Steve Johnson

yeah what the other person said, hamstudy is the go-to. i'd also say dont underestimate the ham radio prep book by Gordon West, some people think its old fashioned but it actually explains the why behind stuff which helps a lot more than just drilling flashcards. the tech exam is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass so you've got a little wiggle room. one thing i'll mention is once you pass tech you'll probably want to get your general pretty quick because tech keeps you on VHF and UHF mostly and once you catch the HF bug you'll want those privileges. just something to think about down the road

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general class) and im still trying to figure out the whole repeater thing in my area. i programmed in a few of the local machines from repeaterbook and some of them i can hear traffic on just fine but when i try to key up nobody seems to hear me or i just get the courtesy beep and then silence. my buddy told me i probably have the wrong CTCSS tone set or maybe dont have one set at all. i thought i understood this but apparently not lol. from what i can tell the tone is kind of like a subaudible signal your radio sends along with your voice so the repeater knows youre a legit user and not just random noise right? but im confused because some repeaters on the list dont have a tone listed and others have like 88.5 or 100.0 and i just cant figure out if i need to set both the transmit AND receive tone or just the transmit one. also while im at it — is there some kind of ettiquette i should know about before jumping on a busy repeater? i dont want to be that guy who steps on someone mid conversation. around here there seems to be a net on tuesday nights and i usually just listen but i wasnt sure if its okay for a newer ham to just check in or if thats more for the established guys.

so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and people are constantly throwing around stuff like QSL and QTH and QRM and honestly i only know like two of them. i know QSL means like confirmed or acknowledged and thats pretty much it. i tried looking up a list online but there are like a hundred of them and i dont know which ones actually get used on the air vs which ones are just old telegraph stuff nobody says anymore. also people say 73 and 88 sometimes, and i figured out 73 is best regards but what is 88 and are there others like that? and whats the deal with saying things like OM or YL, i assume those are for men and women operators but not totally sure. just trying to get a handle on the common ones before i actually start transmitting myself, dont want to sound like a total idiot

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few weeks now and figured id just ask here. im trying to put up something decent for 40m, mostly for ragchewing and some casual DX when conditions are good. my lot is about 75 feet wide and maybe 120 deep, so not terrible but not huge either. i had a half wave dipole up for a while, fed with 450 ohm ladder line into a balanced tuner, and honestly it worked pretty well but i took it down when i rerouted some stuff in the shack and never put it back up. now im second guessing whether to just redo the dipole or throw up a vertical instead. i keep reading that verticals are better for DX because of the lower takeoff angle but then i also read that they pick up all kinds of noise and you need a good ground system or its all a wash. my ground situation isnt great — i'm in a suburban lot and i cant really run 60 radials without my wife losing her mind. was thinking maybe 8 to 16 radials elevated slightly and just live with whatever i get. or do i just put the dipole back up, maybe try to get the center around 45 feet and call it done. anybody dealt with this kind of tradeoff on 40 specifically?

congrats on the first activation, 31 QSOs is solid especially for a first time out and on a random weekday i'm guessing. the upload is pretty straightforward, you just go to pota.app, log into your account, and there's an upload section right there. just drop the ADIF in and it'll parse everything and show you a preview before it submits. double check that your park reference is in there correctly, sometimes ham2adif doesn't pull that in automatically and you'll need to add it to your log or the website will ask you for it. one thing i'd mention is make sure the date and times are in UTC in your log, that trips people up sometimes when they first start. the system is pretty good about flagging issues before you finalize so you'll see if something's off. and yeah paper logging is totally fine, plenty of people still do it, i just use the notes app on my phone which is probably worse than paper honestly

yeah the 18 day window thing trips a lot of people up. basically when a callsign becomes available — like when someone dies or lets their license lapse — it goes into this quiet period before anyone can grab it. after that window closes all the applications for that specific call get processed at the same time, so its not really first come first served, more like a lottery if multiple people applied for the same one. if nobody else applied for yours you should be fine though. as for listing multiple calls, i believe you can actually put in applications for several different callsigns at once, just separate applications each one. some people apply for like 5 or 6 hoping one sticks. i did mine a couple years back and got my 1x2 in maybe 3 weeks total once i figured out the ULS system. the AE7Q website is your best friend for this stuff honestly, way more useful than the FCC site for checking availability and status. good luck with it

timing is everything honestly. i spent way too long just hammering away and wondering why the amp wasnt helping. what changed things for me was getting a second radio so i could actually listen to the pileup behavior on one while the other was ready to transmit. you can hear the rhythm you're talking about way better when your ears arent on the same radio you're about to key. also one thing most people dont talk about — the split offset. everyone crowds 1-3 up because thats what the clusters say. if the op is working 5 up sometimes and nobody's listening because they all see the cluster spot saying 1-2, you can basically have a conversation with the DX. ive gotten some decent ones that way. basically just listen for a full couple minutes before you even think about calling, figure out where the op is actually pulling people from, not where the cluster says to call. the other dirty secret is antenna. a beam aimed correctly beats 1500w into a dipole in the wrong direction every single time and i say that as someone who ran 1500w into a dipole for longer than i should admit.

honestly RemoteHams server infrastructure has been a bit hit or miss in my experience, there are periods where relay latency spikes and i've seen streams die exactly like you're describing. not saying thats definitely your problem but its worth checking their status page or asking in their forum because sometimes its just their end and there's not much you can do on your side. i moved one of my links over to using a direct connection instead of going through their relay servers and stability got way better, less convenient to set up but it holds together a lot more reliably for longer qsos.

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and every time i get on HF someone is using phonetics for everything, like even when the band is totally clear and there's no QRM at all. my elmer told me it's just convention but i looked it up and it seems like some people treat it like a rule. is it actually required or is it just something people do out of habit? also i keep messing up and saying things like "D for Dog" instead of Delta which i know is wrong but it just comes out that way. does anyone actually care about that on air or will people just think im a newly licensed idiot

So I've been messing around with automating my antenna rotator for the past few months and finally got something semi-functional. Started with a Raspberry Pi 4 but honestly the Arduino Mega ended up being way more appropriate for the actual motor control side, Pi is sitting upstream handling the logging and the web interface I threw together. Basic setup is the Arduino reading a pot on the rotator shaft for position feedback, then driving a relay board to handle the direction and a PWM signal going into a motor controller for speed. The pot side took forever to dial in because cheap pots are noisy as anything and I kept getting jitter that would make the antenna hunt back and forth. Ended up adding a small cap across the wiper and ground which helped a lot, then just did some software averaging on the ADC readings. The Pi runs rotctld so it integrates with WSJT-X and a few other things automatically which is the part that actually feels like magic when it works. Click a callsign on the band map and the antenna just... moves there. Probably took me 40 hours total to get to this point which is maybe not the most efficient use of my time but here we are. Anyone else doing anything similar or have thoughts on whether I should just have bought a commercial controller to begin with. I know the Yaesu interfaces exist but where's the fun in that.

had almost the exact same thing on a friends 7300 last year. turned out to be the driver stage, one of the small transistors before the finals was running hot and not driving the PA properly. the finals themselves tested fine which is kind of counterintuitive because most people jump straight to blaming the PA transistors. before you open it up though, go into the menu and find the RF power calibration section, theres a way to check if the radio thinks its actually outputting 100w internally vs what youre seeing at the connector. if the radio thinks its doing full power but the wattmeter says otherwise, that rules out a software/settings issue pretty definitively and points you toward hardware. also worth checking the voltage at the finals with a meter under load if you can get to the test points, icom put some decent documentation out on that.

also check if someone messed with the IPO or attenuator settings, i know thats probably obvious but ive seen people waste days on stuff like that lol. probably not your issue if its totally dead though yeah. the relay theory sounds right to me, that or the antenna relay on the RF board. good luck with it, 857s are worth fixing if you can get it sorted.

yeah the actual Part 97 text is pretty rough to read if youre not used to it, dont feel bad. the short version for tech HF privileges is youre allowed CW on a bunch of bands but for phone (like SSB voice) on HF you basically only get 28.300 to 28.500 MHz on 10 meters. thats it for voice on HF as a tech. the ARRL has a band plan chart thats color coded by license class and honestly thats what most people actually use day to day instead of reading the raw FCC document. look up the ARRL frequency allocation chart and just keep a copy of it near your radio until it becomes second nature. the main thing is just dont transmit outside your privileges, obviously, but also be aware that on 10m phone you still have to follow all the usual Part 97 stuff about ID'ing every 10 minutes and at the end of transmission, no music, no broadcasting to the general public, all that. most of it is common sense once you know the basics.

this is making me think i should probably actually test my go-kit before I need it instead of just assuming everything is fine lol. im pretty new to all the emcomm stuff but our club has been pushing us to get involved in ARES and I signed up a few months ago. havent done a real drill yet, just the check-ins. question — when you say simplex do you mean like just picking a standard simplex frequency ahead of time and everyone knows to go there if the repeater drops, or is it more complicated than that? i feel like our group maybe hasnt covered this as clearly as they should have

okay so i just got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to get on some of the local FM repeaters in my area. i can hear people talking just fine but when i try to key up nobody seems to hear me, or at least nobody responds. i figured out that i probably need to program a CTCSS tone but honestly im still a little fuzzy on how the whole thing works. from what i understand the tone is like a sub-audible signal that tells the repeater to open up and let you through? but my radio is a baofeng uv-5r and i kind of just guessed at some settings. i found the repeater listed on repeaterbook and it shows a 100.0 Hz tone but im not totally sure if that means i transmit with that tone or if its what the repeater sends to me or both. and then theres also the offset — the repeater is on 146.820 and i know i need a minus 600 khz offset but i dont know if ive set that right either. also when i do finally get it working, whats the right way to join a conversation thats already going on? do i just wait for a pause and say my callsign or is there more to it than that? sorry if these are dumb questions i just dont want to be that guy who annoys everyone on the repeater lol

yeah 40m evenings are basically a net parking lot lol. i ran into the same thing when i upgraded. one thing that helped me was looking up the ARRL net directory — theres a searchable thing on their site where you can see what nets run on what frequencies and when. saves a lot of guessing. also some nets are only like 20-30 mins so if you can figure out when they end you can sometimes snag a frequency right after. congrats on the general btw, HF is way more fun than i expected

yeah man totally get that. i do the same thing with 20m sometimes, just let the rx run while im doing other stuff around the house. its like background company almost. my wife thinks im weird for leaving the radio on but i dunno it just feels like somethings happening even if im not part of it

so i finally got tired of putting it off and just built a proper 40m dipole out of some 14 gauge stranded wire i had laying around in the garage. cut each leg to roughly 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula, nothing fancy. used a piece of scrap pvc for the center insulator and drilled through it, soldered the coax braid and center to each leg. actually went pretty smoothly all things considered. the thing is when i threw it up in an inverted V config (apex maybe 30 feet up off a fiberglass painters pole) and checked it with my antenna analyzer, the swr dip was sitting around 6.9 mhz instead of closer to 7.1-7.2 where i wanted it. not a huge deal i know i can just trim a bit off each leg but im wondering if the inverted V shape is pulling it lower like that, or if its just the wire type and environment messing with things. i read somewhere that inverted V configs tend to run a bit long compared to a flat dipole but i wasnt sure how much. also the feedpoint impedance was reading around 38 ohms which felt a bit low to me — is that normal for this config or should i be worried about that

The PR-40 is a great mic but it has a really wide frequency response and the 590 can get overwhelmed if the mic gain is wrong. 50% might actually be too high depending on how close you're talking into it — try pulling it back to like 30-35 and speaking directly into it about 2-3 inches away, not off-axis. A lot of people make the mistake of treating dynamic mics like condenser mics and just kind of talking in the general direction of them which kills the presence. For the EQ on the 590 there's a TX bandwidth setting you can narrow down, something like 2.4 or even 2.0 kHz can clean things up a lot for voice without losing too much intelligibility. The default TX filter settings on that radio are pretty wide and on a noisy band that extra low end just becomes mud. Also check your ALC — if its pinning constantly you're overdriving the PA stage and that's going to make everything sound harsh and distorted even if the mic itself is fine. You want the ALC just barely touching on peaks. As for monitoring your own audio, the easiest thing is to set up a second receiver nearby or use the radio's monitor function if it has one. The 590 does have a sidetone/monitor mode I believe, check the menu. Way easier than bugging the net guys every week.

i run JS8Call pretty regularly actually, mostly on 40m around 7.078 and sometimes 30m. the activity is there but you kind of have to just park on frequency and wait, its not like FT8 where the whole band is buzzing. once you find a few regulars it gets better. the heartbeat/auto-status stuff is kind of annoying at first but once you turn off what you dont need it gets cleaner. PSK31 i still fire up occasionally just because i like it tbh. theres something satisfying about watching the waterfall and picking out calls by eye. RTTY too, still get on for the big contests and there's always activity there. not everything has to be about weak signal i guess

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend, went out to a state forest reference about 45 minutes from home. KFF reference, got it from the WWFF database. honestly wasnt sure what to expect since ive only done a handful of POTA activations before and figured WWFF would be similar but maybe less traffic on the spotting networks. set up my KX3 with a linked dipole, conditions were decent on 40m and i managed to get 44 QSOs in about two hours which felt pretty good for a first time. logged on paper and then transferred to ADIF later which was kind of a pain but whatever. uploaded to the WWFF logbook and it seemed to go through fine. couple things im confused about though — do you need a separate log upload for WWFF and POTA if the reference qualifies for both? pretty sure this particular forest is in both programs. and also whats the deal with the nature references that span multiple countries, i saw some of those in the database and got curious. is activating one of those any different from a regular domestic reference? overall great morning out, heard a deer crashing through the brush about 20 feet from my antenna which was fun. definitely doing more of these.

honestly for where youre starting out the Yaesu FT-60R is probably worth the stretch if you can swing it, used to be around $120-130 and its just a rock solid radio. ive had mine for maybe 8 years and dropped it more times than i want to admit. the menu system isnt the most intuitive thing in the world but once you get it set up you kind of dont have to mess with it again. the baofeng thing -- look theres nothing wrong with a UV-5R as a starter radio and plenty of people use them on repeaters just fine, but the receive on those is pretty wide open and you end up hearing a lot of garbage if youre near any RF noise. for APRS you'd want to look at something like the VX-8DR or the newer FT5D but those are gonna blow your budget pretty good. you could always start with a simpler HT for voice and add APRS later when youre more into it, thats what most people end up doing anyway

yeah what he said about the antenna is the real deal. i made the same jump thinking new hardware would fix everything and it helped but not as much as finally sorting out my feedline situation did. i was getting tons of noise from a cheap coax run through the house. one thing i'll add is if you're doing WSPR decoding specifically, WSJT-X pipes in fine from either device through a virtual audio cable setup, i use VB-Audio for that. works on the RTL too if you havent tried it yet, might be worth doing before spending money just to see if the workflow even appeals to you

I've been thinking about this lately as I chase both awards. DXCC recognizes political boundaries which result in many entities clustered in small geographic areas, while the basic award is for 100 countries that may not be spread worldwide. Meanwhile, WAZ requires confirmed contacts with all 40 geographic zones defined by CQ's official zone map, forcing you to work stations all over the world. Some Asian zones like zone 23 (Mongolia, western China) are particularly challenging from my location. What's your take - does WAZ or DXCC better represent true worldwide coverage?

honestly you're not overthinking it, this is legitimately one of those questions that doesnt have a clean answer. a dipole at 30 feet on 40m is pretty low in terms of wavelength — youre at like 0.22 wavelengths if i did that right — so the radiation angle is going to be pretty high, which means youre good for regional stuff and not great for long haul DX. that tracks with what you're seeing. the thing about verticals though is that a mediocre vertical with a bad ground system will absolutely get smoked by a decent dipole. if you go that route youre committing to laying radials and the more the better up to a point. 16 radials is a common practical minimum but 32 or 64 makes a noticeable difference on receive and transmit. not trying to scare you off it just requires some real work to do right. one thing you might try before spending anything is raising that dipole. even getting it up to 40 or 45 feet would help the radiation angle a bit. sometimes the answer is just more height on what you already have.