Lisa Rodriguez91

Had similar grief with my TNC-Pi setup. Consider trying APRS TNC Web for a lighter interface - it's a Docker-based solution that might bypass whatever's causing your APRX issues. Sometimes a different software stack reveals the actual problem.

so ive been going back and forth on this for like two months now and im just gonna ask. i have a decent sized backyard, maybe 80 feet wide, and im trying to decide whether to put up a proper 40m dipole or just go with a vertical. my neighbor already has complaints about the fence so a big horizontal antenna is gonna be a conversation i dont want to have. the thing is ive read so many contradictory things. one guy says verticals are great for DX because of the low angle radiation, another guy says theyre noise magnets and his dipole at 25 feet blows away his vertical. i get that ground radials matter a lot for verticals but i dont have a way to bury a ton of them, maybe i could lay them on the ground under the grass. would a vertical with like 16 surface radials actually be competitive or am i just gonna be disappointed mainly working 40 and maybe some 20m, not trying to win contests just ragchew and occasional DX when the band opens up. running about 100w from an IC-7300.

yeah FT8 is great for the log but i felt the same way after a few months, its basically a robotic handshake and then you move on. switched a lot of my time to PSK31 on 20m and honestly even though the dx isnt as wild theres actual ragchewing happening. people send their name, qth, weather, rig info, the whole thing. feels more like radio. never really gotten into JS8 but curious about it. does it actually decode as weak as FT8 or is it more like a traditional PSK mode sensitivity wise?

Nothing beats getting a real paper card through the post, even with rising costs and bureau closures. I'm more selective now - paper for special contacts and DX, digital for everything else. The bureau saves money but takes forever.

yeah the JS8Call population is just smaller, thats the honest answer. it tends to be more active on weekends and there are nets that run on specific freqs if you look up the JS8Call groups.io list. 40m around 7078 kHz is probably your best bet in North America, and some guys run it on HF APRS-ish stuff too. the software itself is really solid once you dig into the relay and store-forward features, thats where it gets interesting for things like emcomm or just passing traffic when the bands are sketchy for what its worth i still fire up PSK31 occasionally and there are actually a surprising number of people still on it, usually around 14070. not as many as 2010 obviously but its not dead. if you want ragchew digital that might honestly be easier to find a qso on than JS8 just because the installed base is bigger even if its shrinking

Been seeing lots of discussion about declining ARRL membership lately. Got my renewal notice and honestly wondering if it's worth the $49 anymore. Do I have to join the ARRL? seems to be a common question on the forums. QST still has good articles but most info is online now. What's everyone's take - still paying dues or letting it lapse?

Letters like S/F and B/D are easily confused, which is exactly why we use phonetics. Incorrect pronunciation is one of the most common mistakes in phonetic communication. I recommend recording yourself and playing it back to hear how you sound. Also, don't be afraid to ask for feedback from other hams!

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and yeah its great for working new entities and watching the waterfall light up but after a while it starts to feel like... i dont know, like operating a vending machine? you put in the call sign and get a signal report back and thats it. whole thing is over in 90 seconds and you move on. started playing around with JS8Call last month and its a completely different animal. yeah the signal is weaker because youre spreading it over more time but the idea that you can actually send a sentence or two back and forth is kind of refreshing. ive been running it on 40m mostly around the JS8Call calling frequencies and its slow but you can actually have a qso that feels like a qso. curious if anyone here uses both regularly and how you split your time between them. also wondering if PSK31 is even worth revisiting at this point or if its basically dead. i see a tiny bit of activity on 20m PSK still but not much.

nice one. did you use the KX2's internal tuner with the EFHW or did you bring a separate one? asking because im trying to figure out my kit for my first activation and not sure if i need to pack the LDG or if i can leave it home

this is actually really timely for me because im pretty new and just got my general last spring and ive been trying to figure out when to even bother trying HF. like i knew solar flux mattered but seeing real numbers like 180-190 with actual contacts to show for it helps me understand it way better than the textbooks did. gonna try to get on 10m this weekend if conditions hold, i have a buddipole set up in the backyard so hopefully thats enough to hear something at least

so I finally finished winding all those toroids and got my 40m direct conversion receiver together based loosely on the Sudden receiver design, been meaning to do this for like two years and just kept putting it off. anyway it actually picks up signals which honestly surprised me a little because my soldering on the audio stage looked pretty rough. my issue is there's this pretty noticeable hum on everything, like 60hz I assume, and I'm not sure if it's the power supply (just using a wall wart right now), the audio amp section, or maybe a grounding thing. I did most of the construction on a piece of copper clad with ugly style and the ground connections all seem solid when I check them but who knows. also the audio is a bit muffled, wondering if maybe my low pass filter values are off or if the NE5534 stage needs some tweaking. reception seems decent on SSB but CW is where it really shines which makes sense. anyone been down this road with a DC receiver and hum issues specifically?

so ive been messing around with RemoteHams for a few months now and honestly its been mostly fine for basic stuff but lately ive been trying to set up a more permanent remote station situation and running into some weird behavior with the SDR side of things. my main rig is an IC-7300 at a cabin about 90 miles out and i've got a Pi running the server software plus a software defined radio dongle for the panadapter feed. the control side works okay but there's this lag between when i tune and when the SDR display actually updates and its not consistent — like sometimes its half a second sometimes its closer to 2-3 seconds and i cant figure out if thats a bandwidth thing at the cabin or something in the RemoteHams client itself. the cabin has a decent enough connection, fiber was finally run out there last spring, so im not sure its the upstream bandwidth being choked. i adjusted the SDR sample rate down to like 1.2 MHz which helped a little but the inconsistency is still there. anyone dealt with this or know if theres some buffer setting im missing in the server config? also tangentially — has anyone tried running internet linking through the same connection simultaneously, i have a node on IRLP that i was thinking about moving out there and wondering if that would just make things worse

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and mostly just been doing local 2m stuff on the repeater and a little bit of APRS. honestly kind of bored and want to get on HF. everyone keeps telling me to just go get my general already but i dont really know what to expect from the exam. the tech test wasnt that bad but i remember reading somewhere that general has more math involved? im ok at math but not like great at it. also i guess my bigger question is like once i actually pass, what do i even need to get started on HF. i have no idea what kind of radio to look at or if my current antenna situation is even usable. right now i just have a little mag mount on the roof for VHF. so yeah kind of a two part question i guess, the exam itself and then what happens after

Just got my General last month and I'm starting to work some DX stations on 20m. I keep hearing about different ways to confirm contacts - paper QSL cards, LoTW, eQSL - and I'm honestly overwhelmed. What's the difference between them all? I want to start working toward DXCC eventually, but I don't want to spend a fortune on postage. Which services do most DXers actually use these days? Also, I see some stations say "QSL via bureau" and others say "direct only" - what does that mean exactly? Any advice from the elmers would be appreciated!

I was in the same boat when I first started checking into nets, felt super awkward not knowing the rhythm. What helped me was just messaging the net control on the club's Facebook group and asking them directly what format they prefer. Most net controls are genuinely happy to explain it, it's not a dumb question at all. The one I check into weekly actually has a little info sheet on the club website which I totally missed for like the first month I was doing it.

congrats man, that first QSO feeling is something else. mine was on a HT through a repeater too, i was shaking a little bit which is embarrassing to admit. the guy on the other end probably had no idea i was freaking out. Harold sounds like a solid elmer, good ones are hard to find sometimes and yeah the wife thing... my family still doesnt fully understand why i have an antenna on the roof but they tolerate it so thats good enough i guess

the inverted vee idea above is good, thats what i ended up doing in a similar situation. fits way better on small lots and the pattern is a little more omnidirectional which i actually prefer for general ragchewing. feedpoint impedance is a bit lower than a flat dipole but still close enough to 50 ohms that a decent balun handles it fine without a tuner on most of 40. dont stress too much about the low height thing either, 40m at 18 feet is not ideal but its not useless, people work that band with way worse setups every day

our club was talking about renting a van actually. theres maybe 6 or 7 of us interested. havent nailed down the details yet but if it comes together ill post here. the swap meet tables are usually the best part tbh, found a barely used 706 for like 200 bucks two years ago, guy just wanted it gone

so i finally had a free afternoon yesterday, weather was decent, figured id get on 40m and just ragchew a bit. fired up the rig and my SWR was all over the place, like 3:1 on frequencies that were totally fine last weekend. spent two hours checking connections, reseating the coax, even swapped out the feedline section near the balun and nothing changed. then i go inside and the dog had chewed through part of the coax run along the baseboard. just... classic. anyway got it patched up but now im second guessing whether i want to run LMR-400 through the whole shack or just accept that i need to dog-proof my setup better. anyone run their coax in conduit indoors or is that overkill

so i got my technician a few months back and ive been reading a bit about HF and keep seeing people mention CW and how its supposedly this whole other world once you get into it. im kind of curious but also have no idea where to even start. like do people still actually use it or is it more of a historical thing at this point i tried messing around with one of those morse code apps on my phone for about 20 minutes and it felt completely impossible. how long does it take to get to where you can actually use it on air. is there a method that actually works or do you just have to grind it out

so i just passed my general exam last week (finally after studying for like 3 months) and ive been looking into getting a vanity call instead of just keeping the sequential one they assigned me. the one i got is fine i guess but its kind of a mouthful and i figured if i could get something shorter or maybe with my initials that would be cool. but honestly the FCC ULS system is kind of confusing to navigate and i cant really figure out how the sequential assignment process even works in the first place. like do they just go down a list? is it region based? and then for vanity calls i read something about a window period and i dont fully understand if i have to wait a certain amount of time after getting licensed or if i can apply right away. also does it cost anything now? i thought i read somewhere that fees changed recently but im not sure if thats for the initial license or vanity applications or both. any help would be appreciated, this stuff is harder to find clear answers on than i expected

okay so first thing — your FT-891 and a dipole is totally fine for getting started in contesting, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. some of my best contest memories are from running barefoot with a simple wire antenna. you wont be racking up 2000 QSOs but you'll make contacts and more importantly you'll learn a ton about propagation and operating rhythm just by being in there. for a first contest id honestly say look at something like the CQ WW SSB coming up — its huge which means there are signals everywhere and its actually easier to find people to work than in a smaller contest. the exchange is dead simple, just signal report and CQ zone. the learning curve is mostly just figuring out SO2R and rate stuff which you dont need to worry about yet anyway. just set up, spin the dial, find a station calling CQ contest, give your call, copy the exchange, log it and move on. N1MM Logger Plus is free and worth setting up before the weekend even if it takes a little fiddling. Field Day is kind of its own thing, the debate about whether its a contest is basically a running joke at this point. its scored like a contest but the vibe is more about emergency preparedness and getting people on the air. its great fun though especially if you do it with a club. SOTA is totally separate honestly — thats activating summits, hiking with portable gear. still awesome but a different animal.

the app you're thinking of is probably Ham Radio Prep or maybe Technician by KB6NU, he has a free study guide as a PDF that a lot of people swear by. its written pretty conversationally and explains things in plain english instead of textbook style. just google his callsign and tech study guide and it should come up. dont overthink it. the question pool for tech is only like 400 something questions and the test is 35 questions pulled from it. people pass this thing all the time with a week of prep. just find a local club because a lot of them hold license exams pretty regularly and the VEs are usually pretty relaxed about the whole thing

so i've been putting this off for like two years and finally just did it last weekend. cut a 40m dipole out of some 14 AWG stranded wire i had laying around in the garage, used a SO-239 chassis connector i pulled off an old project as the center insulator — well, i basically just drilled two holes through a chunk of PVC pipe i had and ran the wires through, soldered to the connector pins. its not pretty but it works. anyway hung it inverted-V style from a tree in the backyard, about 35 feet at the apex. got it trimmed to resonate right around 7.150 and the SWR is sitting around 1.4:1 at the low end and creeps up to about 2.1:1 toward 7.300. fed with about 50 feet of RG-8X into the shack. my question is about the feed point situation — i just tied off the coax with some electrical tape to keep the strain off the connector but im a little worried about water getting in there over time. what do people usually use to weatherproof that center section? i've heard self-amalgamating tape is the way to go but also heard people use coax seal or just silicone. also wondering if my SWR curve is normal for an inverted-V or if i should keep trimming.

hamstudy is legit, i used it when i studied for my tech and honestly it made the whole thing way less painful. the way it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills those specifically is pretty useful. i think i spent maybe two weeks on it, maybe 20-30 minutes a day while watching tv and passed with like an 85 or something. the thing about the question pool is you dont really need to understand every single concept deeply to pass the test, but i'd actually recommend trying to understand the basic electricity stuff and the band plan stuff because it'll actually matter when youre on the air. the license exam questions on things like ohms law arent hard if you just remember the formula triangle. some people use the gordon west book and swear by it, some people think its overkill for tech. honestly hamstudy plus maybe watching some of the KB6NU no nonsense study guide stuff on youtube got me through it fine.