Lisa Chen

yeah i was confused about this same stuff when i upgraded. one thing that helped me was just bookmarking the actual fcc part 97 page and the arrl frequency chart and keeping both open. the arrl one is color coded and easier to read but like the other guy said its not law. also worth knowing that 40m gets kind of wild at night with all the international broadcast stations and stuff bleeding in, so even if youre technically in the right place you might have a hard time finding a clear frequency anyway lol. just something to be aware of if youre wondering why 40m sounds like a mess sometimes

I went through this exact thing two winters ago. Had an 7300 and borrowed a friends rig to try it during CQWW and yeah the antenna isolation was a mess, i was getting so much rf into the second receiver that the autos were engaging constantly. ended up just using radio 2 for S&P on 40 while i ran 20 and that alone honestly bumped my Q count noticeably just because i wasnt sitting there spinning the vfo on dead air waiting for a break in my run. if your antennas are on the same tower the band combo matters a lot — 20 and 40 together is rough without filtering, but something like 15 and 40 or 10 and 80 is more manageable because the harmonics arent as nasty. theres a good writeup on the k8cc website that goes into the filter math if you want to get into it. but yeah even a janky half-working SO2R setup taught me a ton about rate optimization just by forcing me to think about when to break a run versus stay put

dude this is exactly the kind of post i needed to see right now because im literally in the middle of building a Penntek TR-45L kit and im getting nervous about whether it'll actually work when im done. your post gives me hope lol. how long did the QCX mini take you start to finish roughly?

don't stress about the old log entries too much — for DXCC purposes the main things you need are the callsign, band, mode, and date/time in UTC. if you're missing RST that's fine, ARRL doesn't care about signal reports for award credit. the clock thing could be a problem if you're off by more than a few minutes but honestly for most garden variety contacts it probably wont matter unless you're trying to claim something from a rare DXpedition where the log might be checked against theirs. LoTW is basically the way to go these days yeah. paper QSLs still work and some entities still require them because the DX station never uploaded to LoTW, but for the bulk of your contacts you'll want everything going through LoTW. get your certificate loaded up and start uploading, it's a little clunky the first time but once it's set up it just runs. also look at Club Log, a lot of DXpeditions use it for OQRS which is how you request a QSL from them directly without having to deal with a bureau.

so ive been on SSB for about two years now and i keep getting comments that my audio sounds like im underwater or there's too much low end. Running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which should honestly be more than enough to sound decent but something isnt clicking. I set the mic gain where the ALC is just barely moving on peaks like everyone says to do, compression is at about 4 on the internal compressor, and i went through the parametric EQ and rolled off below 200hz thinking that would help with the boominess. Still getting the same feedback from guys on the other end. One guy last week said i sounded like i was talking through a pillow. Tried a different mic cable too so thats probably not it. Not sure if its my room (spare bedroom, pretty dead acoustically, carpet and stuff) or if im missing something in the radio settings. Anyone run a similar setup and had to fight with it?

yeah single yagi EME on 2m is doable now with JT65B and especially Q65 which has gotten pretty popular lately, the digital modes have completely changed what the minimum viable station looks like. that said a 9el at 30 feet isnt gonna get you there, you really want something in the 12 to 16 element range at minimum and height matters a lot because youre fighting ground reflection and noise. most guys doing single yagi EME are running something like a 4x or 2x array of longer yagis, not one antenna. 500w is actually not bad for a starting point, a lot of guys run 1kw or more but ive seen single yagi contacts made with 400-500w when the geometry is right and the other station has a big array. the path loss on EME is around 252 dB at 2m which is just a brutal number, every dB of antenna gain you can squeeze out matters enormously. your biggest wins early on are going to be antenna gain and a really low noise preamp at the feedpoint, like a good LNA with maybe 0.3-0.5 dB noise figure makes a real difference at these signal levels. get on the ON4KST chat and just lurk for a while, thats where most of the EME scheduling and real time coordination happens. youll get a feel for who is active and what stations are workable for a modest setup. its a genuinely great community, guys with big stations love helping smaller pistol stations make their first contacts.

honestly the general exam isnt that much harder than tech if you put in a few weeks with hamstudy. the pool feels bigger but a lot of it clicks faster once you have the tech foundation. the propagation stuff especially, once it starts making sense it really makes sense if you know what i mean. and yeah memorizing answers is basically how everyone does it, dont feel bad about that. youll learn the actual theory when you get on the air and start experiencing it. like reading about greyline propagation is one thing but the first time you work someone in europe on 17m at sunrise it just suddenly makes sense in your head. as for privileges, general gets you a solid chunk of HF. youre not getting all of the phone portions on like 75m and a few other spots but honestly for getting started its more than enough. 40m and 20m alone will keep you busy for years. extra class opens up those extra slices but dont let anyone pressure you into rushing for it, plenty of people have been happy generals for decades.

so ive been running a half wave dipole on 40m for about two years now, fed with 450 ohm ladder line into a tuner, and its been working pretty well honestly. but my neighbor just put up an end fed halfwave with a 49:1 unun and hes been talking about how much better it is for dx because of the radiation angle or whatever. now im second guessing everything. my dipole is up about 30 feet, roughly horizontal, center fed, and goes to my attic tuner. his EFHW is mounted at like 35 feet on one end and slopes down to maybe 12 feet. so its not even a fair comparison really. i ran a few tests calling the same stations during the same evening and we were usually within a db or two of each other on signal reports which to me says they're basically equivalent for my situation. anyway my real question is — is the end fed actually doing something fundamentally different pattern wise at those heights, or is this one of those cases where the difference only shows up when you get the antenna way higher than either of us can manage in a suburban lot. i feel like im missing something because he keeps insisting his is better but our rssi reports are basically the same

yeah i did my first one a few months ago and honestly the 44 contacts thing stressed me out way more than it needed to. ended up with like 67 in a couple hours. the hunters are really active once you get spotted. one thing i didnt realize until after was that you can combine POTA and WWFF references if the park is in both databases, so you get credit in both programs from the same activation which is pretty sweet. double dipping in the best possible way lol

I did basically this exact comparison a few years back, had a 40m dipole in inverted-V and tried a vertical I homebrewed from some aluminum tubing. ran about 20 radials which still isnt great. the vertical was definitely louder in every sense — more noise, more signal, just more everything. whether that translated to better contacts was kinda situational honestly. for Japan and Pacific stuff on 40 at sunset the vertical seemed to have an edge but for EU from the east coast the dipole broadside held its own pretty well. one thing i'll say is if your inverted-V apex is only at 30 feet youre not getting great low angle radiation out of it either so both antennas are kinda compromised in their own ways. if you can get the dipole up higher thats probably the easiest win before messing around with a vertical and all the radial work that comes with it

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m and some 20m when the band cooperates. i keep seeing people mention LoTW and eQSL and i signed up for both but honestly i still dont totally understand the difference or which one i should be focusing on. from what i can tell LoTW is run by the ARRL and is more like the official thing for awards like DXCC, and eQSL is more casual but more people use it? or is it the other way around. and then some people still send paper QSL cards through the bureau or direct and im not even sure how the bureau system works yet. i did upload my log to LoTW once and got a few confirmations back but i dont really know what im supposed to do with them or if i need to do anything. do contacts just confirm automatically when both people upload or is there some extra step. and is it worth bothering with paper cards at all or is everyone just doing digital now

yeah end feds are pretty much the go-to for that kind of thing, i use a 49:1 unun with about 53 feet of wire and it just works. throw it in a stuff sack and it weighs nothing. for really quick activations i dont even bother with a mast, just find a good branch like you did 14 contacts on your first one is solid, some people struggle to get the required 4 so you did fine. wait til you try a summit with a big pileup, that gets fun real quick

so ive been messing around with a cheapo RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about 6 months now and honestly its been pretty great for what it is. got it running with SDR# on the shack PC, been doing some ADS-B, listening around 40m with a long wire, picking up NOAA weather sats which is honestly still cool every time. but HF performance is kind of meh even with the direct sampling mod, theres a lot of images and the dynamic range just feels limited compared to what people describe. been looking at the SDRplay RSP1B and the price isnt insane, like $100 range. but then part of me wonders if i should just save up for a HackRF and have something i can actually transmit with for experiments. i know the HackRF receive side isnt as good as a dedicated RX device but the flexibility is appealing. mostly interested in HF monitoring, maybe some satellite stuff, and ive been wanting to play with decoding some utility stuff. not really doing any serious contesting or anything with this, its more of a rabbit hole hobby within the hobby if that makes sense. anyone gone through this same upgrade path and have thoughts?

i had the same issue for like two months before someone on a net just bluntly told me i sounded like i was calling from 1987. turned out my TX monitor was deceiving me because the monitor in the 7300 doesnt reflect what the other end actually hears after processing, at least not exactly. ended up having a buddy on a nearby hill record my audio on his end and send me the file and wow it was eye opening. the EQ i thought was helping was actually making the sibilance really harsh. backed everything off to flat and just adjusted mic distance and it was night and day. sometimes the answer is just less stuff going on not more

welcome to the addiction haha. okay so for nets, the best resource ive actually found that isnt completely dead is the Amateur Radio Relay League's net directory, but honestly your best bet is just asking your local club. every club ive been a member of had at least two or three weekly nets that werent listed anywhere official, just kind of word of mouth. check into a club meeting and mention youre looking — someone will point you in the right direction within about five minutes. as for special events, W1AW has a list on the ARRL site and there's also a site called qrz.com that does a decent job of aggregating them, just poke around in the operating events section. lighthouse weekend is a big one, usually in August, and yeah it's a blast — stations set up at actual lighthouses all over the country. the World Castles on the Air and similar programs do similar things. once you work one you'll want to do all of them, just warning you now. for that 7.258 net, 40m can be real finnicky depending on time of day and propagation. what time are you tuning in? might just be a propagation thing if youre not close enough to the net control station.

deer crashing around near your antenna is basically a rite of passage at this point lol. ive had squirrels investigate my feedline and one time a very confused turkey just stood there staring at me for like ten minutes while i was in the middle of a pileup. nature references indeed. im pretty new to WWFF myself so cant help much with the log upload stuff but the community on the WWFF groups.io list is really helpful if you have specific questions, people there are super responsive.

im in kind of the same boat as you actually so take this with a grain of salt but i've been using the morse toad app and also just playing random CW from youtube videos of actual QSOs in the background while im doing other stuff. not sure if the passive listening thing is doing anything yet lol but the app at least made the letters feel more familiar. been at it about 6 weeks

yeah the third party thing trips a lot of people up. for domestic contacts — both people in the US — you can generally let an unlicensed person speak as long as you're the control operator and you're present and in control of the station the whole time. you cant just hand someone the mic and walk away, that's the big thing. you're responsible for everything that goes out over the air, period. the international piece is where it gets more complicated. if the other station is in another country, that country has to have a third party traffic agreement with the US for it to be allowed at all. theres a list on the ARRL website that's a lot easier to parse than the actual FCC document. some pretty big countries are NOT on that list which surprises people. band and mode dont really change the rule itself. same principle applies on HF phone as it would on 2m or whatever. just keep your hand near the PTT and make sure you could take over at any second if something weird gets said.

This is exactly what I needed to learn! Been throwing my call into the main pile and getting nowhere. Do you recommend starting with the easier DXpeditions to practice this technique, or just jump in with the rare stuff?

i just passed mine like three weeks ago so kind of fresh on this. the math was the part that slowed me down, i hadnt done anything with complex numbers since high school and i had to basically relearn it. there are some good youtube videos that explain the filter and impedance stuff in a way that actually makes sense if youre not an engineer or whatever. took me maybe six weeks of studying on and off and i passed with a decent margin so its not impossible. the extra segments thing is real btw, i was on 75m last weekend and the general portion was absolutely packed with nets and random ragchews and i could just slide up into the extra portion and find a clear frequency no problem. probably depends a lot on where you live and how busy your regional bands are though

nice work on the first one, that summit isnt bad at all for getting your feet wet. i did my first activation on a similar one and yeah spotting yourself feels wrong at first but you get used to it pretty quick. the chasers are usually pretty patient too which helps when youre still figuring out the flow. one thing i started doing is bringing a small notepad just for logging on the summit because fumbling with the phone log when its windy is annoying as heck

so ive been thinking about getting my general and eventually extra and i know morse isnt required anymore but honestly i kind of want to learn it anyway, seems like it would be useful and also just cool to know. the problem is i have no idea where to even start. ive seen people mention stuff like koch method and also just apps but i dont know if apps are actually useful or if its one of those things where you need like a real teacher or a class or something. also how long does it realistically take to get to where you can actually have a qso on the air, not just copy random letters but like an actual conversation. i know it probably varies a lot but just trying to get a rough idea before i invest a bunch of time into it

Start with what you can afford! A good 35Ah AGM battery will serve you well and cost half what lithium does. You can always upgrade later. Focus on getting on the air first - the best go-kit is the one you actually have ready to deploy.

had something weirdly similar on an older 746 pro, not a 7300 but same kind of symptom. turned out to be a tiny crack in a trace on the RF board that you genuinely could not see without like 10x magnification. only showed up under load and heat. ran a jumper wire across it and its been fine for two years since. might be worth checking your boards really carefully around any mounting points where the board flexes a little when things expand.

yeah this is super common, like almost everyone hits a wall somewhere between 12 and 15wpm. its kind of a known thing in the CW world. what helped me more than anything was just listening to actual on-air QSOs at speeds i couldnt fully copy. not trying to get every word, just letting it wash over me. sounds weird but after a few weeks of doing that while doing something else — eating lunch, whatever — my brain started to pick up more without me even trying. also the thing about words as sounds, that really does click eventually but you cant force it. one trick i heard from an old timer at my club was to practice common words as whole chunks — THE, AND, QSL, UR, 73 — just drill those as single sounds not letter by letter. made a big difference for me around the 15wpm mark. keep at it, the jump from 13 to 18 or so kind of happens suddenly once it clicks, at least it did for me.