Steve Johnson

been going almost every year since like 2011 and yeah the flea market is the whole point honestly, show up early friday morning if you can because the good stuff moves fast. bring cash, like more than you think you need, and wear comfortable shoes because youre walking way more than you expect. the parking situation has gotten a little better since they moved venues but its still a thing. oh and the inside vendor hall is worth walking through but prices in there are usually retail so i mostly stick to outside

so i've been watching the solar flux numbers climb over the past few weeks and honestly wasn't expecting much since we're still technically building toward the cycle peak but man, 10 meters has just been absolutely going off some afternoons. caught a solid opening into south america yesterday around 1600 local and worked like 6 stations in 20 minutes which is more than i've worked on that band combined since i got licensed two years ago lol i've been using pskreporter and dxmaps to kind of track where the openings are going but im still not great at predicting when to actually sit down and spin the dial. like is there a rule of thumb for how high the SFI needs to be before 10m gets consistently useful? i've seen it up around 180-190 the last few days and that seems to correlate with good conditions but i honestly don't really know what im looking at half the time with the propagation charts on dxmaps also noticed 12m has been pretty good too, worked a station in the canary islands last week which was a first for me. anyway just curious if others are seeing the same thing or if i've just been lucky with timing

im pretty new to hf, just got my general a few months ago and ive been lurking on 10m trying to figure stuff out. didnt realize conditions were unusually good right now, i just thought this was normal lol. good to know i picked a decent time to upgrade i guess. what frequencies should i be watching for FT8 specifically? i know its around 28.074 but sometimes i tune around and dont see much activity and im not sure if its my setup or just timing

the signalink levels are almost always the culprit when i see this kind of thing described. you want your transmit audio set so youre driving the radio but not splattering all over. with vara HF specifically ive found that running the radio at like 40-50 watts max and keeping the signalink TX knob around the 9-10 oclock position works pretty well, but you really need to watch the ALC meter on the 7300 -- if its moving much at all youre probably overdriving it and vara absolutely hates that. the modulation goes all wobbly and the gateway just gives up on you. also check that youre not running any processing on the 7300. data mode should have speech processor off, TX monitor off, all that stuff. the 7300 has a USB audio interface built in btw, you might actually get better results ditching the signalink and going direct USB -- one less piece of gear in the chain and the 7300s built in codec is pretty decent for digital stuff. as for vara FM on vhf, yeah absolutely try it if you have gateways in range. 40 miles should be workable with a decent antenna, and vhf sessions tend to be way more reliable for short messages.

so the short version is as a general you can use SSB on 40m from 7.175 up to 7.300, and 7.300 is the actual band edge so you dont want to operate right there because if your signal is wide or your rig drifts even a little youre technically outside the ham allocation. most people say stay at least 3 or 4 kHz inside the edge just to be safe, so like 7.295 or so as an upper limit in practice. 7.250 is totally fine, thats right in the middle of the general SSB portion. the lower part of the band below 7.175 is extra class only for phone so dont go there for voice. below that its CW and digital territory. youre not going to accidentally stomp on anything critical at 7.250, thats pretty normal everyday SSB territory

That's awesome! I'm still working up the courage to call CQ on HF. Been listening for weeks but haven't pressed the PTT yet. Your story gives me hope that it's not as scary as I'm making it out to be.

same boat as you honestly, i just started checking into a net like two months ago and it feels way more like a community than just random QSOs. ours is a Sunday evening thing on a local repeater and half the time we end up just chatting after the formal check-in part is done lol. one thing i didnt know at first was that some nets have a specific format for how you give your callsign and info so it might be worth listning for a few weeks before jumping in just to get the flow of it

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of newly upgraded generals. so the short answer is the FCC part 97 rules are what's legally binding, the band plan is basically a voluntary gentleman's agreement put together by the ARRL that most people follow but nobody's going to fine you for ignoring it. that said you really should follow it because the community expects it and you'll get a lot of grief if you fire up SSB down in the CW portion even if you're technically within your allocation. for 40m as a general you can do SSB from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz, and you have CW privileges from 7.025 up. the band edge thing is important -- your signal has sidebands, so if you're operating USB and you set your dial to 7.300 you're actually putting energy above 7.300 which is outside your allocation. most people stay at least 3 kHz inside the edge to be safe, some go even further. its not just courtesy, you can actually be out of band without realizing it if you dont account for the bandwidth of your signal

so ive been licensed about 8 months now and people keep talking about DXCC and chasing entities and i kinda get the concept but im honestly confused about the actual process of getting credits confirmed. like i made a contact with a station in the Canary Islands last week and someone in my club said that counts as a separate entity from Spain but i wasnt sure if i needed to do anything special or if logging it in LOTW automatically means it counts toward something also i saw there's WAS and WAZ too and i dont really understand how those are different goals or if you're supposed to chase all of them at the same time or what. i've worked maybe 40 or 50 countries at this point just messing around on 20m mostly and someone told me i should be keeping better track but i don't really know what that means practically speaking. any help appreciated, and yes i did google it but the ARRL pages are kind of dense

Congrats on the General! Band choice really depends on your area - 70cm is more popular in urban areas, 2m dominates rural. Check repeaterbook.com for your camping spots to see what's active. The FTM-300DR is solid - System Fusion capability is a nice bonus for future-proofing.

honestly for the state QSO parties N1MM is just the right tool, dont fight it. ive tried doing contests in other loggers and you always end up missing something, the multiplier tracking or the dupe checking or whatever. Log4OM is great but its not really built around that rapid exchange workflow. the three-software thing sounds complicated but in practice you just keep them separate. contest happens in N1MM, import when its done, move on. i wouldnt try to have WSJT-X feeding N1MM in real time unless youve tested it a bunch before the contest because weird things can happen with the port configs and the last thing you want is to figure that out at hour two of a contest.

honestly the extra segments arent always that much emptier depending on conditions and what youre doing but i'll say this — i actually learned a ton going through the material and some of it stuck in a way i didnt expect. the stuff about impedance matching and how transmission lines behave at different frequencies finally made some things click for me that i'd been kind of hand-waving for years. like i finally understood why my antenna tuner was doing what it was doing. the math looks scarier than it is. you dont have to derive anything from scratch on the test, you just have to recognize whats going on and pick the right answer. if you use something like hamstudypro and just grind through the pool a few times you'll start to see the patterns. took me maybe 6 weeks of evenings. the theory questions about op-amps and oscillator stability and that kind of stuff i just sort of learned by osmosis going through the flashcards enough times. and yeah full privileges matter if you ever want to do CW contesting in the extra portions or if you get into things like weak signal digital where every few khz can matter. plus if you ever want to be a VE you need it. i'd say go for it, worst case you learn some things.

IMHO, Kenwood radios have the best audio quality and seem to come very close to their commercial units. I've had my TM-281 for 5 years now and it's been bulletproof. The front-firing speaker is a nice touch too for mobile use.

Depends on your operating style and space. If you're primarily contesting or DXing, separate monobands give you the ultimate performance. lower impedance Yagis of around 30-35 ohms offer better performance and are easily matched with a hairpin. For general operation, a well-designed interlaced like the XR5 covers more bands including WARC. Force 12 XR5 - 20/17/15/12/10 interlaced Yagi - a C3 with WARC bands - works very well.

been wondering about this for a while... like if someone with a tech license accidentally transmits on 20m voice or something, how would the FCC even know unless someone reports it? not that im planning to do this just curious about enforcement. heard stories both ways - some say they have monitoring stations everywhere, others say they only investigate complaints also what actually happens if you get caught? is it automatic fine or do they give warnings first

honestly the 7300 is a fantastic radio for what you're describing but I wouldn't say the receive is dramatically better than the 590SG in a direct comparison. the roofing filters on the kenwood are really solid and a lot of contesters actually preferred it for that reason for years. the waterfall though — that really does change how you operate, not gonna lie. i was skeptical too but once you can see a pile-up forming on 20m or watch the band come alive in the evening its hard to go back to just a meter. if your 590 is working fine and you're not having any issues I'd say save the money unless you find a good deal on a used 7300. they hold value pretty well so you wouldnt lose much if you decided to sell it later either. i picked mine up used for around $750 a couple years back and that felt like the right price to take the plunge without feeling stupid about it.

so ive been a Tech for about 8 months now and honestly i mostly just mess around on 2m and 70cm but i keep hearing people talk about HF and it sounds like thats where the real fun is. been thinking about going for my General class but i dont really know what to expect from the exam. like is it a lot harder than the Tech test? i remember the Tech test being pretty manageable, studied for maybe two weeks using hamstudyorg and passed first try. main things im confused about are like how much of the question pool overlaps and whether i actually need to understand the electrical theory stuff or if i can just memorize the answers. also i keep seeing people mention operating on 40m and 20m and im not sure what i can even do once i have the General ticket vs what i have now. any advice from people who went through this recently would be helpful, i feel like im overthinking it

you actually did fine from the sounds of it. most casual nets are pretty relaxed and the net control will let you know if they need anything specific. some nets have a particular format they follow, like a traffic net where you're supposed to declare traffic or pass messages a certain way, and those are a bit more structured. but a general rag chew or club net usually just wants your callsign and maybe your name, sometimes your location if it's a wide-area net and they're logging where signals are coming from. the best thing honestly is to just listen to a few sessions before checking in so you get a feel for how that specific net runs. they're all a little different. and keying up to give your call before speaking during the announcement period is exactly right, that's just good practice so net control knows who's talking. you're doing better than you think, most new folks are way too scared to even try.

welcome to the hobby man, that first qso feeling is something else right. ron sounds like he was a good first contact, some repeaters you key up and get nothing or someone kinda rude about the audio quality on those baofengs lol. dont let that stop you if it happens. stick around on the repeater and you'll start recognizing the regulars pretty quick, most of them are pretty happy to chat with a new tech. what area are you in roughly?