I can generally hit a repeater 17mi (27km) away from at home. When I’m outside, I can be heard well, when I’m inside, I’ll break the repeater’s squelch but may not be clearly copied. HT to HT is generally much less, but I’d generally expect a mile or two (3km)

Usually 40 and 20. I often only use 2 when I’m on road trips or hiking.

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond and explain a bit more to connect the dots for me. I didn’t notice the built-in @AMRRON group name nestled in the rest of the special purpose groups. I definitely don’t appreciate their inclusion, since it is tacit approval of the group, as you alluded to.

Yeah, the FCC document definitely made the potential to leave relaying enabled iffy. I really wish I was a better coder, or I’d fork the code, remove the @AMRRON group and pop up a prompt of whether to allow a relayed message, or only allow to/from trusted parties.

Can you spell it out a bit? I read through the linked sources (that I had access to) and couldn’t determine a clear link between the software’s developer and J6/OathKeepers/Redoubt movement other than the mode is used by those fringe elements. The “Supports” link is just to the JS8 user manual and the other links don’t have clear ties to Jordan or JS8. Admittedly, I’m not a member of the js8call groups.io group, so I wasn’t able to read through that source to see if a tie was more clearly established.

I’m all for not supporting those who are trying move the US to christofascism, but avoiding the most popular free-form digital chat mode because of an alleged link is a stretch. It would be nice to have an “allow list” for who you’re willing to accept messages for, or allowed recipients, but to me, the protocol is still plenty useful without having message forwarding enabled.

Thank you very much!

Check out pskreporter.info for some live maps of propagation as well. Welcome to the HF digital party!

I’ve got an inverted V fan dipole on my roof that’s tuned for 20/40, with the peak maybe 25 feet up. It works just fine, even though there’s quite a bit of QRM in my neighborhood. The noise floor is S7-S9 across most bands.

I had solely been using a QRP labs QDX (fun kit btw!) and had quite a bit of success within the US, with contacts as far as FL from my QTH in CA. I recently got a FT-897 and have been enjoying the extra power. Had a nice QSO to Argentina (FF92) the other night using JS8 with 25W from CM98. I still leave the QDX on during the day when I’m working to keep an eye on the bands; I feel better about the idea of burning it out than I do a more expensive radio.

I spend much more time on JS8 than FT8, just because it’s human interaction instead of computer to computer. FT8 is a great way to get a lot more contacts from a larger number of stations and locations though.

Agreed about wishing it would be open source. The most usable OSS combo I’ve found for using my rspdx over a network is SoapySDR and CubicSDR and CubicSDR hasn’t had a release since Feb 2022.

I’m forcing myself to remember that this is just essentially a beta release, with a lot of features missing. With as long as it took them to release this version, I’m not holding my breath to get new features any time soon though.

Thanks!

That’s what I’m hoping to try this coming weekend. Thankfully the frequency is high enough that it’s not difficult to get it a few wavelengths away from anything to remove the chance of interference.

It helped me a lot to remember that every antenna is, at its heart, a dipole. If your radials are above horizontal (less than 90 degrees to the vertical element), then you’re adding capacitance and making it tune high.

This really helped contextualize it for me, thank you.

I haven’t had time to get out there and play with the antenna for a few days. I’ll hopefully have some time this coming weekend to play with shortening the radials and seeing about getting a more optimal antenna.