Jennifer Park

I removed all the TCP ports and it started working - try clearing any extra COM/TCP port assignments in both VARA and Winlink settings. Also verify your IC-7300 is set to DATA-USB mode, not USB-DATA, and confirm CI-V address matches between radio and software.

so i finally got around to building my first dipole from scratch last weekend. been putting it off for like two years because i kept telling myself id just buy one but honestly after pricing out a decent 40m dipole i figured why not just make the thing myself. i used some 14 gauge stranded copper wire i had laying around in the garage, cut each leg to roughly 33.5 feet for 40 meters using the 468/f formula. center insulator is just a piece of pvc i drilled holes through and the end insulators are some dogbone ones i grabbed off ebay for like 4 bucks total. fed it with about 50 feet of RG-8X into my shack. hung it in an inverted-V config from a fiberglass push-up mast at maybe 25 feet at the apex. SWR at 7.150 is coming in around 1.4:1 which seems decent? but im getting some weird readings across the band where it dips way lower around 7.05 and then climbs again toward 7.3. resonant point seems a little low. do i just trim the ends a bit or is that normal variation and im overthinking it. also not sure if the RG-8X is killing me with loss at this length or if thats fine for HF

As someone still working toward my first DXCC, this is fascinating. I never really understood what WAZ was about. The base certificate costs $6 for CQ subscribers, $12 for non-subscribers if using LoTW. Might be worth pursuing both simultaneously!

yeah the PR-40 is a great mic but its a broadcast mic really, it has a lot of low end presence that sounds great for podcasting but on SSB it just eats up your passband with stuff below 300hz that nobody can hear anyway. the 7300 has a parametric EQ and a TX bandwidth setting and those are the two things you want to focus on first. what i do is set the TX bandwidth to around 2.8khz — you dont need the full 3khz and tightening it up a little helps. then in the tone menu i cut the bass shelf pretty aggressively, like -4 to -6db below 400hz. the mids around 1.5-2khz are where voice intelligibility actually lives so you can leave those flat or bump them slightly. also the compressor in the 7300 is actually usable, a little P-COMP goes a long way for punchiness without making you sound like youre calling from the moon. mic distance with a dynamic like the PR-40 you want it maybe 2-3 inches and talking slightly off axis helps cut some of that proximity effect bass buildup

tbh i tried JS8Call for like two weeks and went back to just running FT8 and occasional PSK31. the activity on JS8 felt really thin from here, maybe a regional thing, im in the upper midwest. could never quite find that critical mass of people actually wanting to chat vs just beaconing their grid and moving on PSK31 still gets my vote if you want an actual keyboard-to-keyboard qso with decent weak signal performance. yeah its not as deep in the noise as FT8 but with a reasonable setup and a decent waterfall you can pull out signals you'd never hear on SSB and the conversations feel like actual conversations. theres still activity on 14.070 area if you look for it

4 contacts is 4 contacts man, activation counts. my first one i only got 3 and had to basically beg a buddy on the phone to get on and work me lol. the buddistick style antennas are kinda finicky in wind, i switched to just a simple linked dipole over a sotabeams mast and it made a huge difference. also throw your activation on sotawatch before you go up, chasers will be waiting for you and it makes getting those first few contacts way easier

so ive been running a remote station for about two years now using a mix of stuff i cobbled together myself — hamlib over ssh tunnels, a cheap IP relay board for PTT, VNC for the logging software, the whole nine yards. it works but its honestly kind of a mess to maintain and every time my ISP does something weird the whole thing falls apart for a day or two until i figure out whats different. i started looking at RemoteHams seriously last month because a friend of mine has been using it and says its pretty solid. he's got an SDR-based setup on the remote end which i thought was interesting because i was assuming it was just for conventional transceivers. i guess the SDR remote client handles that side of things? not totally clear on how the audio path works when you go that route vs using a radio with a built in soundcard interface. my main hesitation is the whole internet linking piece — like if the RemoteHams server infrastructure has a hiccup does your whole station go dark, or is there some fallback. i know you can do direct connections but from what i read that requires both ends to have stable IPs which isnt always the case. anybody whos gone from DIY to RemoteHams or vice versa have thoughts? or even if youve just used both in different contexts id be curious what you found

missing band openings is basically a ham radio tradition at this point, dont feel bad. ive had my beam pointed the wrong direction for entire openings before and only figured it out when someone told me later. at least you had the cluster up. im still pretty new to HF so honestly 10m being open at all is exciting for me, i grew up reading about 10m being the magic band and thought id never see it. got my general last spring and have been trying to learn the propagation stuff as i go. its a lot to take in but sites like prop.kc2g.com have been helpful for just getting a quick snapshot of whats going on.

oh man hamfests are the best for finding deals, went to one last summer as my first one ever and came home with way more than i planned on spending lol. ended up with a handheld and like three books i didnt need. def go if you can

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for racking up contacts and working DX with a compromised antenna setup (im on a second floor apartment with a random wire out the window, dont judge me) but honestly i feel like im just clicking buttons and logging callsigns and theres not really any... i dunno, ham radio feeling to it? like theres no actual communication happening someone at our club meeting mentioned JS8Call and how its basically built on the same weak signal foundation as FT8 but lets you actually type messages back and forth, relay stuff through other stations, even do some basic store-and-forward messaging. ive been poking around with it a bit and it seems interesting but the SNR performance obviously takes a hit compared to pure FT8 curious if anyone here actually uses JS8Call regularly on HF and whether its worth having it in the mix alongside WSJT-X, or is the weaker weak-signal performance kind of a dealbreaker when youre already fighting a mediocre antenna situation. also wondering how active the bands actually are on JS8 — like is there enough activity that you can find someone to have a real qso with or is it mostly tumbleweeds

yeah this happens all the time, especially on 40m during the day when skip is doing weird things. the RMS gateway might show green because someone else connected recently but that doesnt mean the path is good right now for your qth i usually try 2-3 different gateways if the first one is being slow. also check the gateway status on the winlink website - some of them go offline or have issues and it takes a while to update in the software

so ive been running a Diamond NR770H on my truck for about two years now and its been fine for local repeaters and the occasional simplex chat but i keep hearing guys on the club net with noticeably stronger signals and a lot of them are running some kind of roof mounted setup or even a small yagi on a mag mount which i didnt even know was really a thing people did mobile. my commute takes me past a hilltop about 12 miles from the city and ive had this half baked idea of throwing up a small 2m yagi on a tripod up there for like weak signal work or even just better simplex coverage into town. wondering if anyone has actually done something like a 5 or 6 element yagi portable or if thats more trouble than its worth when you could just run a collinear with more height. my current rig is a TM-V71A if that matters. not even sure what my actual question is here, i guess im just curious what people have found works best for mobile vhf and whether a yagi for hilltop portable ops is something worth building or buying

so my trusty 706 decided to crap out on me yesterday but only on 20 meters. every other band works fine, full power, good swr, but switch to 20m and nothing. not even carrier. checked all the obvious stuff like antenna connections and swr meter shows good match. anybody seen this before on the mkiig? i'm thinking maybe the band pass filters but dont want to crack it open if theres something simple im missing

what's going on with the 857 front end? like is it overloading or just deaf? because that might be fixable before you spend money on a whole new rig. had a similar thing happen with mine turned out to be a cold solder joint on the RF board, tech fixed it for like 60 bucks. anyway not trying to talk you out of the 7610 just seems worth checking first

yeah the latency thing is real, CW remote is kind of a pain no matter what you use unless your roundtrip is under like 30ms which basically means you gotta be in the same city as the station anyway. I gave up on keying CW remotely and just use it for digital and SSB rag chews now. RemoteHams works fine for casual stuff but if you're doing anything serious like contesting or chasing DX where you need to be quick on the trigger it still feels a little sluggish. just my experience from maybe a year of using it on and off.

yeah that pattern — one band low, everything else fine — almost always points to the LPF relay or the relay driver for that band segment. the 7300 has a relay board that switches the low pass filters and those relays can get flaky, especially if the radio has seen a lot of use. worth pulling the covers and looking at the relay board, sometimes you can see a burnt or corroded contact if you look carefully. the other thing i'd check is the LPF coils themselves for that band but honestly the relay is the more common failure point. icom service manual has the relay designations labeled pretty clearly. if you have a DMM you can at least check coil resistance on the suspect relay and compare it to the others. replacement relays are like a few bucks each if you can identify the right part number.

so i've been doing SO2R half-heartedly for maybe 3 years now, never really getting the rate improvement i expected. was running two k3s with a bandmaster and some janky switching i cobbled together, and honestly my rates were sometimes worse than just running single radio because i kept screwing up the audio and transmitting on the wrong band. embarrassing stuff. anyway last winter i finally sat down and actually thought through the workflow properly instead of just winging it and here's what changed things for me — i stopped trying to S&P on radio 2 while actively running on radio 1 at the same time. sounds obvious but i was trying to do both simultaneously which is just too much. now i use R2 strictly for finding the next CQ frequency or a mult while i'm finishing a QSO on R1. the moment i have a clear picture of where i'm going next, R2 goes quiet and i focus on closing the R1 QSO cleanly. also the headphone audio thing was killing me. switched to totally separate audio routing with a headphone matrix box and now i can split L/R or blend however i want per radio. that alone probably added 20 QSOs per hour just from not losing my place mid-run. anyone else have a specific thing that finally made SO2R feel natural rather than a handicap? curious what the turning point was for others

Started with the ARRL manual but got bogged down in theory I didn't need yet. Switched to the free HamBooks from HamStudy.org - they make complex concepts approachable and focus on what you need for the test. Passed on first try and actually understood what I was doing.

nice work getting out there. i did my first wwff a few months ago and the 44 QSO thing tripped me up too, spent like 20 minutes after getting home trying to verify i hadnt imagined it. you're good though, 44 is the magic number. the upload wasnt too bad once i figured out you need to register on the wwff site separately from any other logging accounts you might have. took me two tries because i forgot to set the WWFF reference in my ADIF header but the site actually gives you a pretty readable error message so its not a disaster when it happens.

so ive been running an old FT-450D for about 4 years now and its served me well but im starting to feel like i want something with a proper panadapter and better filtering. been eyeballing the IC-7300 for a while but my buddy keeps telling me to look at the 991A since it covers VHF/UHF too and i only have the one antenna feedline run through the wall right now. the thing is i dont really do much VHF from the shack, i mostly just grab the HT for that. so the multiband thing on the 991A doesnt excite me as much as it probably should. the 7300 spectrum scope just looks so much more usable from everything ive seen. but its like $200 more depending where you look and thats real money. anyone actually run both of these or switched from one to the other? im not a contester or anything just do general HF ragchew and some WSPR/digital stuff on the side. wondering if the 7300 is actually worth it for that use case or if im just getting lured in by the shiny touchscreen