Catherine O'Brien

so i just got my technician license about 3 weeks ago and ive been listening on a few repeaters and also some HF with my dad's radio and honestly half the time i have no idea what people are saying. like they'll say QSY or QRM or whatever and i kind of nod along but i dont actually know what it means. also saw someone write 73 at the end of a message and had to google it. is there like a standard list or do you just kind of pick it up over time? also what does QRZ mean because i hear that one a lot on HF and sometimes it sounds like the person is asking something but i cant tell what

hamstudy.org is honestly the way to go, just use that. the question pool for tech is public and hamstudy has the current one loaded. you can see exactly which questions are on the actual exam and it tracks what youre getting wrong so you can focus there. i passed mine last spring and barely touched a book, maybe 2 weeks of doing practice questions at night for like 20-30 mins and i was consistently hitting 85-90% so i just went and took it.
the electronics theory stuff in those books is way more than you need to pass. its good to know eventually but for the exam you really just need to recognize the right answer, a lot of it is memorization more than understanding. dont stress too much, the tech exam is genuinely not that hard if you put in a little time with the practice pool.

not a basic question at all, this stuff is genuinely confusing when you first encounter it. so yeah they're all separate awards with separate requirements and fees, but they're all worth chasing if you enjoy that kind of operating.
WAS is Worked All States, run by ARRL, you need all 50 US states confirmed. WAZ is Worked All Zones, that's the 40 CQ zones worldwide, run by CQ magazine. DXCC is also ARRL and yeah it's 100 confirmed DXCC entities — and entities are not the same as countries, which trips everyone up at first. Hawaii is indeed a separate entity from the continental US, so is Alaska. there's a whole list of like 340 something current entities on the ARRL website worth bookmarking.
the good news is if you've been logging in something like LOTW or even just a paper log, you can go back through your contacts and see what you've got. a lot of people dont realize they're close to WAS until someone points it out. definitely start uploading to Logbook of the World if you haven't, that's how most confirmations happen these days and it makes the award applications way easier.

so ive been running APRS for about 6 months now, mostly just tracking with a Kenwood D72 and it works great, i can see myself on the map, digipeaters are picking me up, all that stuff is fine. but im trying to use the messaging side of things and its hit or miss at best. like ill send a message to another station and sometimes they get it, sometimes they dont, and i never get the ACK back so my radio just keeps retrying until it gives up.
the other station says they see the message eventually on their end but its delayed by like several minutes sometimes. my path is set to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 which i thought was pretty standard. running about 5 watts. is this a path issue or is messaging just kind of unreliable by design? ive read conflicting stuff about whether you need IGate coverage for messaging to work properly vs just RF path to the other station.
also not sure if this matters but im in a somewhat rural area, theres one digipeater i can hit consistently maybe 30 miles away but i dont know if theres a good IGate nearby

So ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about nets like they're a big part of the hobby but honestly im still figuring out which ones are worth checking into regularly. Right now i only do the local 2m club net on tuesday nights and thats about it.
I was poking around on netlogger the other night and there are just SO many nets running at any given time, like traffic nets, emergency prep nets, ragchew nets, dx nets — how do you guys even pick? Do most people just stick to a few they like or do you kind of rotate around depending on whats on HF that evening?
Also im curious about special event stations, ive heard about them but never actually worked one. Is there a good place to track when they're happening? I saw something about a national parks one a while back and totally missed it which was kind of annoying.

so ive been chasing this problem for about three weeks now and im starting to lose my mind a little. my 7300 started showing elevated noise floor on 40m and 80m, like S2-S3 consistently even with the antenna disconnected. at first i thought it was RFI from something in the house so i went around unplugging stuff one by one, the usual routine. didnt change anything.
then i noticed it's worse when the shack computer is on but even with the computer completely off and unplugged it's still sitting there. the bands above 40m seem mostly fine, 20m maybe has a tiny bit more noise than usual but nothing dramatic. just 40 and 80 that are bad. i've done a factory reset twice, updated the firmware, tried a different antenna feedline, even borrowed a buddies dummy load to rule out the antenna entirely. noise is still there with the dummy load connected.
at this point im wondering if something inside the radio itself has gone south. maybe a filter cap somewhere or something in the front end? the radio is about 4 years old and has been running pretty much every day. any ideas before i ship it off to icom?

so ive been using a cheap RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly just scanning the local repeaters, poking around on aircraft band, that kind of thing. works fine honestly but im starting to get curious about whether stepping up to something like an SDRplay RSP1B or even a HackRF would actually make a noticeable difference for what i do or if its just gear acquisition syndrome kicking in again
the main thing bugging me with the rtl is the noise floor, especially down in the lower HF bands even with the direct sampling mod enabled. i can hear stuff but its kinda rough and i feel like im missing weaker signals. been running SDR# and tried SDRangel for a bit but went back because i couldnt figure out the plugin situation. also tried gqrx on a raspberry pi 4 which was actually pretty decent
so anyway the RSP1B is what like 120 bucks, is that actually worth it over just getting a better LNA and a filtered preamp for the rtl setup? or am i thinking about this wrong

same thing happened to me last week, worked a couple ZL stations on 17m out of nowhere after days of nothing. I think we might be catching the tail end of some sporadic-E mixed in with regular F2 propagation? not totally sure tbh. DXmaps is pretty useful if you havent tried it, shows real time spots and you can kind of see where openings are happening before you even call CQ.

hamrs works fine once you get used to it but i do tap the wrong thing constantly lol. i started using a small bluetooth keyboard with my phone and that helped a ton actually, just sits on my leg while im operating

our local repeater group asked if i wanted to try being net control for the thursday night tech net next week and i said sure without really thinking about it. now im kinda freaking out a little bit because ive never done this before and dont want to sound like an idiot on the air. i know the basic format from listening but what are some things i should know beforehand? like what if nobody checks in or what if someone has an emergency or something