Jennifer Walsh53

just to add one thing — if youre still not getting into the repeater after setting the tone, double check you have the offset right. most 2m repeaters are plus or minus 600 kHz and if your radio is set to simplex or the wrong offset direction youll transmit on the wrong frequency and the repeater just wont hear you at all. i spent like two days debugging a tone issue once and it turned out i just had the offset backwards lol. easy fix but easy to miss.

your friend isnt entirely wrong tbh, a lot of people do pass just by pattern matching the answers and theres nothing wrong with that to get your foot in the door. the license is really just the beginning anyway, the real learning happens on the air. dont stress too much about fully understanding every single question in the pool before your exam date. one thing i'd say is pay attention to the RF safety questions because there seem to be more of them than people expect and they tripped up a couple guys at our club's recent license session. also anything about repeater operations since thats probably what youll be using most as a new tech. good luck with it, its really not that hard once you just commit to sitting down and going through it

honestly the technician exam is way easier than most people expect, dont psych yourself out. theres 35 questions pulled from a pool of like 400 or so and you need 26 right to pass. the math is pretty minimal, mostly just ohms law stuff and even then theres only a handful of those questions on the actual test. what worked for me was just using hamstudy.org every day for like 2 weeks, maybe 20-30 minutes at a time. it shows you the actual question pool and tracks which ones you keep getting wrong. by the time i was consistently scoring above 80% on the practice tests i figured i was ready and i passed no problem. some people use the Gordon West book or the ARRL technician manual if they want more explanation behind the answers, but honestly just drilling the question pool got me through it fine. the test isnt really about deep understanding, its more about recognizing the right answer. find a local club near you too, they usually run testing sessions pretty regularly and some even do free license classes on weekends. way less intimidating than you think

so ive been putting this off for like two years but finally cracked open the 857D last weekend to do the extended TX mod. you know the one, mars/cap mod, just pulling the diode on the main board. straightforward enough if youve done any rig surgery before but there were a couple things that caught me off guard that i figured id post about since the writeups i found online were a little vague on certain steps. first thing is the board in mine (i have a later production unit, not sure exactly when it was made but the serial puts it somewhere around 2011 or so) had the diode in a slightly different spot than the photos i was working from. not drastically different but enough that i was poking around in there longer than i should have been. if you have a later unit double check before you go snipping anything. second thing, and this is the one that almost got me, the ribbon cable on the front panel is way more fragile than it looks. i disconnected it fine going in but clipping it back i felt it snag just slightly and spent a good 20 minutes convincing myself i hadnt damaged it. ended up being fine but just go slow on that part. everything powers up and works normally now, no issues on the ham bands and the wider TX is doing what its supposed to do. just sharing in case anybody else is about to go down this road.

yeah what he said about LOTW. i was in the same boat when i started chasing DXCC and i kept thinking it was more automated than it is lol. you basically have to go in and submit when youre ready to claim the award. the credits just sit there until you do one thing i'd add — grab the DX spotting clusters if you havent already, like DXSummit or DX Watch, it makes finding new entities way less random. thats how i found out about a rare one from the south atlantic last spring and managed to get in the pileup. didnt work out that time but still. just having that running in the background while youre at the shack changes everything

honestly just do it, the General exam is not that bad. i was in the same boat about two years ago, zero electronics background, and i used HamStudy.org basically every day on my lunch break for maybe three weeks and passed on the first try. the electrical theory stuff looks scary but the question pool is finite so you can just brute force memorize a lot of it and get by fine. understanding it helps but its not strictly required to pass. as for whether to get the license before the gear, yeah definitely get the license first. no point dropping money on an HF rig if something comes up and you dont follow through on the exam. and once you have General you can actually listen to the bands on a cheap SDR or something while you save up for a real radio. 40 meters especially is pretty active and you'll want to be able to transmit and join in sooner or later, its way more interesting than just listening

nice work man, i did my first one earlier this year and got totally hooked. theres something about operating from a real park reference that makes the contacts feel more meaningful than just sitting in the shack yknow. i was running a similar setup, kx2 into an efhw and it did the job fine. the pile ups when you first spot yourself are kinda wild if youve never experienced it before lol dont stress too much about the submission process, just take your time reading the wwff.net instructions once and it clicks pretty fast

I went last year for the first time and honestly had no idea what half the stuff even was lol. picked up some coax connectors and a book. is there usually a license testing session at these things? someone at my club mentioned it but I wasnt sure if that was just for certain hamfests

okay so i just passed my technician exam like three weeks ago and ive been trying to figure out exactly what im allowed to do. i understand i have HF privileges on 10m and some other bands but every time i try to read the actual Part 97 rules my eyes glaze over. the FCC document is written in such a weird legal way that i cant tell if im reading it right. specifically im confused about the phone privileges. i thought techs could do SSB on 10m but my buddy said something about only certain frequencies and i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere i shouldnt. is there a plain english version of this somewhere or does someone just want to explain it to me like im five

this is exactly why i got my ticket lol. nobody tells you that just listening is half the hobby. i was so focused on passing the test and getting on the air that i didnt realize how much of it is just... vibing honestly

the birdie thing is almost certainly a grounding issue or you've got a tiny solder bridge you missed. happened to me on a 7000 years ago after i replaced a cap near the IF stage, took me forever to find it because it was only visible under magnification. get yourself a loupe or a decent USB microscope if you dont have one, totally worth it for this kind of work. the 7300 board is dense and icom doesn't exactly leave you a ton of margin for error in there. as for doing both mods at the same time, id honestly sort the birdie problem first before you go touching anything else. no point compounding the troubleshooting. the TX range mod is pretty benign on the 7300 and there are a ton of documented methods but clean up what you broke first, then expand from there.

generator separation absolutely helps but you need more than you think. at field day a few years back we had the eu2000 (older version, same basic deal) about 30 feet from the HF station and still had some hash coming in. moved it to maybe 60 feet with the cord run along the ground and it cleared up noticeably. the other thing that made a huge difference was a common mode choke right at the rig — just wound some of the power cable through a mix31 toroid, maybe 8-9 turns. killed a lot of what was getting in on the dc side. your lifepo4 plan sounds smarter honestly if you can make the capacity work. 100ah at 12.8v nominal is what, about 1280wh theoretical, real world maybe 900-1000wh usable before you'd want to back off. at 100w out youre pulling maybe 22-25a on transmit, way less on receive. if your duty cycle is reasonable you could probably go 4-5 hours easy without touching the charger. i'd bring the honda as insurance but run off the battery primary, keep the genny away from the antenna farm and just use it to top up between nets if needed. the EFHW vs buddipole thing — i'd go EFHW without hesitation for actual HF work. buddipole is convenient but its a compromise in every direction. get the wire up as high as you can and you'll hear the difference immediately.

ok so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and people are throwing around all these abbreviations and Q codes and i can only figure out like half of them from context. like i get QSL means confirming receipt and QTH is your location but then someone said QRM and QRN and i wasnt sure if those were the same thing or different. and whats the deal with 73 and 88, are those Q codes too or something else entirely also heard someone say QRP and assumed it meant they had a weak signal but then someone else used it to describe their radio setup so now im even more confused. is there like a master list somewhere or do people just kind of pick these up over time. been licensed about 4 months, tech currently studying for general

so ive been sitting on doing the mars/cap mod on my FT-857D for probably two years now, kept putting it off because honestly i was nervous about voiding warranty on a radio i paid decent money for. anyway the warranty is long gone at this point so i finally cracked it open last weekend. the mod itself is dead simple, just moving a couple diodes on the main board, theres a million guides online and they all basically say the same thing. took me maybe 20 minutes including the time i spent second guessing myself and triple checking which diode was which. radio came back together fine, transmits on extended ranges now no issues. but heres the thing i actually wanted to ask about — while i had the thing open i noticed the cooling situation in there is kind of grim. the fan doesnt kick on until the radio is pretty warm and on extended digital mode sessions like i do with FT8 it runs hot. has anyone swapped in a higher cfm fan or done anything to improve airflow in these? i know theres a mod floating around where you tie the fan to always on at low speed but i cant remember where i saw it and searching hasnt turned up much. the stock fan is just so loud when it does run that id almost rather have a quieter one running continuously than the on/off cycling.

ok so i've been licensed about 8 months now and i keep seeing people talk about chasing DXCC and WAS and WAZ and honestly i thought they were all kind of the same thing but they're clearly not and i'm getting confused trying to figure out which one i should even be working toward first from what i can tell WAS is just working all 50 states which seems more doable for me right now since i'm running 100 watts into a dipole in a suburban backyard, and DXCC is working 100 entities which sounds cool but i dont even know what counts as an entity vs a country because apparently they're different? like is Hawaii its own entity or is it just part of the US and then WAZ is zones and i honestly havent even started to figure that one out yet also how does lotw work with all this, do i need separate accounts or does it just track everything automatically once i start logging confirmed contacts. my elmer mentioned something about applying for credits separately for each award which sounds annoying but maybe im misunderstanding him