Sarah Chen

I see a lot of debate about learning methods. Koch method says learn characters at full speed from the start, while Farnsworth timing uses high character speed but slow overall timing. What are the practical differences? Which approach gives better results for getting on the air quickly? Koch: Start with 2 chars at 20+ WPM, add more at 90% accuracyFarnsworth: 18-20 WPM chars spaced out to 5 WPM overallAnyone tried both methods? What worked for you?

Totally normal to feel that way your first few times, dont sweat it. The timing thing gets easier — most people wait about a second after the squelch tail drops before keying up, just enough to make sure the other person is really done. doubling happens to everyone, even guys who've been doing this for decades, especially on busy repeaters. For phonetics it kind of depends on the net. Some nets are pretty casual and a quick callsign is fine, others are more formal and they expect full phonetics every time. just follow what the net control does and you'll fit right in. and yeah for announcements you usually just key up when they ask and say something like "W1XYZ, I have an announcement" and wait for them to acknowledge you before you go ahead. you'll get the hang of it fast, the first few check-ins are always the weirdest part

oh man dont feel bad, literally everyone fumbles their first few check-ins, its just one of those things you learn by doing. the awkward repeat thing from net control is pretty normal — sometimes the signal wasnt quite there or they just want to confirm the call before logging it, doesnt necessarily mean you did anything wrong. as for the format, yeah it varies a bit but most voice nets around here want you to wait for net control to acknowledge you before giving your name and location. so when they call for check-ins you just give your callsign once, clearly, then wait. net control will come back to you and usually say something like "copy [your call], go ahead" or just repeat your call back and thats your cue to give your full info. some nets have a specific format they announce at the start so if you catch the preamble it'll usually tell you exactly what they want. keep checking in, it clicks pretty fast after a few times.

i put up a vertical last summer, 33ft with 32 radials, took me two full weekends. it works but i kind of wish i had just raised my dipole higher tbh. the radial field is a pain and even with 32 of them i dont think i hit the theoretical efficiency numbers. dx wise its fine but for the regional stuff the dipole was clearly better and thats actually most of what i do on 40 anyway so. both have their place i guess but if youre on the fence and already have a dipole working id look at the height question first before committing to the radial project

just chiming in cause im kinda in the same boat, around 11wpm right now. somebody on another forum told me to try LCWO dot net if you havent already, you can set character speed high like 20wpm and just slow down the spacing between letters (Farnsworth method i think its called). that way your brain learns the sounds at the right speed even if you have more time to process. seemed to help me at least with recognizing the characters faster even if my overall copying speed isnt there yet

Currently running a 33-foot vertical with 16 quarter-wave radials on 40 meters. Many hams find the 33-foot vertical to be a sweet spot for size. That represents a quarter-wavelength of the 40 meter band. Getting decent performance but considering expanding to 32 radials for better efficiency. These are the vertical's radials. They provide the essential ground connection that creates the "other half" of the antenna. Has anyone done a real-world comparison of radial count on 40m? Looking for practical advice on cost vs. performance tradeoff.

The ARRL Extra Class License Manual 12th edition covers the new question pool perfectly. It provides detailed explanations for all questions and leads you through advanced electronics theory and specialized operating practices. Don't rush - the theory is complex but rewarding once you understand it.

the CTCSS thing trips up a lot of new folks, dont worry. so the PL tone (same thing as CTCSS, just older lingo) is what your radio sends out when you transmit so the repeater knows to open up and repeat you. the receive tone is different — that filters what YOU hear so your speaker only opens if someone is transmitting with that tone too. for most repeaters you only need to set the transmit tone. putting it in both fields usually doesnt hurt anything but if the repeater doesnt use CTCSS on its output then setting a receive tone might actually make you miss transmissions from other stations, so i'd just leave the rx side off unless you know for sure the repeater uses it. as for etiquette, both approaches you described are pretty normal. saying your callsign and waiting is totally fine, some people just say "N0XYZ monitoring" or whatever and wait to see if anyone comes back. launching into a conversation is more for when you already know someone is on. the main thing is just dont kerchunk the repeater without identifying, the FCC wants you to ID and honestly it's just good manners on a linked system especially.

For emergency communications, CW abbreviations are incredibly valuable. These codes help communicate information quickly and effectively, which is critical during disasters when power and bandwidth are limited. Don't skip learning them - they're tools in your communication toolkit.

honestly the best thing i ever did was forget about learning the dots and dashes visually. like dont even think about it as dit dah patterns written down, that just slows you down later when youre trying to copy at speed. look up the Koch method, theres a free program called LCWO dot net where you basically start with just two characters and you only add a new one when you hit a certain accuracy threshold. feels slow at first but it actually works and you end up hearing the letters as sounds instead of counting beats the other thing people always say and its true is learn at a higher character speed than your overall speed. so like send characters fast but with long gaps between them. farnsworth spacing i think its called. if you learn at 5wpm with slow characters youll have to relearn everything when you try to go faster. i made that mistake. took me way longer than it needed to

psk31 is still my go to for conversational stuff tbh, old school but the waterfall full of signals on 14.070 feels more alive to me than waiting for js8 replies. that said i havent put serious time into js8call so maybe im missing something. ft4 is worth trying too if you want something faster than ft8 but dont need the absolute floor sensitivity, activity picked up a lot during contests

so ive been messing with RemoteHams for a few months now and overall its pretty solid but i keep running into this one issue where the audio latency spikes randomly, like it'll be totally fine for 20 minutes then just jump to like 800ms out of nowhere and come back down. doesnt seem to matter what the band conditions are doing, happens on 40m just as much as 20m. my upload at the remote site is around 15 Mbps so it shouldnt be a bandwidth thing. the remote station is running an IC-7300 and i've got the RemoteHams client software talking to it fine, PTT works, everything basically functions. but i wanted to also pipe in an SDR -- i have an RTL-SDR v3 sitting there -- so i could have a panadapter view while operating remotely. tried setting up SDR# on the remote machine and forwarding the stream but its kind of a mess, not sure if theres a cleaner way to do this. also tangentially curious if anyone has tried using something like WSJT-X through a remote setup like this for FT8. i know the timing sensitivity is brutal for digital modes and im guessing the latency situation makes it basically unusable but maybe im wrong

All messages, transmissions and directions should be in plain language. Use of CB words, "Q" signal on phone, 10 codes or other jargon should be avoided. Just be yourself and use normal conversational English.

so my club just put up a flyer about the Tri-County hamfest coming up on the 14th and im thinking about going but ive never actually been to one of these before. is it worth the drive? im about 90 minutes out. mostly hoping to find a decent HF rig without spending Icom money lol. also does anyone know if they usually have a flea market type setup or is it mostly vendors

so i finally did it after putting it off for like two years, passed the technician exam last tuesday and got my callsign a few days later. spent the weekend just listening on the 2m repeater in my area and then yesterday i just went for it and keyed up and someone actually came back to me. older guy named Harold, he was super patient with me stumbling through my first exchange lol. i dont even remember half of what i said i was so nervous. but it counted right anyway just wanted to share because i feel like nobody in my real life gets it. my wife thinks im obsessed with a walkie talkie. whats the first contact you guys remember making

yeah the window system trips up a lot of people, its not a lottery exactly but it kind of feels like one. basically when you apply there's a 18 day filing window and anyone else who wants that same call can throw their hat in during that time. after the window closes the FCC looks at all the applications and there IS a priority order — extras do get first crack at certain call formats, and then generals and techs for others. so a 1x2 like W1AB is going to be pretty competitive if it's available and extras will generally beat you to it if they apply. a 2x2 or 1x3 format might be more realistic for a general depending on what district you're in. timing wise in my experience it's been running a few weeks to maybe a month but i've seen people wait longer if there's a conflict or if the FCC has a backlog. the AE7Q website is your best friend for this stuff, he has tools that show you all the applications in queue for a specific call and you can see exactly what's pending. way easier than trying to parse the ULS directly.

yeah i went through the same confusion when i upgraded, took me a while to sort out what was an actual rule vs what was just convention. one thing that helped me was just downloading the arrl band chart pdf and keeping it near the radio for a while. the other thing -- 7.245 is actually a pretty busy frequency, theres some nets that use it depending on time of day and region so that might have been what that guy was annoyed about, not so much the band edge thing. hard to say without knowing more context

just get your general already, problem solved lol. seriously though the tech HF privs are so limited its kind of frustrating, i remember sitting there with my tech ticket thinking i was gonna get on HF and then realizing how little i could actually do. the general exam really isnt that hard, i studied for maybe three weeks using hamStudy.org and passed no problem. then the whole HF world opens up.

could also just be one of the driver transistors starting to go, not necessarily the finals. i've seen these come in where only one or two bands are affected and it traces back to the driver stage getting weak. finals usually either work or they dont, a partially bad driver can give you this kind of weird band-specific low output. just something to check before you go buying finals which are not cheap

so I finally got around to putting my FT-7900R in the truck, been sitting in the box for like 4 months because I kept putting it off. got it mounted under the dash on the passenger side, ran the power cable straight to the battery with a fuse inline, and the radio seems happy. the antenna is a NMO mount that I stuck on the roof right above the rear passenger door, kind of off center because I was worried about drilling through the middle of the roof and hitting something I shouldnt. it works, I mean I can hit the local repeaters just fine and everyone says my audio sounds okay, but I keep reading that center of the roof is the ideal placement for ground plane and radiation pattern. is my slightly off-center mount going to cause any real world problems or is this one of those things that matters more in theory than actual use? I drive around pretty hilly terrain if that matters at all.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general) and everybody keeps telling me i need to try a contest to really get a feel for operating under pressure. CQ WW is coming up and i looked at the rules and honestly my eyes glazed over a little. zones, multipliers, exchange formats... its a lot to take in all at once. i did manage to get a few contacts during ARRL Field Day back in june, but that was operating from a club station with an elmer basically sitting next to me the whole time which was great but also meant i wasnt really doing it myself you know. my home setup is a modest one — ts-480 into a dipole up maybe 25 feet — not exactly a contest powerhouse but i figured maybe i can just operate search and plow for a few hours and see what happens without worrying about score. also saw some mentions of SOTA activations being a good way to practice fast exchanges under pressure, different vibe obviously but someone on my local repeater swears by it for getting comfortable with pileups. has anyone done both? do they actually translate to each other at all or is it a totally different skill set. anyway mainly just wondering if someone can point me toward a gentle on-ramp for CQ WW or if theres another contest coming up that might be better for a beginner.

the baud rate thing on the 7300 got me too, i think almost everyone hits that at some point. icom's documentation on CI-V is fine once you find the right version of it but theres so many forum posts with conflicting info that its easy to end up chasing your tail. im curious about the DX cluster integration part you mentioned — are you just telneting into a cluster node directly from the pi or going through something like DXtelnet or whatever. i've been wanting to do something similar where it could alert me on a display or maybe even beep when a new one shows up on a band i have an antenna for. got a old pi 3 doing nothing and a small OLED i pulled off a broken weather station project so maybe its time to actually do something with it

yeah same thing happened to me honestly. i checked in to a traffic net before i really understood how they were different from a regular ragchew net and i had no idea what i was doing lol. the net manager was nice about it though. one thing i'd add is if you really feel bad you could always email or reach out to the net control operator after — a lot of them are club members and totally approachable off the air. they've seen it all and most of them were new once too. the fact that you were listening for weeks before jumping in is honestly more than most people do so you're already ahead of the curve imo

so i've been doing contests for probably 12 years now and SO2R always seemed like this mythical thing that the big guns did and i never really got it to work right. always had either the audio bleed issue or i'd lose my run frequency because i wasn't paying attention while S&Ping on the second radio. finally had a decent CQWW SSB last weekend and i think i've got the basics down enough to actually talk about it. the thing that made the biggest difference honestly wasn't the radios or the software, it was just forcing myself to actually listen to both ears independently. sounds obvious but i kept defaulting to mixing both receivers into a mono blend and that just defeats the whole purpose. once i committed to keeping the run radio in my left ear only and the S&P radio in the right it started feeling more natural after like the first hour. rate-wise i was seeing around 180-190/hr during the good runs on 15m saturday morning which for me is pretty solid. probably left points on the table because i still hesitate too long before calling CQ again after a QSO but thats a timing thing i gotta work on. anyone else gone through this and have tips for reducing that dead air time between QSOs? my logging software is N1MM and i've got the F-key timing set pretty aggressively already but still feel like im slow on the exchange sometimes.