DX Lover

that hollow phasey sound on SSB is almost certainly audio feedback or RF getting into the audio stage. the LM386 is notoriously easy to get oscillating or picking up garbage if the layout isnt tight. the classic fix is a 10 ohm resistor in series with pin 7 (the bypass pin) and a 0.047uf cap to ground, plus make sure you have a cap right at the supply pins of both chips, like physically right there not somewhere else on the board.
also with direct conversion receivers you get both sidebands at once so SSB can sound a bit weird by nature, you kind of have to tune to one side of zero beat to minimize the other sideband. might not be a fault at all just the nature of the beast. CW sounding fine makes sense because both sidebands just give you a tone anyway so it adds rather than interferes.

yeah the net directory can be a lot to sort through, totally understand. honestly the best thing i did when i was starting out was just pick one night a week and commit to it. i check into the 3916 net on 80m most sunday evenings, its been going forever and the net control guys are really patient with newer checkins. just give your callsign when they ask for checkins and thats pretty much it, nobody's gonna quiz you or anything.
for the special event stations — yeah thats a different thing. those are usually set up for a specific occasion, like a museum ships weekend or a historical anniversary or whatever. they get a special 1x1 callsign or a vanity call for the event. lots of people chase them for certificates or just for the novelty of the contact. keep an eye on the ARRL website and also qrz has a special event calendar that i check pretty regular. some of them are only on for a day or a weekend so you kinda have to pay attention. worth doing though, got a really nice certificate from a lighthouse event a couple years back.

honestly i was in the same boat, general for like three years before i finally buckled down. the math is real but its not as brutal as you might think if you just take it slow. most of the stuff like reactance formulas and the filter questions, you dont need to derive anything from scratch, you just need to recognize what formula applies and punch numbers in. what helped me a lot was the ARRL Extra Class License Manual, i know some people say just use hamstudy.org but i needed the explanations behind the answers or else nothing stuck.
the op-amp questions tripped me up too at first but once someone explained to me that for most of those questions you just need to know the basic configurations and what they do, it clicked. took me about two months of studying a little bit each night. the extra frequencies are nice to have especially on 80m and 40m where the extra portion is noticeably less crowded sometimes, but yeah the real reason to do it is just to actually understand whats going on. which it sounds like is why you want to do it anyway so i say go for it

honestly it's not that bad once you stop trying to memorize every single thing and actually understand what the questions are getting at. the electrical theory stuff like reactance and impedance tripped me up at first but once i watched a couple youtube videos on it it clicked pretty fast. i think the hardest part for most tech upgrades is the band plan stuff and knowing what modes are allowed where, thats just pure memorization there's no shortcut.
i went from 60-something percent to passing comfortably in like three weeks just doing 20-30 questions a day on ham study. the thing is after a while you start recognizing the wrong answers as much as the right ones which helps a lot. just keep grinding it, you're closer than you think. and once you get that HF priv its a whole different world, 40m alone is worth it.

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

So after years of telling myself I'd get around to it I finally put together an actual go-kit this past weekend. Nothing fancy, just a Pelican-style case I had sitting around and started stuffing it with stuff I figured I'd need if things went sideways and I had to set up somewhere fast.
Right now I've got my Yaesu FT-857D in there, a LiFePO4 battery (the 30ah one from Bioenno), some coax, a few PL-259 connectors and a cheap soldering iron, a laminated card with local repeater freqs and CTCSS tones, and a copy of my license obviosly. Also threw in a small notepad and a handful of pens because I kept forgetting how often you actually need to write stuff down during a net.
What I'm not sure about is the antenna situation. I have a mag mount for the car and a random wire that I've used portable before but neither feels like a solid permanent solution for a kit that's supposed to be grab-and-go. Anyone else running a similar setup, what do you use for HF portable that doesn't take forever to deploy? And is there anything obvious I'm probably forgetting that you wish someone had told you when you put your first kit together?

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 messing with this for probably 3 weeks now and im getting close but not quite there. the basic RemoteHams client connects fine to my home station, i can key up the rig and hear audio without too much latency, but the part thats killing me is trying to bridge that into some kind of internet linking setup so other guys can jump on the SDR side when im not actively using it.
my current setup is a flex 6400 at the home QTH running SmartSDR, and ive got the RemoteHams server software running on a dedicated windows box next to it. audio routing is done through virtual audio cable which honestly has been a nightmare to get stable but its mostly working now. the SDR waterfall over the remote client is usable, not great, but usable.
where im stuck is the linking piece. i was thinking about running something like AllStarLink on a separate pi just to handle the VoIP side when the station is in kind of a shared or unattended mode, but im not sure if that even makes sense architecturally or if im overcomplicating it. has anyone actually done a hybrid setup like this where the SDR remote handles the rig control and something else handles the linking or repeater tie-in? feels like it should work but ive been going in circles

oh man this is like reading my own journal from two years ago. the plateau between 12 and 18wpm is real and pretty much everyone hits it, you're not doing anything wrong.
what finally got me moving again was two things. first i stopped worrying about copying every single character and started trying to copy words as whole units instead of letter by letter. sounds obvious but i was still sounding out each dit and dah in my head which just doesn't scale up. the second thing was jumping into actual QSOs way before i felt ready. even if i only caught half of what the other guy sent, making myself respond and stay in the exchange forced my brain to process faster than any practice software ever did. the slow net on 40m was a lifesaver for me, people are patient and nobody cares if you ask for a repeat.
the high speed listening thing works eventually but not if you're actively trying to copy it. just have it on in the background while you're doing something else. like actually something else, not half-listening. it takes weeks but something does change.