Northern Ham

Log4OM can actually handle contest logging to some degree, they added a contest module a couple versions back but i tried it for a state QSO party and gave up pretty fast. the rate display is nowhere near what N1MM gives you and some of the multiplier tracking felt off. for anything serious just use N1MM, thats what its built for. for the WSJT-X integration there is a UDP logging option that can send QSOs in real time to some logging programs, Log4OM supports it i think, might be worth digging into that instead of doing manual adif imports. cuts down on the duplicate problem at least in theory, ive never actually tested it myself so take that with a grain of salt

Welcome to the dark side haha. Seriously though, CQ WW with 100w and a dipole is totally doable, dont let the big gun stations intimidate you. You probably wont win your category but thats kind of missing the point when you're just starting out. The first time I did it I was running a G5RV up maybe 25 feet and I still worked like 80 countries over the weekend, which blew my mind honestly. The bands are absolutely packed wall to wall and thats actually a good thing for you because stations are aggressively hunting contacts and they WILL work you even if your signal isnt huge. N1MM+ is definitely the go-to for contesting, worth the small learning curve to set it up before the contest weekend so you're not fumbling with it when it starts. And yeah SOTA is a completely different animal, much more relaxed, more about the experience of getting to a summit than raw contact numbers. Both are worth doing for sure.

yep that's alternator whine, pretty much textbook. the ferrite cores can help a little but honestly the first thing i'd check is your ground. grounding to the frame can work but its not always great depending on the truck -- sometimes theres paint or corrosion under that bolt that you cant see and it creates a bad connection. try running a dedicated ground straight from the radio chassis back to the battery negative post, short as you can make it, and see if that cleans things up. i had the exact same thing on my tacoma with an IC-2300 and that fixed it completely. also make sure your coax shield is grounded well at the antenna mount, a floating shield can pick up all kinds of garbage from the electrical system. if you do all that and still have the whine then yeah look at a noise filter on the power line, astatic makes one thats like 12 bucks and actually works reasonably well. but ground first, seriously.

Looking for advice on antenna choice for mobile operation in mountainous terrain. Currently running a Diamond NR770HB dual-band 5/8λ over 1/4λ on my truck, but I'm getting mixed results working repeaters in the Sierra Nevada region. The pattern seems too low for the steep terrain angles to many repeaters. I've read that 1/4λ antennas perform better at higher take-off angles. Would switching to a Larsen NMO-27 or similar 1/4λ dual-band antenna improve my coverage to mountain-top repeaters? My mount is center roof with good ground plane. Any real-world experience with this trade-off would be appreciated.

so i just got my technician license about two months ago and ive been lurking on the local 2m repeater for a while now. there's a net that runs wednesday evenings around 8pm and i finally worked up the nerve to check in last week. the net control called around for check-ins and i gave my callsign but i wasnt sure if i was supposed to say anything else after that -- like do you give your name and location every time or just the call? i kind of fumbled through it and said my name but then wasnt sure if i should have waited for him to acknowledge me first or just go ahead. also i noticed they mentioned something about a special event station coming up next month for some kind of anniversary of the club. is that something any licensed ham can participate in or do you have to be a club member? i looked it up a little but couldnt find much about how those work from the operating side, like if you get to actually make contacts under the special callsign or if its more of a public display thing. anyway just curious how the more experienced folks handle nets, i dont want to make a fool of myself next wednesday

what frequency are you trying to connect on and what time of day? that matters a lot more than people think when picking gateways. some of those RMS nodes that look great at noon are basically useless at night on 40m because the skip changes and suddenly youre trying to hit a gateway thats only 200 miles away on a frequency that wants to go to Europe. i had the exact same dropout problem and it turned out i just needed to use a gateway farther away on a different band that actually had a workable path at the time i was testing.

yeah the listening thing is huge and i think a lot of people skip it cause they're just excited and start hammering the key. i made that mistake bad during the 3Y0 attempt a while back, just called and called and got nowhere for an hour before i actually sat on the freq and watched what the op was doing for a bit. made a big difference once i understood the pattern. one thing i'll add thats maybe obvious but — make sure your audio on transmit is actually clean. i had a buddy who couldn't buy a contact in pileups and it turned out his mic gain was way too hot and his signal was just splattered all over. nobody's going to pull a distorted call out of a pile. worth having someone give you an honest report on what you sound like before you go chasing something rare.

lol i was on 40 last night and had like a 45 minute ragchew with a guy in Missouri, so it can happen. just gotta find the right frequency and maybe call CQ a few times. people are there they just dont always announce themselves. also 7.200 area gets busy sometimes but it attracts some, uh, colorful characters depending on the night haha

had almost this exact thing happen on mine after i accidentally keyed into a open connector for a second. one of the RD15HVF1 finals had gone soft — not dead, just... weak. the other one was still pulling its weight so the radio kept functioning but output was way down. you can sometimes catch it by measuring drain current on each device separately but that means getting into the PA board which is a bit of a project on the 7300. before you go that far though, check the PA bias trimmer. theres a known thing where those can drift, especially on units that ran hot. Icom has a service bulletin floating around on it i think, might be worth digging up. if bias is way off it'll look exactly like what you're describing. ALC pegged because the radio is trying to compensate and just can't get there.

I just passed mine like two months ago. the theory was intimidating but half of those questions if you just know the formulas you can calculate the answer right there in the exam, you dont even have to memorize. the oscillator and amplifier stability stuff was the hardest for me personally. but honestly once you sit down and take a few practice exams on hamstudy or whatever it starts feeling less impossible pretty quick just go for it, worst case you fail and take it again, the examiners dont care

From a technical standpoint, even though it is a low-power device, it must conform to all repeater rules. You must "plug in" the necessary Part 97 rule sections including sections on auxiliary operation and control. Identification requirements also apply and you must be sure not to cause harmful interference to coordinated repeaters. Make sure you understand the control operator requirements for unattended operation.

I'm running the same setup! The frequency extension is straightforward but make sure you have the external reference connected before powering up - the Pluto can be finicky about clock sources. What upconverter are you using for 2.4 GHz?

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i'm trying to figure out the whole confirmation thing. right now i upload to LoTW after every session and i have an eQSL account but honestly i barely check it. never sent a physical card yet. my question is do people actually still mail cards back and forth or is that mostly just for awards chasing and DX stuff? i got a few cards in the mail already from stations i worked and they're honestly really cool to look at but i dont know if i'm supposed to send one back or what the etiquette is. like is there an expectation that you respond to every card you receive? also i uploaded my logs to LoTW but only like 30% of my contacts have confirmed. is that normal or am i doing something wrong with the uploads

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into my local 2m net last Tuesday and i think i maybe messed something up but im not entirely sure. i gave my callsign when the net control asked for check-ins but i just said my call and my name and then kind of stopped. a few of the other stations said their call, name, location AND whether they had traffic or not. nobody said anything to me directly but afterwards i felt like i skipped something i was supposed to say. is there like a standard format for checking into a net? i looked around online a bit but honestly found like six different answers. some nets seem real formal and others seem pretty relaxed. this is just a weekly ragchew net if that matters. also is it rude to just listen for a few weeks before actually checking in or is that weird too

For contests I always use external battery packs when possible. The TIDRADIO UV-5R ham radio features a rechargeable 3800 mAh battery that provides up to 5 days of battery life. This is 2.5 times longer than the 1800mAh battery, and the power-saving function can extend battery life even further. High-capacity batteries make a huge difference during long operating sessions.

The simplex range issue is huge and often overlooked in planning. These areas may benefit from scheduling drills and exercises to keep operators ready to respond in emergencies. Drills also ensure that professionals and ham operators are comfortable working together. We're adding more hilltop portable sites to our plans.

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two weeks now and i just need someone to tell me im overthinking it. i have a decent backyard, maybe 80 feet end to end, and im trying to decide between throwing up a simple 40m dipole or getting one of those trapped verticals. right now im using a random wire with a tuner and it works but the noise floor on receive is just terrible, like S7 on a quiet night which i know is partly the location (suburbs, lots of switching power supplies nearby) but i feel like a better antenna would help. the dipole seems like the obvious choice because i have the space and they're cheap to build, but my only decent support is an oak tree on one end and the other end would have to come down pretty low, maybe 20 feet at the peak and like 8 feet on the far end. so its not gonna be a nice flat dipole, more like an inverted V or even worse. the vertical would go in the middle of the yard and id have room for maybe 8 radials if i bury them which i know isnt ideal but its what i have. mostly doing SSB and some digital, not really chasing DX hard, just want reliable contacts on 40 and maybe 80 if i can get the vertical to load up on 80 with the tuner. anyone been through this same debate

ok so i just upgraded from tech to general last month and im trying to figure out the 40 meter band. i know generals have more privileges than techs but every chart i look at shows different things and i cant figure out if im reading it right. like theres the FCC allocation and then theres the ARRL band plan and they dont always match up? or am i missing something specifically i keep seeing people say dont operate too close to the band edge and i get that in theory but what does that actually mean in practice. like if 7.125 is supposedly where general phone starts, can i just tune to 7.125 and start calling or is there some buffer i should leave. someone at my club said something about your signal having width and that you need to account for that but i wasnt totally sure what he meant also is 40m phone generally LSB down there? i think i know the answer but want to make sure before i make an embarrassing mistake on the air

so ive been running a TM-V71A in my truck for about 6 months now and i keep going back and forth on where to mount the antenna. right now i have a NMO mount drilled through the cab roof near the back and it works okay but i feel like im losing something compared to when i had it on a magnetic mount sitting on the roof. which i know sounds backwards because the NMO should be better grounded but something just feels off. truck is a 2018 F-150 with the aluminum body which i know complicates things a little bit. running a Larsen NMO150/450 dual band whip. on 2m i hit the local repeater just fine, maybe 35 miles out, but on 70cm it just feels weak. a buddy of mine who runs the same radio in his Tacoma with a trunk lip mount says his 70cm is noticeably better and i cant figure out why that would be. has anyone done a NMO on aluminum body trucks and had issues? wondering if the ground isnt as solid as i think it is. i did use the star washer and made sure the paint was scraped clean but aluminum is aluminum i guess. anyway open to hearing what placements have worked for people, especially on the newer trucks with all the weird body panels

so ive been on HF for about three years now and SSB audio quality is something i keep going back and forth on. started out just running the stock mic on my 7300 and honestly it was fine, people could copy me, no complaints. then i fell down the rabbit hole of reading about mic gain and compression and TX equalizers and now im not sure if i made things better or worse. the thing that bugs me is everyone online seems to obsess over flat response mics and processing chains and studio-grade this and that, but when i actually listen to most SSB contacts the bar is... not that high. like as long as youre not clipping and your audio is centered in the passband most people are happy. i run a heil PR-40 into the radio now with the icom eq set to bump the mids a bit and pull back some of the low end, and ive gotten good reports but im honestly not sure how much of that is the mic versus just having my gain set correctly finally. curious what other people actually find makes the biggest difference in practice. is it the mic, the gain staging, compression, the eq, or just making sure you're not over-driving the finals and splattering all over the place. because i suspect the answer is mostly gain staging and everything else is kind of secondary

yeah perfboard dc receivers are a pain, the layout really does matter more than people think. i did a 20m one a while back and had similar issues, ended up having to run a dedicated ground trace around the whole board just to keep the audio ground separated from the RF ground. might sound overkill but it worked. also just something to check — whats your bypass cap situation on the VFO or BFO section? sometimes the oscillator noise couples right into the audio and looks like hum but its actually oscillator garbage riding on the audio. hard to tell without a scope honestly.

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly im getting a little bored just doing local repeater stuff and the occasional simplex. started reading about HF and now im kind of obsessed with the idea of actually making contacts on like 40 or 20 meters. my elmer keeps telling me to just go take the general already but i dont really know where to start with studying. the tech exam felt pretty manageable, i used hamstudy.org and just drilled questions for like 2 weeks and passed fine. is general roughly the same deal or is there a lot more actual understanding you need vs just memorizing? i looked at some of the questions and some of the electrical stuff looks kind of intimidating, the stuff about impedance and reactance and all that. do i actually need to understand it or can i just memorize the answers again also once i pass, whats the realistic path to actually getting on HF without spending a ton of money right away

yeah the mars mod is pretty harmless on those radios. i did mine like day two of owning it, old habit from the 706 days where you kind of just did it automatically. fan mod sounds interesting, my shack gets warm in summer and i always wondered if the stock cooling was really adequate for heavy digital use. might look into that noctua option.

honestly the General exam is pretty manageable if you put in a few weeks of studying. I used HamStudy.org almost exclusively and just did practice tests every day for like 3 weeks. by the time i was hitting 85-90% consistently i went and took the exam and passed no problem. the electrical theory stuff looks scary but once you understand the basic formulas it clicks pretty fast, ohms law and the resonance stuff especially. as for going for Extra at the same time, i wouldnt recommend it unless you already have a background in electronics or something. Extra has a lot more depth and some of the question are genuinely tricky not just memorizable. get General first, get on HF, have fun for a while, then maybe circle back to Extra when you feel like a new challenge. thats what most people do anyway. the HF bands you unlock with General are more than enough to keep you busy for a long time, 40m alone is incredible once you get a decent antenna up

I'd actually recommend getting a pre-built QRP rig first like the FT-818 to learn CW and operating techniques, then tackle kit building once you know what good performance sounds like.