Jennifer Walsh53

had the 590SG for about three years before i picked up a 7300 and honestly the kenwood guys arent wrong, the receive audio on the 590 is really nice, very smooth, and the DSP implementation feels more mature somehow. but the 7300 wins on everyday usability just because of that touchscreen and the spectrum scope. when youre spinning the band looking for a qso it changes how you operate, you start seeing the band instead of just listening to it. for what you described — 40/20 ragchew and occasional DX — id go 7300 without much hesitation. the waterfall alone will keep you entertained for hours when youre first getting it set up. and the price on used ones has come down a fair bit. saw one go on qrz classifieds last week for like 850 in good shape.

After raising, lowering, and clipping each half of the antenna five times, you can achieve excellent SWR of <2 across the entire band. The height really matters for dipole bandwidth. Consider adding an antenna tuner if you need full band coverage - it's easier than chasing perfect SWR across 300 kHz.

the noise thing is really site dependent like you said but in my experience a vertical on 40 is almost always louder for local noise than a horizontal dipole at any reasonable height, at least in a typical suburban setup. the dipole has some rejection off the ends and if you orient it right you can null out some of the worst offenders. verticals are pretty much omnidirectional all the way down to the ground so they grab everything. that said the low angle radiation on a vertical is real and does help for DX, so theres a tradeoff. if DX is your main goal maybe consider a phased pair of verticals someday but thats a whole project. for radials honestly 16-32 on the ground does most of the work, going from 4 to 16 is a bigger jump than going from 32 to 120. read the ON4UN low band book if you havent, he goes into the numbers pretty thoroughly. i run 24 radials under my 40m vertical and its working fine, compared to my old dipole the noise is worse but the signal reports into europe are consistently better which is what i wanted.

dont worry about the doubling thing, that happens to literally everyone at least once including people who've been licensed for years. net control has heard it a thousand times and they dont care, they just want to get you checked in. for the timing question - most nets will have the net control say something like "additional check-ins" or pause for a second or two specifically for that. you want to listen for the tail end of their transmission and that short gap before they move on. some nets use a specific beep or courtesy tone on the repeater which is your cue. just takes a few times of listening to get the rhythm down. and no its absolutely not rude to check in and mostly just listen. thats actually how a lot of people participate especially newer folks. some nets are more talkative and some are very structured and business-like. if they ask if you have any traffic or comments just say "negative" or "nothing for the net" and youre good. you did fine, keep checking in and itll feel natural within a few weeks

so ive been running APRS for a few months now with a TM-D710G and a byonics GPS puck mounted on the dash. works great most of the time but every now and then my position on aprs.fi shows me like 12 miles south of where I actually am, sometimes in the middle of a lake which is obviously wrong. the weird thing is it doesn't happen consistently, could be fine for days then suddenly show up wrong for a few beacons then fix itself. my NMEA feed looks correct when i monitor it through the radio's display, shows the right lat/lon, so im not sure if its a digipeater thing or what. using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 path which i figured was pretty standard. anybody seen this kind of thing before or have a idea what might cause it

haha yeah my first QSO i completely blanked on phonetics mid-sentence, just said my call sign letters like i was reading a grocery list. the other op was nice about it though, most people on the repeaters around here are pretty welcoming to new folks. congrats on the license, 32/35 is solid. dont stress the baofeng thing, its fine for getting started on local repeaters, just maybe look at the programming before you accidentally transmit on something you shouldnt lol

I've seen similar behavior in the ARRL January VHF Test. The workaround I use is to keep the N1MM+ Entry window visible and manually update the Location field immediately after each FT8/FT4 QSO confirms. Not ideal for rate, but ensures accurate Cabrillo output for scoring verification.

i had almost the exact same headache last winter during ARRL 10m. ended up just disabling the Log4OM UDP listener for the contest weekend so N1MM got everything clean, then did the manual import after. it sucked but at least i wasnt getting duplicate QSOs showing up everywhere. the merge problem is real and i dont think any of these apps were really designed to cooperate that nicely with each other, they all kind of want to be the master log.

so i finally picked a summit for my first ever activation, going up W6/NC-415 tomorrow morning. its not a super high prominence peak but it looked manageable and the trail report seemed reasonable. ive been chasing for about 6 months now so i kind of know how the other side works but actually doing the activation myself has me a little nervous. my plan is to run HF on 40m and 20m with my KX2 and a linked dipole i built from the sotabeams plans, plus i threw my HT in the bag in case i can hit a local repeater for the last contact if i need it. ive got a 3ah lipo that should be plenty for low power ops. gonna try to spot myself on sotawatch before i leave the car and then again once im set up if i have signal. i know i need 4 contacts to qualify but im honestly hoping for more than that, seems like a waste to hike all the way up and only work 4 stations. is there anything dumb i trip up on that first timers usually miss? like i feel like ive read everything but you never know

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. like i mostly do HF and some weak signal stuff on 6m and honestly i already have access to most of the bands i care about. but i keep hearing people say the extra portions of 40 and 20 are less crowded which honestly does sound appealing especially during a contest weekend when everything else is a wall of noise. my main hesitation is the theory. i looked at the question pool and some of that stuff is pretty deep, like the filter design questions and the transmission line stuff, oscillator theory. i took some electronics in college like 15 years ago so its not totally foreign but its been a while. how bad is it really? is it the kind of thing where you can just memorize the pool or do you actually have to understand the underlying concepts to pass. and does understanding it actually help you on the air or is it just trivia at that point

so ive been doing a lot of hilltop activations lately, mostly on 2m and 70cm, and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother lugging a yagi up there or just stick with my trusty diamond x50 on a painters pole. the collinear is obviously way easier, just strap it to the pole and youre done in like 5 minutes. but theres a few repeaters and some ssb activity i want to hit that are maybe just on the edge of what the x50 can do from my usual spots. i was looking at a cheap 5 element dual band yagi, one of those m2 or arrow style deals. the gain difference on paper looks nice but i keep hearing people say the pattern makes it more work than its worth for general operating. like if youre just doing fm through a repeater you dont really want to be rotating a yagi every time someone new checks in. been at this for about three years so not totally new to vhf but never actually used a yagi in the field, only at home on a fixed mast. anyone gone through this same decision and figured out which direction made more sense for their style of operating

the FT-60 is honestly hard to beat for that price range, ive had mine for like 6 years and its been dropped, rained on, and generally abused and it just keeps working. the audio is noticeably better than the baofeng stuff, like night and day on a busy repeater. the menu isnt the friendliest but you figure it out after a week or so. the D in FT-70D means it does System Fusion which is yaesu's digital voice mode, its fine if your local repeaters support it but if they dont you wont really notice a difference. i wouldnt pay extra for it just for local FM use unless you specifically know theres a fusion repeater near you that you wanna use. for 100-150 the FT-60 is probably the move honestly, build quality is just in a different league than the baofengs

Setting up a proper RF ground system for my HF station and getting conflicting advice. Some sources say use flat copper strap or braid for lowest RF impedance, others say 14AWG wire is perfectly adequate for equipment bonding to the ground bus. My setup: IC-7610, AL-80B amp, Astron supply, all connected to 1/2" copper pipe ground bus with #6 AWG run back to outside ground rod. Currently using 14AWG for individual equipment connections but wondering if I should upgrade to copper braid. Also seeing newer info suggesting common-mode chokes are more important than trying to provide low-impedance RF grounds inside the shack. What's the current thinking on this?

Programming CTCSS tones properly is one of the most common issues newcomers face with repeater operation. Make sure you're setting the tone for transmit (usually labeled "T-CTCS" or similar in your radio menu). Some radios have separate settings for transmit and receive tones - you only need the transmit tone to access the repeater.

For better performance, add a 2N5109 RF preamp stage ahead of the mixer. The design is quite sensitive but you can improve it further with 10-15dB of low-noise gain on 20/40m.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and dabbled in a lot of modes but EME keeps coming up in conversations at the club and i finally sat down and read through some stuff online and now im both really excited and kind of overwhelmed. like the basic concept makes sense — bounce your signal off the moon, someone on the other side of the planet hears it — but the actual requirements to do this seem pretty intense depending on who you ask. what i keep running into is wildly different answers about how much antenna and power you actually need to make it work. some people say you can do it on 2m with a single yagi and 100w if you use JT65 or Q65, other guys are saying you need a stack of four or more yagis and a kilowatt minimum. i get that more is always better but is there like a realistic minimum that actually produces contacts and not just frustration. my backyard isnt tiny but im not going to fit a 10-element dish back there either. also curious how the scheduling and timing stuff works in practice. i know the moon has to be in a mutual window for both stations but do most people just hang out on the skeds pages and wait, or is there a more active calling frequency thing happening. any insight from people actually doing this would be appreciated, i dont want to spend a bunch of money and then find out i have the wrong expectations.

so i've been building this 40m direct conversion receiver from scratch, based loosely on the Neophyte design but i swapped out the audio stage with an LM386 because thats what i had in the junk box. overall the thing actually receives, which honestly surprised me after all the rework i had to do on the band pass filter section. the problem now is the audio quality is just... bad. like there's this low frequency hum that i cant seem to track down and on strong signals i get this weird distortion that almost sounds like motorboating. i checked the power supply filtering and added a 100uF cap across the rails which helped a little but its still there. the LM386 is running at minimum gain right now with a 10uF between pins 1 and 8 removed, so its at like 20dB not 46. anyone dealt with this before? im wondering if its RF getting into the audio stage somehow or if my ground plane is just garbage. i built it on perfboard which probably didnt help things. the hum is there even with the antenna disconnected so i lean toward a grounding issue but not totally sure.

im in the same boat as you actually, been studying for about a month now. what helped me was doing hamstudy for the question pool but also watching some youtube videos when something totally didnt make sense to me. there's a few guys on there that explain the ohms law stuff pretty well with like visuals and stuff. the tech exam isnt super hard from what i can tell, most of the questions are pretty straightforward once youve seen them a few times. good luck to you

So ive been trying to get Winlink Express working for about two weeks now and I feel like im close but something keeps going wrong with the connection to the RMS gateway about 40 miles from me. Im running a 2m setup, Kenwood TM-V71A into a Signalink USB, and the audio levels look reasonable in the software. I can see the gateway in the session list, frequency shows 144.990, I initiate the connection and it starts the handshake but then just... times out. Sometimes I get a partial connect and it downloads like 3 packets then drops. I went through the audio calibration thing in Winlink Express like three times. PTT keying looks right on the radio, I can see the TX light hit. Tried both VARA FM and ARDOP, VARA FM seems to get a little further but still drops. My antenna situation is a jpole up about 20 feet which has always worked fine for local repeater stuff so i dont think thats the problem but honestly who knows. Anyone dealt with flaky connections to a gateway like this? Is there something in the RMS configuration on my end I might be missing, or is this more likely just a propagation/path issue to that particular node? Also not sure how message handling works once it does connect — like if i have messages pending does it automatically pull them or do I have to do something specific to trigger that.

Worth noting that Extra class still has exclusive segments on 80, 40, 20, and 15 meters, especially prime DX frequencies. But General gives you plenty to work with - I've been General for 5 years and never felt limited.

yeah i did almost exactly this with a 7300 about a year ago. the CI-V on that rig defaults to 19200 baud but you can change it in the menu — i think mine is set to 9600 just to keep things simple. the format for the frequency data is pretty standard icom stuff, you're looking for the FE FE stuff in the byte stream. there's a library called ICOMLib or something similar on github that someone wrote for arduino, saved me a ton of headaches trying to parse it manually. one thing i ran into — make sure you're using a proper TTL to RS232 level shifter between the arduino and the rig if you're going into the actual serial port. if youre using the USB then you can just treat it like a regular serial device from the computers side and have the arduino talk to the computer instead, which is what i ended up doing actually. bit of a roundabout way to do it but it meant i could also tie it into log4om for logging at the same time. the ULN2003 approach is solid btw, thats exactly what i used. just watch your relay coil current if you stack a bunch of them.

ok so ive been running a mag loop on my desk for about 8 months and honestly its fine for what it is but i want to actually build something real. the plan is a center fed dipole for 40m, probably inverted V because i only have one decent high point (a big oak tree in the back, maybe 35 feet up at the apex). i have a spool of 14 AWG stranded copper wire and some coax laying around. the thing i keep going back and forth on is the feedpoint. ive read like 6 different articles and half of them say just connect the coax directly and use a 1:1 choke balun, the other half act like youll burn your rig down without a 4:1. my understanding is a dipole in free space is like 73 ohms so a 1:1 should be fine, but when you fold it into an inverted V the impedance drops a bit depending on the angle... is that right? or am i misremembering that. also do i really need to stress about wire length to the half inch or is the standard formula (468 / freq in MHz) close enough to tune from? im planning to cut long and trim, which seems obvious but i just want to make sure im not missing something dumb before i go buy connectors and whatever else i need.

ok so i passed my technician exam like two months ago and ive been mostly just doing 2m stuff but i want to get on HF. i keep reading part 97 and honestly it just makes my head spin trying to figure out what privileges i actually have. like i know i can do some CW on certain bands but can i actually do voice anywhere? somebody at the club mentioned 10 meters but then somebody else said something different and now im not sure who to believe. also is there anything about power limits that are different for techs vs general? i dont want to accidentally transmit somewhere im not supposed to and get in trouble with the fcc

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into a local 2m net last Tuesday and i think i may have done it kind of awkward. the net control called for check-ins and i just said my callsign and then kind of waited and wasn't sure if i was supposed to say my name and location right away or wait for them to acknowledge me first. the guy running the net was really nice about it but i felt like i stumbled through the whole thing. also at one point someone was already talking and i keyed up anyway because i thought there was a gap — there wasnt, i just couldn't hear the other station well enough. net control kind of paused and said "please stand by" which i'm pretty sure was aimed at me. is there like a standard way nets usually want you to check in? i've read a couple things online but they all seem a little different and some of it is pretty old info. also is it rude to just check in and then say you have nothing further and just listen? i wasn't sure if i was expected to have something to say or contribute to a roundtable or whatever they do after check-ins. i don't want to be that guy who just logs the contact and bails but i also genuinely didn't have much to report that night.

yeah you basically just absorb them over time honestly. but the ones you absolutely need day to day are probably QSO (a contact or conversation), QTH (your location), QRM (interference from other stations, like man-made), QRN (natural noise, static that kind of thing), QSB (signal fading), QRZ (who is calling me), and QSL which yeah means confirmed or understood depending on context. when someone says QSL on voice theyre usually just saying roger or got it, not necessarily talking about the card. the 73 thing is just best regards, comes from the old telegraph days and nobody really knows why 73 specifically but its just what it is. 88 is used sometimes too but thats its own can of worms lol. ARRL website has a full list if you want to go down that rabbit hole, i think its in the handbook too. honestly though just hang around on the air and it clicks pretty fast, nobody expects a new general to know every single one