so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general class) and everyone keeps telling me i should try one of the big contests but honestly the whole thing feels kind of overwhelming when i look at it. like CQ WW is apparently coming up and i looked at the rules page and my eyes glazed over halfway through. exchange formats and multipliers and all that. i get the basic idea, you contact as many stations as possible, but theres so much more to it than that apparently.

field day i at least sort of understand because my club did it and i just sat next to someone experienced and they walked me through it. but doing CQ WW on my own feels like a completely different beast. also ive been seeing people mention SOTA activations and i know thats not really a contest in the same way but some people seem to count it the same kind of thing in terms of being a fun operating goal.

anyway is there a good way to ease into contesting without completely embarrassing myself or wasting peoples time on the air. do people get annoyed if a new guy is slow with exchanges during a big contest like CQ WW or ARRL sweepstakes or whatever

Nobody's going to bite your head off for being slow, honestly. The big guns running serious category entries might move on quickly if you fumble but thats just how it goes, they're not being rude they just have a rate to maintain. Most casual contesters are totally fine with a slower exchange.

My advice would be to just jump into something like the ARRL November Sweepstakes or even one of the smaller state QSO parties first. The exchanges are simpler and the pace is a lot more manageable than CQ WW which can get absolutely insane on 20 meters during peak hours. Set yourself a small goal, like 50 contacts, and just focus on that. Use N1MM or even just a paper log if you want to keep it simple. You'll figure out the rhythm pretty fast once you're actually doing it, reading about it only gets you so far.

SOTA is its own whole thing and worth doing but yeah it's more of a personal challenge than a contest per se. Still great fun though if you like hiking.

field day is honestly the perfect on-ramp and it sounds like you already did that so youre not starting from zero. the exchange stuff feels confusing on paper but after like 10 contacts it just becomes muscle memory. dont stress it.

one thing i wish someone told me early on — just search for the contest on youtube before you do it. there are guys who record their whole contesting sessions and you can hear exactly how the exchanges sound in real life which is way more helpful than reading the rules document imo