Ham Fan

welcome to the hobby, don't stress too much about the baofeng thing, plenty of people started on one and they work fine once they're set up right. so the CTCSS thing — basically most repeaters require you to transmit a specific sub-audible tone along with your voice so the repeater knows to open up. if you're not sending the right tone (or any tone at all) the repeater just ignores you even though you're technically transmitting on the right frequency. it's not hearing you at all from its perspective. the tone you need should be listed in whatever directory you pulled the repeater info from, usually shown as something like 88.5 or 100.0 or 127.3 Hz next to the frequency. on the uv-5r you have to go into the menu and set what they call the T-CTCS setting — that's your transmit tone. just match it to whatever the listing shows and you should be good. the R-CTCS you can leave off unless you want to squelch out other stuff. as for jumping in — when there's a pause between two people talking you can just say your callsign. like literally just your callsign and nothing else, that's the signal that you want to join in or that you're monitoring. people will usually respond and welcome you. some repeaters also have a morning or evening net you could check in on which is a nice low pressure way to get started.

yeah the single yagi guys arent wrong but they're also not telling you the full story. with JT65 and a single long yagi like a 9el or bigger you can work some of the big gun stations, the ones running 4x8el arrays or dishes, but you're basically dependent on them hearing you. your own receive is going to be marginal and youll miss a lot of the smaller stations. the IC-9700 is fine, solid radio for this, but the preamp thing is absolutely real. you want your noise figure down around 0.5 dB or less and it needs to be at the antenna, not in the shack. a good masthead preamp makes a bigger difference than adding another yagi honestly. coax from there to the shack matters less once youve got a low NF upfront but you still want good quality hardline if the run is more than like 20 feet. first contact timeline really depends. if you get on during a big contest like the ARRL EME contest weekend youll probably work something within the first session because thats when the big pistols are actively calling CQ and sweeping for contacts. outside of contest weekends it can take longer just because youre waiting for mutual windows and the activity level drops off a lot.

the WSJT-X integration question is the one that actually matters here. WSJT-X can log directly to N1MM via UDP if you set it up right, same with Log4OM, so either way you shouldnt have the two-universe problem you're worried about. took me an afternoon to get it sorted but once it works it just works and you forget about it i use Log4OM as my main logger and it does what i need. cluster integration, cloudlog sync if you use that, LoTW upload is straightforward. for the contests you mention, the ARRL stuff, it handles them okay but i wouldnt say it feels natural the way N1MM does. the dupe checking feels a little slower to me but that might just be my machine

so ive been running a flat 40m dipole at about 35 feet for a while now, fed with coax through a 1:1 balun, works decent but ive been thinking about dropping the center and running it inverted V style mostly because its easier to support with just a single center mast and i can get the ends lower to the ground without them being a hazard the thing i keep reading is that the inverted V supposedly has a slightly lower radiation angle which sounds great for dx, but then someone else told me the pattern gets broader which kind of cancels that out, and now i dont know what to believe. anyone actually compared these back to back or have a feel for whether its a noticeable thing on the air vs just a modeling thing that doesnt really matter at normal heights i dont have EZNEC or anything set up right now so im kind of going on gut feel and whatever i read which is probably not ideal

Update to latest APRX version as recent releases fixed several messaging problems. Check your filter configuration - using 't/m' filter alone may require area filter to prevent discard. The history timeout logic was adjusted in newer builds.

So i finally did my first activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. Been licensed for about 8 months and kept reading about POTA on here and elsewhere and finally just decided to stop overthinking it and go do it. Threw the KX2 in my bag with a 40m linked dipole and just went. Honestly it was way more fun than i expected. Got my 10 contacts in maybe 35 minutes on 40m SSB, bunch of hunters came back pretty quick once i spotted myself on the POTA app. A couple guys even called me back a second time which i thought was cool, didnt realize people collected parks that way. My question is about the park reference numbers. I activated K-2345 but there was a sign at the trailhead that mentioned the park is also part of some larger state forest complex. Do i need to look that up separately and log it as a second reference on the same activation? Or is that only if i physically move to a different area within it. Also how do you guys handle the log upload, the adif from my KX2 needs some tweaking i think before the POTA site will accept it.

ok so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and still kind of confused about phonetics. like i know the NATO ones, Alpha Bravo Charlie etc., but i see people on the air just saying letters sometimes without phonetics and other times going full phonetic alphabet for everything. is there a rule about this or is it just feel? like if someone asks for my callsign do i always spell it out phonetically or only when theres QRM or whatever. also sometimes i hear people using non-standard ones, heard a guy say "America" instead of Alpha the other day which threw me off a bit. just trying to figure out the actual convention here because i dont want to sound weird on air

I've been working DX seriously for about 8 years now and I'm sitting at 280 confirmed countries on mixed mode. Honor Roll requires being within the top 10 entities on the current DXCC list - if there are 340 entities, that means I need 331 confirmed (minus 9 from overall count). So I need about 51 more countries, and frankly some of these remaining ones seem nearly impossible. How realistic is Honor Roll for someone who can't travel to rare DX locations or spend thousands on DXpedition donations? Are there strategies I'm missing besides just waiting for DXpeditions? For context, I run 100W to a tribander at 40 feet - nothing fancy but it's gotten me this far.

Koch method hands down! I wasted months trying to build up from slow speeds. Once I switched to Koch at 18WPM character speed, everything clicked in about 6 weeks of daily practice. The key is hearing characters as sounds, not counting dots and dashes.

ok so ive been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor does it and he makes it look really fun but honestly the whole licensing thing is kind of intimidating and i dont even know where to start. like do i have to take a class or can i just study on my own? and how hard is the technician test actually, i took one practice test online and got like a 60% which is probably bad. also is there a specific book i should get or do people just use websites. sorry if this is a dumb question im just trying to figure out what the realistic path looks like here

oh man dont stress about it, everyone steps on someone at least once when theyre starting out, it literally happens to experienced ops too especially on busy nets. the timing thing just comes with ear training honestly. for most directed nets the way it works is net control will say something like "any additional check-ins" or pause after calling for check-ins, and thats your window. the trick is not jumping in the absolute first millisecond the frequency opens up — give it just a beat, maybe half a second, so you're not doubling with someone who started at the same time. if you do double with someone net control will usually just ask both to repeat and it's no big deal at all. and checking in with no traffic is completely normal and totally welcome. a lot of nets actually want to know how many active stations are out there even if nobody has anything to pass. you can just say your call and say "no traffic" or "listening" and youre done. some nets actually track participation numbers so your check-in matters even if you dont say a word after that.

honestly your club guy is right for where you're at. SO2R helps but it's kind of the last 10-15% of your score, not the first. the real gains come from stuff like not wasting time calling a station 6 times when the band is clearly moving — just log what you hear and come back. also running frequency discipline, like knowing when to give up a run freq and go hunt mults vs grinding out 5-point QSOs on a dying band. i spent two years just working on those basics before i even thought about a second radio and my scores went up way more than i expected. SO2R is genuinely useful for keeping your rate up during the dead spots — you can be listening on 15 for a new opening while you're still technically running on 20, and that matters in a 48 hour contest. but the station complexity is real and if you mess up the filter setup you will absolutely cause interference problems, possibly to yourself and to others nearby. not worth it until the operating fundamentals are dialed in imo.

this is actually something im trying to learn more about myself, im still pretty new and all the solar flux stuff is a bit confusing honestly. like i understand higher number generally means better HF conditions but i dont really get the relationship between SFI and specific bands. does a flux of 150 help 15m more than 40m or is it across the board? sorry if thats a dumb question

yeah what he said. i'll just add that the arrl dxcc page has a thing called the online application where you can literally see all your lotw-confirmed credits listed out and then submit from there. its like 15 bucks or something for the first award i think. once you get that first certificate in the mail its pretty motivating, i ended up going down a rabbit hole chasing WAS after that and now im halfway through WAZ too so just be warned lol

I was terrified my first time too! Most nets are super friendly and patient with new hams. Listen to a few sessions first to get the feel, then just dive in. The worst that happens is you learn something! Net control will guide you through it.

yeah the general idea is if theres any chance of confusion just go ahead and use phonetics. on a quiet local repeater with a strong signal you can probably get away with just saying the letters but anything with noise, fading, or if youre working someone further out you really want the full phonetic alphabet. the whole point of NATO phonetics is that each word was chosen specifically because it sounds distinct from the others even through heavy interference, like november and mike arent going to get confused for each other the way N and M might. as for non-standard ones, i hear it occasionally and honestly it bugs me a little. ive heard guys say things like sugar instead of sierra or chicago instead of charlie and half the time the other station just gets confused anyway. the whole reason we standardized on NATO was so everyone worldwide is working from the same list. if youre doing any kind of EmComm or anything serious you really should stick to the standard. casual ragchewing on a local machine, nobody is going to yell at you but its still worth building the habit now while youre new so it just becomes automatic.

New General here with an IC-7300. I'm struggling with getting proper mic gain settings for SSB. When I set the gain high enough to see decent power output on my wattmeter (around 80-90W), I'm getting constant ALC indication. Lower the gain and I'm only seeing 30-40W average. How do you balance proper mic gain with ALC limits? Manual says to avoid ALC activation but then my power seems too low.