Sarah Mitchell94

so this has been driving me nuts for about two weeks now. my 7300 receives perfectly, everything looks normal on the waterfall, audio is good, all the menus respond fine. but the moment i try to transmit anything — even just keying up with no mic audio — the rig just... dies. like the display goes dark, the fan spins down, and then after about 3-4 seconds it reboots itself and comes back like nothing happened. i swapped out my power supply first because that seemed obvious, tried it on a different 30A supply i borrowed from a buddy and same exact behavior. so i dont think its a PSU sag issue. SWR on the antenna is fine, ive checked it with an external meter, like 1.3:1 on 40m which is where i do most of my operating. before i ship it off to icom or find someone local to look at it, does anyone have a clue what subsystem this would even point to? the finals? some protection circuit thats tripping? i havent opened it up yet because honestly im a little nervous about voiding whatever warranty is left on it, but i bought it used so probably no warranty anyway. any ideas would be really appreciated, been off the air for two weeks and its killing me.

the HackRF receive performance is genuinely not great, like its fine for strong signals but once you start trying to pull weak stuff out of the noise you're going to notice it versus a dedicated receiver. the ADC resolution alone is 8-bit versus the SDRplay stuff which is up to 14-bit depending on the model, and that matters a lot when you're trying to decode WSPR spots that are barely above the noise floor. i ran a HackRF for about a year before picking up an RSP1A and the difference on HF was pretty significant. SDR++ works great with the SDRplay drivers too, had no issues there. if you dont need to transmit i'd honestly skip the HackRF entirely for your use case. the transmit side of the HackRF is cool for experimenting but if you're just monitoring and decoding you'd be paying for a feature you wont use while getting worse receive performance. RSP1B is a solid step up from RTL without breaking the bank

yeah the footswitch thing is no joke. i ran with a dodgy setup for way too long because i kept telling myself it was fine and then id blow a run frequency by accidentally transmitting on the wrong VFO at the worst possible moment. embarrassing when it happens during a pile up you just spent 10 minutes building. on the mult chasing question — my general rule is if i can work a new mult on radio 2 in under maybe 15-20 seconds i do it, otherwise i let it go and come back. anything that pulls your attention off the run for longer than that starts costing you more in rate than you got from the mult, at least until the later hours when rate naturally drops and mults become relatively more valuable. early in a contest like the first 6-8 hours i'm pretty ruthless about protecting the run. later i get more aggressive with mult hunting. also the two-ear thing took me forever to really internalize. i actually practiced with the radio off just getting used to having one ear on a podcast and the other on something else. felt dumb but it genuinely helped.

i was in almost the exact same spot about 8 months ago and ended up going with the FT-65R, no regrets. its not fancy but it does what an HT is supposed to do and i never have to fight with it. the baofengs always kind of stressed me out because i read too many posts about people accidentally transmitting on frequencies they shouldnt or having the power output be way off from what it claims. maybe that stuff is overblown but for like $80 more why deal with the uncertainty you know also the hilly terrain thing is real, i live somewhere similar and honestly finding which repeaters you can actually hit from your location is half the fun at first. join your local club if you havent already because someone will probably let you try different radios before you commit anyway

the valley thing might be more of a problem than you think depending on terrain. ive worked from a similar spot and even with the dipole up decent height we were getting our 40m basically absorbed by the hillsides to the northwest. ended up having to switch to a nvis configuration which honestly worked fine for the county-to-county comms we needed but wasnt what we planned. might be worth pulling up a topo and seeing what youre actually dealing with before the exercise so you dont spend the first hour troubleshooting angles when you should be passing traffic. on the power side i cant really add much to what the other guy said but i will say the honda is nice to have in the truck even if you dont run it. just knowing its there keeps the stress down when youre trying to focus on comms and not whether your batteries are gonna make it. ive started treating genny as insurance not primary and it changes how you plan the whole setup.

honestly the question pool method works fine for tech, the actual exam questions are pulled word for word from the pool so if you can consistently score like 85%+ on practice tests on hamstudy you're pretty much ready. i passed mine doing maybe two weeks of studying on lunch breaks. that said i'd at least try to understand the basic ohm's law stuff and the license privileges sections because that comes up on general too and its not hard once it clicks. the RF safety questions tripped me up at first but there's really only a handful of them and they kind of follow a pattern once you see a few. dont overthink it. take a practice test right now and see where you actually stand, most people are closer than they think

congrats man, that first QSO feeling is something else. i remember mine, i was shaking a little on the PTT which is embarassing to admit but whatever. the baofeng is fine to start, dont let anyone give you grief about it. once you get the bug youll end up with a proper mobile rig soon enough anyway haha. welcome to the hobby

honestly the sloper thing might be doing more work than the end fed vs center fed debate — i had a similar setup and when i put my dipole in an inverted V it changed the pattern enough that certain directions got noticeably worse. anyway dont stress it too much, 1-2 db either way is basically a coin flip on 40m with band conditions doing whatever they want. if youre making contacts youre fine

so ive had my IC-7300 for about 4 years now and honestly its been a great radio, no real complaints, but i keep looking at the IC-7610 and the Flex 6400 and wondering if im missing out on something. the dual watch on the 7610 seems genuinely useful for contesting and i do a fair bit of that but is it worth the price jump. the Flex stuff kind of intimidates me a little, i run a pretty traditional shack — dedicated monitor, logging PC, nothing crazy — and i feel like going full SDR might mean rebuilding everything around the radio instead of just dropping it in. also ran into someone at a hamfest last month who swore by his Kenwood TS-890 and said the roofing filters are in a different league than the Icom stuff. i dont do a ton of weak signal work but i do run some FT8 and CW when conditions are decent. honestly i might just be in upgrade mode for no reason, my 7300 hears everything fine. does anyone actually regret making this jump or is it one of those things where once you go up you cant go back

ive been the same way tbh. think i made maybe two qsos last month. life gets busy and the radio just sits there. dont stress it, the hobby will still be there when you feel like it again

so ive been doing contests pretty seriously for about 3 years now, mainly CW sprints and some of the bigger ones like sweepstakes and ARRL DX. consistently putting up decent scores but i feel like ive hit a ceiling on rate, especially during the slower parts of the contest when S&P is all youve got and running just isnt happening. been reading a lot about SO2R and honestly it sounds great in theory but every time i try to wrap my head around the actual implementation it gets complicated fast. like youre talking two radios, two antennas that dont interfere, some kind of switching setup, and then actually developing the skill to mentally manage both at the same time which from what i understand takes a long time to get right. i have a K3 and was thinking about picking up a used K3S or maybe an IC-7300 as the second radio but im not sure if mixing brands creates headaches with the logging software integration. also curious how people manage the antenna isolation side of it. my setup is a 3el yagi on 20 and a dipole for 40, both on a fairly small lot. the physical separation just isnt there so im worried about desense killing me. is there a point where youre better off just getting really good at single radio operating before jumping to SO2R, or is the rate improvement big enough that its worth the learning curve even if your first few contests with it are a mess

the timing thing is real and it took me honestly like 3 or 4 full contest weekends before it stopped feeling like i was just thrashing between two radios randomly. what helped me the most was basically training myself to only flip attention to radio 2 right after i send the TU and log the contact — theres a natural dead moment there before the next caller IDs themselves fully. thats your window. its maybe 1.5 to 2 seconds but if radio 2 already has a call partially decoded youre not starting from zero. the microham station master should handle the interlocking fine but make sure your tx inhibit lines are actually configured right because ive seen setups where people think theyre protected and theyre not, you can still get the radios stomping on each other if the timing offsets are wrong in the software. on the phone SO2R question — yeah people do it, i do it in ssb sweepstakes, but its significantly harder. on CW your brain can kind of half-monitor radio 2 audio while youre sending on radio 1 because sending is automatic. on phone youre actually talking so you cant listen to anything else at the same time. some guys use headphone mixing tricks, left ear radio 1 right ear radio 2, but i find it exhausting for more than a couple hours. most serious phone SO2R ops i know are just doing search and pounce on radio 2 only during deliberate breaks in their run, not true simultaneous operation.

oh man i almost bought an FTM-400 last month but ended up going with the 300DR instead just because of the price difference. curious how you like it once you get it set up. the dual receive on those is pretty nice for scanning the local repeater while also monitoring 146.52 anyway no real advice on the CRV specifically but second what the other guy said about lip mounts being totally fine for local stuff

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (Tech class) and i finally got a decent HT, a Baofeng UV-5R which i know everyone has opinions about but its what i could afford right now. anyway theres a 2m repeater listed in the directory for my area and i programmed in the input/output frequencies but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or at least nobody responds. the repeater does open up when i transmit because i can hear the tail but thats it. so i looked it up more and apparently theres something called a CTCSS tone i need to set? the listing on repeaterbook shows 100.0 Hz for the tone. i went into the menu and i think i set it but honestly the Baofeng menus are kind of a nightmare and im not 100% sure i did it right. is the CTCSS tone something the repeater needs to hear from me to let me in, or is it something i set to filter what i hear? or both? i feel like ive read three different explanations and theyre all slightly different. also separate question — is there like a standard way to call on a repeater when youre new? i dont want to step on anyone or do something wrong without realizing it. ive been listening for a few days and mostly hear nothing but occasionally someone checks in.

the ARRL website has a band plan chart thats way easier to read than the actual part 97 text, worth bookmarking. for 40 meters as a general you basically have phone privileges from 7.175 to 7.300, below that down to 7.025 is CW and data, and the very bottom chunk 7.000 to 7.025 is extra class only for phone but generals can still do CW there i believe. your club guy was probably talking about the sub-bands where certain emission types are restricted, like you cant just fire up SSB anywhere on the band. honestly the footnotes in part 97 are brutal, ive been licensed since 2009 and i still have to look stuff up sometimes. dont stress too much just get the ARRL chart printed out and keep it near the radio for a while until it sinks in