I passed my Technician today, and I’m pretty happy about it. Although, I’m a little nervous about forgetting things and doing something wrong… I’m still excited though

Passed my General exam today and pretty excited about it. Passed Technician in August and have been casually studying via the HamStudy app - can’t say enough good things about that. Over the last 72 hours I watched the entirety of the W4EEY General Class series on YouTube. Passed with a 33/35. I took a swing on the Extra exam too - didn’t pass, but realized how much Dave and Gary (in the videos) dropped some Extra info in the General series. Shout out to W4EEY and KE4EA for their knowledge and presentation (I gelled more with Dave’s style but appreciated the 2 different formats), and to the folks at HamStudy for such an easy to use learning tool.

Anyway - Catch ya on 20m!

PS - Do you prefer ‘Stroke’ AG, ‘Slant’ AG, or ‘Slash’ AG?

To start off, this isn't an antenna modeling program. Rather, it's a tool I'm developing to help visualize and better understand how different variables affect an antenna's radiation pattern.

For example, in the animation above, you can see how the radiation pattern changes as a V-dipole is progressively raised above the ground.

Personally, being able to watch the lobes stretch, shift, and eventually split into additional lobes as the antenna moves beyond its ideal height makes the concept much easier to grasp. It's one thing to compare static radiation plots at two or three different heights, but actually seeing the pattern evolve in real time gives you a much better understanding of what's happening.

The goal is to make antenna behavior a little more intuitive, especially for those of us who learn better by seeing things in action rather than staring at charts and numbers.

Anyway, I'd love to hear what you all think! I'm still working on adding a few features before releasing it, but I wanted to share a preview and get some feedback from the community. I dont want to start entering the realms of antenna modeling but if theres some specific antennas youd like to see amd specific changes in those antennas please let me know!

73, SummitRadio

No Laptop Needed! IU1WXY's Incredible Xiegu X6100 Firmware
https://youtu.be/-0jZGT5VcyA

Health issues got me back in the hobby again. Just trying to figure out where I am in the solar cycle. Seems like if you hear something on 10 m we're doing okay

OK, this is super niche, but couldn't figure where else to write about it.

If you're a member of any ARES or RACES organization, there's a chance you have a copy of a fillable PDF file of the ICS 309 form. But if you actually try to use it, you'll find that anything entered in the second line gets auto-copied all the way down the form. I've found copies of this form in multiple ARES/RACES organizations, so I'm guessing it's pretty widely used, but I guess nobody is actually filling it in electronically.

A little searching found a good form at https://w0eca.org/ics-forms/ if you're looking to update.

My son (10) wanted to mount his ht on the wall near his bed so I gave it to him as a project. He drew then modeled it in TinkerCAD before slicing and sending it to the printer. He’s had his tech license for about 4 months and is so excited to put his 3D printer to work for his amateur radio hobby. This was his first time designing his own part and he knows it’s basic but he knows it serves the purpose. Not too shabby for a 10 year old!

(I’m posting this here so he can see the comments.)

Hello - I know nothing about ham radios but it was recommended to get a Tegret UV5R. Would this be sufficient for only needing to communicate with my buddies around 300 yards apart, in deep deep woods in the mountains?

Any help would be appreciated. We tried hunting walkie talkies but due to the dense woods they wouldn't work.

Had a birthday and sold my motorcycle, so I turned all my cash and gifts to HF radio stuff.

I am absolutely the person to jump in and then try to swim lol.

So I got a trusdx radio and a G90. I built an EFHW wire antenna. I also got a NanoVNA....

What I dont have is trees lol. Nor do I have a ham shack. The room I use as my office is on the front side of the house and the best place for antennas is the back yard. I built the EFHW as a more portable thing, but didn't think it through lol and it's a lot of wire that doesn't have trees to go into.

I bought a painters pole to try and raise one end, well because of the wind we have here, it'll dang near need to be a permanent installation....which is not good for a painters pole....sigh....

So then I started thinking about a 4x4 post at the very far end of my yard and the other end connected to my house....that still lands me on the opposite side of my house to my office.

I've got radios and wires and crap all over my desk. I've got no real plan or ideas how to do any of this and I guess I'm looking for ideas.

When I search the googles I get a lot of cartoon drawings that always seem to involve a two story house.

I'm at the wonderful intersection of no knowledge/idea what I'm doing and very little patience because I want to get some HF radio sounds coming in....

Help. Inspiration. Ideas. Anything from the ham community. If you're wondering how treeless and how much wind...Texas Panhandle. TIA

I’m positive I could ask AI to create one for me, but I would like something maintained by humans! I want to be able to better plan time off requests from work around contests, since I work a lot of weekends. However, if such a calendar already exists that I can subscribe to with my Mac and iPhone via iCal, I don’t have to go build the thing myself!
Thanks in advance!

They make 10 meter radios for 10 meters wink wink with SSB and other modes, but why not these 6 meter ones? No one seems to use 6 meters FM even when 6 meters is good, so who on Earth are these radios for? I'd really like to get on, but the only way seems to be an all band, all mode, which I'm not too keen on..

Does anyone have any good resources to help me fill in a basic knowledge gap that I have?

I'm a big diy-er and when I look up different antenna designs I see stuff about ununs, baluns, and transformmers to match impedance or remove noise. For whatever reason I just have a hard time understanding what they are doing and what would be appropriate in a given condition.

Any basic knowledge resources that anyone knows of would be very much appreciated.

For context, I'm mainly looking at receiving only on the HF bands (since a radio that can transmit on these bands are pretty pricey). I have a decent understanding of basic electronics but mainly DC rather than AC.

I know that "just google it" is an option, but I've tried that and am still confused. I'm basically looking for information on the level of a dumb college student or a smartish high school student.

Thanks in advance!

Bonjour à tous les radioamateurs et amateurs de radio.

Je vous propose un lien pour les Applis radioamateur.

Catégories.

FT8 et FT4, propagation, satellites, répéteurs, carnet de trafic, Pota et SOTA, DMR – D-STAR – C4FM – RÉSEAUX, SSTV, outils, SDR, GPS, Audio et conception des antennes.

Recevez mes 73 — bonne visite.

Applications mobiles pour radioamateurs – 2026

What’s a good used or new all mode radio with 2meter SSB base or mobile that can be found for under $1000

It's a big upgrade, and the most noticeable change is the channel editor. It now edits more like a spreadsheet. Click a cell and type, or paste a list of frequencies from Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets straight into a bank.

If you have multiple scanners, you can swap them without restarting, name each one, and give your banks nicknames.

There's a long list of fixes, too. The changelog has them all, if that's your thing.

If you're on 1.1.1 or later, you'll get the update notice the next time you open Bearpaw. Everyone else can grab it at bearpaw.app.

Recently I have some friends punch their tickets as Techs (hosted a flower pot antenna night and it was great 2m antenna building, j-pole vs flower pot : r/HamRadio and encouraged some antenna deep dives on design) and this has got me interested in 2m/70cm again. I have a vx-6r as an HT that has been great for hiking over the years. Recently I came across a decent local deal ($200) for a used Yaesu FT2dr. I've been debating it. I know before anyone says 2m is dead and spend the money on HF, that a lot of people's priorities are there. In the Seattle area there is actually a decent community of activity on 2m for my commute (shout out to PSRG).

Anyway, to my question. Those that are still rocking the older and outdated FT2dr, do you still like them? Dual receive, battery life, and APRS all sound good to me. Yaesu build quality also helps. I know its outdated and the FT5dr is the current king of Yaesu HTs.

So im not actually using the mast for ham radio but it is a heavy duty 12m radio mast that i am using. I need to suspend a small environmental monitor 8m high, which im planning to do with the mast. My question is how far away do the guy lines need to be from the mast and how big/deep do the pegs/ground anchors need to be? The mast will have some form of tripod but the mast needs to stay up for atleast a month so i cant rely on that alone. I also cant secure it to anything.

Any help or guidance is much appreciated.

At first I was going to use off-the-shelf GaN switches and drivers, but I'm worried that the drivers wouldn't be able to handle switching that quickly and precisely. (To operate in Class E at 6m, the full cycle is on the order of 10 ns, and I was hoping for hitting 2m, 1.25m, and 70cm, which would likely require the devices to switch in tenths of nanoseconds. Meanwhile, switch driver latency is around 30 ns according to data sheets...)

Yet at the same time, the QMX is able to transmit at 6m using regular old MOSFETs and discrete logic, according to the schematic. I figured that a GaN with an integrated driver that doesn't have to fight PCB trace parasitics would be able to switch a whole lot faster, and they're only about $7 a pop even in small runs, but the datasheets I looked at have hundreds of ns of latency and are intended for switching frequencies below the 50 MHz required to hit 6m.

(As for why I'm doing this: WA1QIX's polar amplifier can't hit frequencies that high, and the QMX+ is 5W max.)

QSSTV-Experimental is an amateur-radio program for sending and receiving SSTV (slow-scan television) and HAMDRM / DSSTV (digital SSTV) pictures using a sound card. It is compatible with most of MMSSTV and EasyPal. Substantial changes have been made versus upstream QSSTV.

All original QSSTV features are still available. See the README.md for details.

Changes versus upstream QSSTV 9.5.11

Platforms

• Windows (64-bit, 10 1809 or later, or 11)
• Linux AppImage (x86_64/arm64 - Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 39 or similar and later)
• macOS (macOS 15 or later, Intel or Apple Silicon, should work but untested. No hardware.)

New Features

• Sample-rate calibration - from WWV time ticks, NTP, or a reference SSTV station
• Decode SSTV from audio files - (WAV, MP3, FLAC, OGG, AAC), from the GUI (*File > Decode SSTV From File...*) at about 10x real time, or from the command line with `qsstv-experimental --batch`
• New SSTV modes - *JB60*, a ~61 s 640*496 color mode (still in development), and *PD120W*, a 16:9 widescreen PD120
• Stitched grid images - transmit pictures as 1x2, 2x1 or 2x2 grids on the higher resolution SSTV modes and DRM
• Pan/Zoom images for transmission - Place images exactly how you want them in-frame (and in grids) before transmission
• Gallery multi-select - to delete or send several images to TX, with the Del key for quick deletion
• WebP, AVIF and HEIC support
• Image viewer zoom and pan
• Clipboard support - copy (anywhere)/paste into the transmit window or TX stock
• ADIF logbook broadcast over UDP - on every OS
• DRM Live size-slider preview - preview updates as the slider is dragged
• DRM Progressive Image Reception - Image previews as you receive, improving in quality over time
• Follows Desktop Themes

See the GitHub for ALL the changes.

BIG Thank you to WA8LMF, KC8LOQ, and KF8GTK for lots and lots of testing.

Have fun! I did.

Jay NT0Y

https://github.com/jbdubbs/QSSTV-Experimental

Next Saturday, October 24th, special event station K1MFD goes live from the summit of West Peak in Meriden to celebrate 175 years of the Meriden Department of Fire & Emergency Services (1851–2026).

To mark the milestone, every station logged will receive a custom digital commemorative certificate. We just finished up the image generation script, once the event is complete it should just be a quick ADIF export and emails will be sent.

Operational Details:
• Date & Time: Saturday, October 24 | 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM EDT (1500 – 2000 UTC)
• Location: West Peak / Hanging Hills, Meriden, CT (Grid FN31nn)
• Dual Activation: POTA US-4561 | SOTA W1/HH-004
• Planned Bands & Modes: 40m, 20m, 15m, and 10m Phone (SSB); 146.520 FM Simplex and 144.200 SSB; periodic SSTV passes on 14.230 and 7.171 MHz

Chaser Note:
Certificates will be generated automatically and delivered to the email address on your QRZ profile. If your QRZ email is outdated or marked private, take a quick moment today to update it so your certificate lands cleanly after the activation.

Hope to catch ya Saturday!

Hello Dear HamRadio operators,

I would like to invite all of you to come see and test my new platform. www.dxrank.net

I built it around a permanent and temporary performance based ranking system that gives points to each QSO made based on many factors, that mostly indicate how difficult/unique that QSO was, like how wide the bandwidth, analogic vs digital modes, what distance, how was the band condition and more.
The all time rank, is permanent and always attached to one callsign. The temporary rank is based on a time filter: 30min, 1 day etc. and shows you the best operators of that time frame.

Every rank is awarded a visual rank badge for easy identification and recognition.

And it's just the start.

The Live QSO map is a live world map, interactive based for all live-real time incoming qsos, where you can filter, select and see callsign locations and more.

Currently the live QSO are derived from online logging platforms but not only, see below.

Alongside that there are various graphs that show you the current QSO rate inbound.

After that i created also a user menu, with useful tools for various tasks.

The ADIF Score let's you merge your existing adi record to the platform, so even if you don't log QSO online automatically, you can still update the platform manually similar to QRZ.com, the eligible qso from 12 Oct 2026 onward will be merged to you rank and points.

Additionally i have prepared Pro Tools access, some of which are ready like the ADIF PRO tool, which is based on a previous program of mine, basically is the master ADI analysis tool, where you can pull precise stats and graphs of your radio activity, export to cabrillo, PDF reports and more.

There is a lot more on the platform that i can explain here, i invite you to come over and enjoy it, is absolutely all free and ads and spam free. With exception for the pro tools access in the future.

Come over and let me know your thoughts. 73

Marco