so i've been licensed about 8 months now and i've kind of fallen down the rabbit hole of checking into nets. started with the local 2m club net on tuesday nights just to get comfortable talking on the radio and now i have like a whole notebook page of different nets i try to catch during the week. the ARRL phone net, a couple of traffic nets, the 10m net on wednesday mornings when the band cooperates which is not always honestly.

anyway my question is does anyone have a good way of keeping track of all of this without losing your mind. im trying to figure out if theres a website or something that has like a searchable database of nets because i know there are way more out there than i've stumbled onto by accident. also curious if anyone does special event station stuff and how you even find out when those are happening, i feel like i always hear about them after the fact

the WD5GNR net directory used to be the go-to for finding nets but honestly i havent checked if its still being maintained. the ARRL also has a nets page somewhere on their site, its not the prettiest thing to navigate but its there. for special events i mostly just watch the ARRL website and W1AW schedule, they post operating events pretty regularly. also DX bulletins sometimes mention special event callsigns worth chasing.

as for keeping track, i just use a plain text file on my computer. old school i know but it works. i have the frequency, mode, day and time in UTC, net control callsign if i know it, and a little note about whether the net requires a check-in announcement or just jump in. took a while to build up but i probably have 20 or so nets on there now that i rotate through depending on whats open.

oh man the special event thing yes i feel that, i missed the whole set of stations for a big anniversary thing last year because i only found out like two days before it ended. someone mentioned it in passing on a local repeater and i scrambled to work a couple of them but missed most of it. now i follow a few ham radio guys on social media just because they tend to post about that stuff and it actually helps more than i expected. theres one account that basically just reposts special event and DXpedition news and its been pretty useful