Karen Lewis

yeah the mid-band on 40 can be a mess depending on the season, ive noticed it too. for getting check-ins up, honestly the best thing that ever worked for our local net was just mentioning it on the repeater a couple times leading up to the evening. sounds obvious but a lot of people lurk on the 2m machine and just need a reminder that the HF net is happening. the special event angle is a good draw too. we did something similar for field day prep one year where net control gave out a little certificate of participation, nothing fancy just a pdf, and people loved it. gave them a reason to check in beyond just saying their callsign and 59.

welcome to the chaos haha. seriously though CQ WW is one of those things where you just gotta jump in and learn by doing. i was terrified my first time too and now i look forward to it every year. your setup sounds fine for getting your feet wet. one thing nobody told me when i started — write down the exchange format on a sticky note and put it right next to your radio. sounds dumb but when your adrenaline is up and someone comes back to your call you can blank on the simplest stuff. 59 and your zone number, done. also maybe download N1MM logger or Log4OM if you havent already, logging by hand during a busy contest is just asking for trouble

yeah 178 is solidly good, you're getting into territory where 10m really comes alive especially for trans-atlantic and trans-pacific paths. generally speaking once SFI climbs above maybe 150 or so you start seeing real DX on 10 and 12 meters, below that it gets spottier. the low K index absolutely helped too — even with great solar flux a geomagnetic storm can kill the higher bands pretty fast, so having both going your way at the same time is kind of the sweet spot. the flux doesn't need to build up over days necessarily, though sustained elevated flux does tend to condition the ionosphere better over time. but honestly a single good day can produce amazing openings if the geometry lines up. sounds like you hit it perfectly. worth setting up a notification from one of the propagation sites so you can catch the next one before it's half over

the barrel sound is almost always too much low end yeah. i switched to an Heil PR-781 a while back and the difference was pretty immediate, those mics are voiced for comms use so they naturally cut a lot of the stuff below 300hz that just muddies up a sideband signal anyway. not saying you need to buy a new mic right now but if youre ever at a hamfest and see one for cheap its worth grabbing. one other thing — whats your RF power set to? sometimes guys are running reduced power for whatever reason and that can make marginal audio way more noticeable, like if conditions are already bad there isnt enough signal to noise for people to fill in the gaps. also make sure youre not too far off mic, SSB really rewards being like 2-3 inches away not a foot like people do on FM

so i've been licensed about 8 months now, got my general back in the spring and ive been mostly just doing casual QSOs and a little SOTA stuff on the weekends. my buddy at the club keeps telling me i need to try CQ WW this october and honestly i'm kind of nervous about it. like i know its a big deal but i dont really understand the exchange format yet and the idea of a pile up genuinely terrifies me. i run a modest setup, ft-891 into a end fed halfwave up about 25 feet in my backyard. worked some DX on it so i know it gets out okay but nothing like serious contesting. is this even worth attempting for a first timer or should i wait until i have a better antenna situation. also is there a difference between doing CQ WW SSB versus the CW weekend, i assume CW is way more competitive but maybe thats not the right way to think about it also vaguely related — anyone doing field day stuff locally near the southeast? our club did one but i missed it because of a family thing and i kinda regret it

yeah 6 was wide open here too, im up in the midwest and i was hearing stuff i never hear. had a solid qso with a station in Costa Rica on just 100 watts and a simple dipole which honestly still amazes me about that band. theres something about sporadic E that just feels like cheating in the best possible way lol. keep an eye on DX maps and pskreporter if you havent already, makes it way easier to see where the clouds are forming before you even key up

yeah the 10m opening this week was something else, i was just spinning the dial Tuesday afternoon and stumbled into a massive pileup for a VP8 station, took me about 45 minutes but i finally got through on my third call. running a yagi at about 35 feet so i had a little help but still, conditions were clearly doing the heavy lifting. on the 7760 thing i havent seen one in person but a guy in our club says his dealer told him late Q1 deliveries for the US market, which probably means April realistically knowing how these rollouts usually go. the remote head concept makes a lot of sense for mobile installs or shack setups where you dont want a big radio on the desk. whether the receiver is actually better than the 7610 i genuinely dont know — icom hasnt published the blocking dynamic range numbers yet which is a little suspicious or maybe just their usual slow documentation pace.

i just did this like four months ago so pretty fresh for me. took me honestly closer to five or six weeks but im slow lol. the question pool changed in 2023 i think? make sure you're using the current one, hamstudy shows you which version it's pulling from so just double check that. some of the older pdf versions floating around online are out of date the feedline and antenna stuff was where i struggled too but theres a couple youtube guys that explain the decibel math in a way that actually makes sense, just search general class study and youll find them. once i got the math part it wasnt that bad. good luck, its worth it

im basically in the same boat as you, been licensed 18 months and just started taking DXCC seriously maybe three months ago. one thing that helped me was downloading TQSL and just uploading all my old ADIF files at once, took like an hour but suddenly i had way more confirmations than i expected because a lot of the dx stations upload to LoTW pretty regularly. also just a heads up, eQSL is a separate thing and those credits dont count for DXCC, i made that mistake early on thinking i was building toward the award but eQSL and LoTW are totally different systems. learned that the hard way lol

so ive been messing with APRS for a few months now and i finally got my Kenwood TM-D710G set up with a proper antenna on the roof, been watching aprs.fi and my packets are getting out but something looks off. like my position keeps jumping around even when im parked and not moving, and sometimes the path shows a ridiculous number of hops before it hits the internet gateway. im using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 as my path which i thought was the standard thing to do, but i see guys at the club running just WIDE2-2 and they seem to get out fine. is there actually a difference in how those get handled by digis? i know WIDE1-1 is supposed to hit fill-in digis first but im not sure if thats actually helping me or just cluttering up the channel. our area has decent coverage already. also the position jumping thing is probably a GPS issue right? the GPS lock seems solid on the radio display but aprs.fi shows me like three blocks away sometimes. just wondering if anyone else ran into this

had almost the exact same thing on a friends 7300 last year. turned out to be a partially failed RD70HVF2 in the final stage. one of the pair was still conducting but way degraded, so you get output but nothing close to full power. radio had no idea anything was wrong which was the annoying part. ended up replacing both finals as a matched pair, problem went away. parts arent super cheap but its not a nightmare job if youre comfortable with SMD and have a decent iron with temp control. just make sure you get the thermal compound right when you put it back together or youll be right back where you started.

so the 10 meter thing — as a tech you do get phone privileges on 10m, specifically 28.300 to 28.500 MHz. its not just CW. a lot of people dont realize that. you also have some other small HF slices but 10m is the big one where you can actually ragchew if the band is open. the third party traffic thing is a whole other can of worms. basically your friend can talk on your radio if you're present and in control of the station, thats called a third party and its generally fine for domestic contacts. where it gets complicated is international — there's a list of countries that have third party agreements with the US and if the country isnt on that list you're technically not supposed to pass third party traffic to them. so like if you wanted your unlicensed friend to talk to someone in another country you'd have to check the list first. for just talking to another US ham its basically fine as long as you're there supervising and you ID properly

i always get nervous reading about people clipping diodes on their radios lol. did this on a 897D back in the day and it was fine but i still held my breath for about a week after. good documentation on that mod exists at least, some of the other mods floating around out there for various rigs the instructions are just... not great. like someone typed it up from memory and never proofread it.

so i've been messing around with an arduino mega for a few months now and i finally got to the point where i want to do something actually useful with it for the shack. the idea is pretty simple in my head — read the SWR from my antenna analyzer output, feed that into the arduino, and have it drive a couple of stepper motors to rotate the capacitor and inductor on my homebrew L-network tuner. sounds simple right the problem im running into is the analog reads are noisy as heck. im using a directional coupler i wound myself on a FT-37-43 core and the voltage divider output feeding into the A0 pin, but even with a 100uf cap across the input and a small RC filter i built i still get like 30-40 points of jitter on the analogRead. tried averaging 50 samples and it helped some but when youre trying to detect a minimum in the SWR curve even small variations mess up the algorithm anyone dealt with ADC noise on arduino specifically in an RF environment? im wondering if i need to shield the whole thing in a metal box or if theres something in the code side i can do. also considered switching to a Pi Zero with an external ADC over SPI but that feels like overkill for what is basically a PID loop

messaging was one of those things that took me forever to wrap my head around too. what helped me was actually setting up Direwolf on a pi as a receive-only IGate for a while just to understand what was actually getting through vs what i thought was getting through. you start watching the raw packets come across and it becomes a lot clearer why some stuff makes it and some doesnt. one thing i'll add — if the other station is also mobile or has an inconsistant beacon rate, sometimes the timing just works against you and the retries end up stepping on each other. not saying thats whats happening but ive seen it. 5 watts should be enough to hit a digi 30 miles out as long as you have a decent antenna, whats on the roof or is this a handheld setup?

honestly the best thing i ever did was just start listening to W1AW code practice on the air instead of always using software. something about real transmitted code sounds different and your ear adjusts differently to it. they send at multiple speeds throughout the week and you can look up the text ahead of time to check yourself. also just leaving it on in the background while doing other things, not really actively copying, just ambient listening. i dont know if thats a real thing or just placebo but my speed went up noticeably after a few weeks of doing that.

welcome to the addiction, fair warning it does not get cheaper lol. okay so to your questions — yes your contacts can count toward multiple awards at the same time, thats the beauty of it. a QSO with say ZL (New Zealand) counts as a DXCC entity, its in zone 32 for WAZ, and obviously doesnt help your WAS since thats US states only. but you log it once and it works for everything. you do have to apply for each award separately though through ARRL for DXCC and WAS, and CQ Magazine handles WAZ. for modes, DXCC is now broken into mixed, phone, CW, digital, and a few satellite categories so FT8 counts under digital. a lot of guys run all modes and submit for mixed first since that fills up fastest. SSB is still perfectly fine for DX, dont let anyone tell you otherwise, but yeah the FT8 pile-ups for rare entities can be a bit more manageable sometimes. and yes absolutely go back and claim those old contacts. as long as you have the log data and can get the QSLs confirmed either via LoTW or paper cards, the date doesnt matter. get yourself set up on Logbook of the World if you havent already, thats really the easiest way to accumulate credits without chasing physical cards everywhere.

I had the exact same problem with my first Baofeng! Many newcomers fail to program the CTCSS tone properly. Check if your radio is set to "T" (tone encode) rather than "TSQ" (tone squelch). Also verify the offset direction is correct.

congrats man, that first qso feeling is real. i remember being so nervous i forgot to say my callsign at the end and the other guy had to remind me haha. dont worry about the baofeng thing either, everyone starts somewhere and for local vhf work it does the job fine. just get familiar with the repeater etiquette and youll be good. whats your callsign?

i just got my tech about 3 months ago so this is pretty fresh for me. i used hamstudy like the other guy said but i also watched some of the Ham Radio Crash Course videos on youtube just to actually understand the material instead of pure memorization. some of the electrical theory stuff was going over my head just reading questions cold so having someone explain it helped. took me about 3 weeks of studying maybe 20 mins a night. test itself felt pretty manageable, few questions surprised me but nothing crazy. good luck

Just got back from a two-week ARES deployment in western North Carolina following Hurricane Helene. During Hurricane Helene, hams in North Carolina used repeaters on Mount Mitchell to coordinate road closures and relief efforts when internet and phones were down. Wanted to share some key lessons learned for future deployments. What worked exceptionally well: Winlink proved absolutely critical for handling health and welfare traffic when internet was downNVIS antennas on 80m provided excellent coverage across the mountainous terrainHaving pre-programmed simplex frequencies was a lifesaver when repeaters went downWhat we need to improve: Better coordination between ARES groups from different states, and more training on ICS forms. Emergency ham radio operators usually conduct an After Action session and write a report with the findings and produce summary reports with lessons learned and recommendations. The digital modes like JS8Call and Vara really showed their value for low-power, reliable communications. If you haven't experimented with these yet, now's the time to start practicing.

had something similar on an older 746 pro, turned out to be a cold solder joint on one of the driver stage connectors that only opened up when the board expanded. not saying thats your problem but worth doing a close visual inspection with a loupe under good lighting before assuming its the finals themselves. i reflowed a couple joints that looked fine to the naked eye and it cleared right up. digital modes push the duty cycle way harder so any marginal connection is gonna show up there first.

Thanks for asking this! I'm in the same boat with a new Tech license and want to understand the rules. The FCC removed the power threshold exemption because amateur installations vary widely in size, power, and frequency, and can be located close to people. Sounds like we all need to do our homework now.

congrats on the install, that radio is a solid choice, been running one in my jeep for a few years and its held up great. one thing i'd say when you're ready to ditch the mag mount — seriously just do the NMO through the roof. i put it off forever too but once i finally did it the difference in signal was noticeable and you stop worrying about it sliding around or scratching the paint. there's a roof rail on my jeep that made it easy but even on a regular roof its not as scary as it sounds, just go slow with the hole saw. also on the power run, did you do separate fuses for both the positive and negative or just the positive? i ask because i've seen some installs where people skip the negative side fuse and then wonder why they get weird rf noise. might not matter but something to keep in mind.

The Extra test is full of arcane, technical questions, but real-world experience with equipment, mods, and antenna projects helps immensely. Don't underestimate Dave Casler's videos (KE0OG) and online study guides - they bridge theory to practice.