David Kowalski

honestly i think people way overthink this. the boring truth is signal strength still matters a lot, not just your technique. ive seen guys with stacked yagis and a kilowatt crack pileups that i couldnt touch with my 100w and a wire, same technique, same timing, everything. that said your point about reading the operator is the one thing that levels the playing field a bit for us normal humans with normal antennas one thing i havent seen mentioned much is if the DXpedition is posting their listening range on the cluster dont just go to the middle of it, go to the edges, specifically the upper edge in my experience. everyone reads 5 to 10 and goes to 7.5, so go to 9.5 and see what happens. worked for me on a couple rare ones. not every time but often enough that its my first move now

so this has been driving me nuts for a couple weeks now. my 857 was working great, i was running it mobile and everything was fine, then one day i keyed up and my SWR meter barely moved. radio shows full power on the display but im maybe getting 5-10 watts out on a good day, usually less. receive is totally normal, sensitivity hasnt changed at all that i can tell. i swapped antennas and coax thinking maybe a connector went bad, no change. tried it on dummy load same deal. the final amp section is where my head is going but i wanted to see if anyone else has run into this before i start poking around in there with a meter. i did notice once or twice in the last month before it died it would kind of hiccup mid transmission, like a brief dropout, not sure if thats related or i was just imagining things. radio hasnt been dropped or anything, just normal mobile use. mounts been solid. wondering if maybe a driver transistor is on its way out or if theres something stupid im missing before i go down the rabbit hole on this

congrats on the first build, that's a great feeling when it just fires up and works. i built mine about four years ago now and yeah the first real contact on QRP hits different for sure. on the antenna question, i switched from random wire to an EFHW a while back and honestly dont think i'd go back. with a random wire you kinda need a tuner to make it behave and even then depending on the length you can get some weird RF hot spots on the coax shield which is annoying when youre portable and running on battery. the EFHW with a decent 49:1 unun is pretty close to resonant on multiple bands without needing much tuning, packs down small, and if you can get it up at a decent angle it really does work well. only thing is the matchbox adds a tiny bit of weight and complexity but not enough to matter really. lots of guys wind their own ununs which is not hard at all if you have a couple toroids lying around. what band are you mostly operating on, that might change the advice a bit

okay so ive been chasing DX pretty casually for about two years now and i think i have somewhere around 140 entities confirmed but honestly i dont fully understand how the whole credit system works anymore. back when i started everyone said you need the QSL card but now people keep telling me LoTW is the way to go and the paper cards dont really matter as much? heres my actual confusion though — i have a bunch of contacts in LoTW that are confirmed, and i have a bunch of paper cards, but some entities i only have one or the other. like i worked a rare one from the south pacific last year and the op uploaded to LoTW but never replied to my card request. does that LoTW confirmation count toward my DXCC credit even without a paper card? i genuinely cant find a straight answer on the ARRL site and reading the rules makes my head spin a bit. also while im asking — WAS and WAZ, are those tracked the same way or does each award have totally different confirmation requirements? i work a lot of phone so im on HF most evenings. just trying to figure out if im wasting time sending paper cards when LoTW does the same job basically.

sounds like you might have some via bureau confirmations mixed in there which is totally fine for DXCC as long as the QSO details match your log. the different callsigns thing though - if its a special event station or something operating under a different call that could still be valid but you need to make sure its the same DXCC entity. LoTW is definitely the way to go these days, much faster and you can see your confirmed count update in real time. i switched to mostly electronic confirmations years ago and never looked back

I used Ham Radio Prep's video course along with the HamStudy app. The key is taking lots of practice exams - I did at least 75 before my test day. You only need 37 correct out of 50, not perfection!

That impedance is brutal for most tuners. The common "T" network tuner is most efficient matching around 1000 ohms, while very inefficient at 2.5 ohms. Try adding some feedline length to transform that impedance higher, or consider a different unun ratio.