whatever, and you add a new one only once you can copy those at like 90% accuracy. sounds slow but it builds the right kind of muscle memory. the app LCWO dot net is free and does exactly this, ive seen total beginners get to 10-12wpm in a few months using it consistently. key word being consistently, even 10-15 minutes a day beats doing an hour once a week by a lot.

Getting FLdigi working with my SDR setup was challenging initially, but once configured it opens up many more modes beyond just PSK31. JS8Call is more sensitive to linearity than FT8/FT4, so your transmitter setup matters more.

Start with the ARRL RF worksheets A and B - Worksheet B is now a necessary step under the new rules. For your dipole setup, check OET Supplement B Bulletin 65 which has numerous tables for different antenna types and bands. Most likely your 100W/dipole combination will pass easily.

so ive been noticing 10 meters has been doing some really strange things the past couple weeks and i cant quite figure out if its just me or if conditions are actually as weird as they seem. some days i can work europe no problem from here in the midwest, like legit 59 signals out of nowhere, and then other days the band sounds completely dead and i cant even hear anything from out west let alone across the pond. i've been checking the solar flux numbers on spaceweather.com and they've been bouncing around a lot, like anywhere from the low 150s up to 190 something and then crashing back down. does that kind of variation normally cause this much inconsistency or is something else going on? im wondering if im missing something about how to read the conditions before i get on. also had a weird experience last tuesday where i worked a guy in japan around noon local time on 10m with like a 5 watt qrp setup and then an hour later the band was completely gone. no warning, no gradual fade, just gone. is that normal for this part of the solar cycle?

that summit is a good one for a first activation, not too brutal of a hike. i did it a couple years back with a buddipole and regretted every ounce of it by the time i got to the top lol. the EFHW is definitely the move for SOTA, i use a 49:1 unun and just random wire now and it works fine on 40 and 20 with a little trimming. 18 lbs is heavy though yeah, once you get it dialed in you can get a SOTA kit down to like 7 or 8 lbs pretty easily if you dont mind a smaller battery

Have you verified the frequency calibration? The standard APRS frequency in North America is 144.390 MHz but some radios drift slightly. Try monitoring with a second radio to confirm you're hearing clean packets on frequency.

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and mostly just did ragchewing and some local stuff but lately ive been getting really into DX and i think i want to actually go for DXCC. i have maybe 60-something confirmed already just from casual contacts over the years which is a nice head start i guess. my confusion is around the whole LoTW vs paper QSL thing. i know LoTW is what most people use now and the ARRL processes credits from that automatically but like... if i have old QSLs from contacts before i was uploading to LoTW, can i still submit those physical cards? and do i have to send the actual cards or just some kind of application form with them? also how does WAS and WAZ fit into all this — are those totally separate awards that you apply for independently or does any of it overlap? i keep seeing people mention they're working on all three at the same time and im not sure if thats a thing you can kind of bundle together or if its just coincidental that the contacts count for multiple things. sorry if this is explained somewhere obvious, ive read the ARRL award pages a few times and i always come away more confused than when i started

yeah that symptom pattern — tx working but rx completely dead — is pretty classic for a blown front end. on most modern rigs there's a PIN diode or a set of schottky protection diodes right at the antenna port that are supposed to clamp transients, but a big enough surge just sacrifices them and sometimes takes out the first LNA stage too. the 7300 uses a fairly integrated RF front end so if the LNA MMIC got hit you might be looking at a board-level component that's not easy to source or rework without proper gear. i'd start by checking continuity and resistance at the antenna port to ground on both center and shield with the radio off and unplugged, just to see if anything obvious is shorted. also worth pulling the top cover and looking for any visible burn marks near the antenna input circuitry. icom's service centers can sometimes just swap the RF unit board but that's not cheap. if you're handy with SMD work and can get the service manual it might be worth a shot yourself, but honestly for a 7300 the repair cost vs. just getting it serviced professionally is probably worth thinking about.

yeah i caught the tail end of that, jumped on around 3ish and worked a couple stations in brazil and one in argentina before it faded. my wspr spots were going nuts too, showing up in places i normally never decode. solar flux has been climbing this week so hopefully we get more of that. 10m is just a completely different band when its actually open, new hams who got licensed in the doldrums have no idea what theyre missing lol on the 905 thing i saw the same posts, price is still pretty eye watering but i guess for what it does its not shocking. would love to hear from someone who actually has one before i even think about it

this is kind of what i figured when i got into HF but nobody told me, i spent like two months convinced i needed a better mic before someone on a net finally just said hey your gain is set way too high and i fixed it in five minutes. felt kind of dumb but also relieved because i wasnt about to spend another $200 on a mic do you guys bother with a separate speech processor or is the built in stuff in modern radios good enough now. ive seen the W2IHY boxes and stuff like that and im not sure if thats overkill for just casual ragchewing and the occasional contest

ok so i just got my technician license last month and ive been reading through part 97 trying to figure out what the rules actually are and honestly its kind of a mess to read through. like i get the basic idea but some of it is really confusing. my main question is about what counts as prohibited transmissions — i know you cant do music and you cant broadcast to the general public but what exactly counts as broadcasting? like if im just talking to a friend on 2 meters and someone else happens to hear it, is that broadcasting? and also ive seen people say you cant transmit obscene language but who decides whats obscene, is there like a list somewhere or is it just whatever the FCC feels like that day. also someone at my club meeting said something about third party traffic and how you have to be careful with that and now im paranoid about literally everything i say on the radio. sorry if this is a dumb question im just trying to not accidentally break any rules

so i've been working on a direct conversion receiver for 40m for the past few months, mostly following the Minima design but i kind of went off-script on the audio stage because i had some TL072s laying around instead of the specified opamps. got the whole thing assembled last weekend and it actually receives signals which honestly surprised me a bit. the problem is there's this low frequency hum in the audio that gets worse when i touch the enclosure, and also i'm getting some weird heterodyne-type squealing when i tune near the bottom of the band. the BFO is running around 7.0 MHz and i built it on ugly-style construction on a piece of copper clad. my shielding is basically just a cookie tin i found in the kitchen which is maybe not ideal. anybody dealt with this kind of thing before? im wondering if the hum is a grounding issue or if its RF getting into the audio stage somehow. the VFO is built on a separate board about 3 inches away from the audio section, no shielding between them. should i be worried about that or is 3 inches fine for this kind of build

The partial connect and drop thing with VARA FM usually comes down to one of two things in my experience — audio levels are either too hot going into the soundcard or the timing is slightly off on PTT. The Signalink has that little trim pot inside for TX level and a lot of people never touch it and just crank the software slider, which can cause exactly the kind of clipping that makes the gateway drop you after partial sync. Try backing the TX audio way down, like lower than you think it should be, and see if that changes anything. Also worth checking — is your Kenwood set to a fixed audio output level or is it doing any kind of automatic level control? Some rigs have settings that mess with the audio chain in ways that confuse the modem. And yeah to answer your other question, once you actually get a clean connection Winlink Express handles the message sync automatically, both send and receive, you dont have to poke it. It'll pull everything in the queue for your callsign from that gateway.

I worked several Marconi 150th anniversary stations last January - N1W was particularly active and well-run. The difference now is that social media spreads the word faster than QST ever could, but there's also more competition for attention from POTA, contests, and digital modes.

That auxiliary fuse box might actually work fine if it's heavy gauge wiring to the battery. Check the wire size feeding that box - if it's 12AWG or larger you're probably okay. But direct battery is always the gold standard.

honestly the Extra exam isnt as bad as people make it sound. i stressed about it for months and then just sat down with the ARRL Extra manual and hm601 practice tests for about 6 weeks and passed first try. the theory sections are dense but most of it starts clicking once you see the same concepts come up over and over in the practice questions. the smith chart stuff yeah its weird but there are only like a handful of questions that actually show up on the pool so dont overthink it. as for whether its worth it, the privileges on 75 and 40 are real. the extra portion of 40 meters especially is noticeably less crowded on weekday mornings if youre into rag chewing or working DX. i also just liked knowing i had gone as far as you can go with the license, kind of felt like finishing something. but if youre happy with what youre doing now nobody is going to take that away from you by not upgrading.

yeah the fan thing is real, mine started getting audible around the 3 year mark. i swapped it out for a noctua 40mm and its basically silent now. you do have to do a little adapter work because the connector isnt the same and the voltage curve is slightly different but nothing crazy. theres a thread on eham somewhere with the exact part numbers. the hardest part honestly was just getting the case back together without scratching anything, i always seem to do that. also on the MARS mod — totally agree its less scary than it looks. i did mine about 18 months ago. just make sure youre doing the right revision of the mod for your serial number range because there were a couple different board layouts and the pad locations moved. the older threads dont always make that clear and i had a moment of confusion before i found the right documentation.

made that exact jump about 18 months ago. honestly the scope on the 7610 is better, wider and the touchscreen feels a bit more responsive but its not like night and day if you're used to the 7300. the real difference for me was the dual receiver during contests. SO2R-lite kind of thing where you can be running on one band and listening on another without a second radio taking up bench space. if you dont do much contesting though i can see the argument for just staying put. the roofing filters on the 7610 are also better which matters on a crowded band, 3khz vs the 7300s 15khz on the default i think. makes a difference when 40m is wall to wall on a weekend. but if your antenna situation isnt great the radio upgrade will only do so much anyway. thats the thing nobody wants to say.