DX Lover

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly on 40m and some 2m stuff locally. my elmer keeps telling me i should get set up on LoTW but then someone at the club meeting last week mentioned eQSL and now im seeing people talk about paper QSL cards too and im just... confused about what i actually need to be doing here. like is LoTW the main one everyone uses? do awards require one over the other? i downloaded the tqsl software and honestly got a little lost with the certificate request thing. and then eQSL seems way simpler to sign up for but i dont know if its as widely accepted. and paper cards look really cool but i have no idea how that whole bureau system works or if i need a buro address or whatever. im not chasing any specific awards right now just want to make sure im confirming contacts the right way and not missing out. any help appreciated, sorry if this is a dumb question

Manhattan style construction and 40m DC receivers, that combo can get weird with layout. i had the same hum issue on one i built a few years back and it ended up being that i had the audio stage physically too close to the LO circuitry. moving them apart by like an inch and a half on the board made a huge difference. sounds dumb but RF coupling into the audio input transistor was the whole problem.

so ive been running our local club's wednesday night net for about 8 months now and lately the check-ins have dropped off pretty bad. used to get maybe 15-20 stations and now we're lucky to get 8 or 9. not sure if its the time slot (we run at 8pm local) or if people just kind of lost interest after the pandemic thing wound down when everyone was home and bored. anyway i wanted to ask if anyone here participates in regular weekly nets and what keeps you coming back. also curious if any of you have done special event station stuff tied to a net — like we had a 1x1 callsign for a local centennial thing last year and tried to incorporate it into the net format but it got a little confusing logistically. mostly just looking for ideas to get numbers back up and maybe make it more interesting. we do have a few newer hams who just got their tickets and they seem to like it but the old timers have kind of drifted away

yeah the tech privileges on HF are kind of awkward to explain at first but basically on 10m you get phone from 28.300 to 28.500 MHz and CW on a chunk of the lower end, something like 28.000 to 28.300 i think, dont quote me exactly go look it up. the ARRL has a privileges chart thats color coded by license class and honestly thats the easiest way to see it at a glance rather than trying to parse the actual part 97 language which is written for lawyers not hams. the short version is you have pretty wide access on VHF and UHF which is where most techs spend their time anyway until they upgrade

so ive been trying to get Winlink Express working for about a week now and im losing my mind a little bit. i got the software installed fine and i can see a handful of RMS gateways showing up in the channel selection list near me, but every time i try to connect it just times out or gives me a connection refused error. im running a Kenwood TS-590SG into a SignaLink USB for the audio, and ive got the radio set to 1200 baud packet on 2m, connecting to my local gateway which is listed as active on the Winlink maps. ive gone through the audio levels maybe a dozen times. transmit audio looks okay in the SignaLink, receive seems fine too. PTT is keying the radio, i can see the TX light come on, so that part works. but the gateway just never responds. i checked the gateway status on winlink.org and it shows it was last active like 6 hours ago so maybe its just down? or am i doing something obviously wrong with my setup that im missing also not totally clear on how the message handling works once you actually do connect - like does it just pull everything automatically or do you have to do something to initiate the mail sync. any pointers appreciated, been googling for hours and the documentation is kind of scattered

congrats on passing and the first QSO, thats always a memorable one. Ron sounds like a good elmer. dont stress about the baofeng stuff, yeah they have issues but for getting started on local repeaters they do the job. just make sure you programmed the tones right or you'll be stepping on people without knowing it, happens to a lot of new hams. welcome to the hobby

so i finally got my general last month and have been lurking on a few local nets trying to build up confidence before actually checking in. last night i just went for it and checked into the tuesday evening 2m net and it went okay i think but there were a couple moments where i wasnt sure what i was supposed to do and i feel like i probably stepped on someone. like when the net control called for check-ins i waited what felt like forever and then just said my callsign and the guy came back to me fine but then later there was some kind of directed traffic portion and i had no idea what was happening so i just stayed quiet. is that the right move? also at one point two people were talking and there was a gap and i thought they were done so i started to key up and then realized they werent done and i just kind of... stopped mid transmission. im sure everyone heard that half-second of dead air from me. anyway nobody said anything bad and the net control was super nice about it but i'd love to know what i was supposed to be doing during those different parts of the net. how do you know when a directed net switches to open or whatever? is there a standard way nets are run or does every club do it different?