Emily Johnson

If the paint interferes with grounding, you'll need to scrape a bit of the paint or powder coating off. You can also run a short grounding strap from the mount to a grounded part of the vehicle, but keep the strap as short as possible. Test your SWR before permanent installation!

yeah i was in the same boat not that long ago tbh. i just stayed on 2m and 70cm for the first few months while i sorted it out, nothing wrong with that. the repeater scene in most areas is pretty active and you learn a lot just operating before worrying about HF access
one thing i'll say is dont stress too much about accidentally doing something wrong when you're just starting out and asking questions like this — the FCC isnt sitting there waiting to pounce on a new tech who made an honest mistake. obvious stuff like broadcasting music or encrypted transmissions or operating without ID'ing, that's where people actually get in trouble

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. ok so worked vs confirmed — worked just means it's in your log, confirmed means the other station has uploaded to LoTW and there's a match, or you've exchanged paper QSLs and submitted them. only confirmed QSOs count for the actual award credit, but the ARRL lets you apply once you hit 100 confirmed so the worked number is really just your pipeline of hope
the good news is your old QSOs absolutely count as long as you can get them confirmed. a lot of guys dont realize this and think they have to start fresh. dig through your old logs, get them uploaded to LoTW if they arent already, and chase confirmations on the ones that matter. some of those DX stations from years ago may already be in LoTW and you just have to sync your account
as for order of operations, i'd say focus on DXCC first since it's the big one and your tribander will work fine for most of it. WAS kind of happens naturally along the way if you're on HF regularly, and WAZ is a nice project for when you're feeling like the DX is getting repetitive. they all use LoTW so it's not like you're doing double work anyway

nice work getting out there. im still working up the nerve to do mine lol, been a ham for 8 months and keep putting it off. quick question back at you -- did you pre-announce the activation on the SOTA reflector or just show up and wing it? ive seen people do both and wasnt sure if the pre-announcement actually makes a difference for getting chasers

consistent offset in one direction is almost always a GPS datum issue or the radio is somehow pulling a cached position. the D710 has had some quirks where if the GPS loses lock briefly it'll hold the last known position and keep beaconing it even after reacquiring. try doing a full cold start on the GPS and see if it changes anything. also check what your GPRMC sentence looks like if you can — some guys use APRSISCE or another client on a laptop to sniff the actual packets going out and compare the coords to what the radio display says.
also worth checking if theres a fill-in digi near you running old firmware, ive seen cases where a digi was injecting bad position data but thats pretty rare and usually causes random scatter not a consistent offset.

yeah what he said about the inverted V, i had the same problem on my first build and kept trimming and trimming and making it worse lol. also depending on how close your antenna is to the garage roof the capacitive loading from that can pull resonance down too. 25 feet isnt a ton of height for 40m, more height would probably help clean things up. dont give up on it though, even at 3:1 most tuners will handle it fine and the antenna is still radiating

just upgraded myself a few months ago and had the exact same confusion. the chart on the ARRL website actually helped me more than the FCC part 97 tables which are kind of dense to read through. also worth knowing that 7.290 is kind of informally used for AM on 40m so if you stumble onto a bunch of AM stations down there thats why, they wont bite but it can be surprising if you dont know

I just use N1MM for everything including digital contests and honestly never saw the point of Log4OM but I know a lot of guys like it. One thing worth knowing — if you run WSJT-X during something like FD or a state QSO party, you can have both N1MM and WSJT-X open and set WSJT-X to send UDP packets to N1MM on port 2333 or whatever you have N1MM listening on. WSJT-X logs the QSO and N1MM picks it up automatically, no manual import needed. Works pretty well though sometimes the band/mode doesnt come through exactly how N1MM expects it and you get a werid entry that needs fixing.