Mike Thompson

yeah the click moment is real, it does happen. cant tell you exactly when but one day you'll realize you copied a whole sentence without thinking about it and it kind of blows your mind
one thing i dont see mentioned enough is just listening to actual QSOs on the air even when you cant copy them yet. tune to 40m around 7.050 or so in the evenings and just let it wash over you. your brain starts to recognize rhythms and common words like CQ and 73 and signal reports before you even consciously learn them. also the RufzXP program is great once youre a bit further along for building speed but maybe not quite yet at 5wpm

the discomfort with farnsworth spacing absolutely goes away, took me maybe 3 or 4 weeks before it stopped feeling like someone was talking to me in slow motion between fast letters if that makes sense. the key thing is dont drop the character speed down no matter how tempting it is. your brain needs to learn the sound of each character as one single chunk and you cant do that at 5wpm because you have time to count.
for me personally it took about 8 months to get comfortably to 20wpm but i wasnt super consistent about it. some weeks id do nothing and then feel guilty and binge practice for a few days. if you can really stick to 20-30 minutes every single day you could probably do it in 4 or 5 months id guess. the other thing that helped me a ton was just listening to actual qsos on the air even when i couldnt copy everything. just having real code in your ears instead of practice files makes a difference somehow, the rhythm is different when a human is sending versus a computer

yeah the gordon west book is good but i remember thinking it had a lot of extra stuff that wasnt really on the test when i took mine last year. the practice questions are what really matters. i think i did like 10 or 15 full practice tests in the last few days before mine and just made sure i wasnt getting below like 85% consistently before i went in.
the electrical formulas like ohms law and the power formula do show up but theres only a few variations of those questions so once you can do P=IE and rearrange it youre fine. the part that tripped me up was some of the antenna stuff and what the different license privileges actually are. like knowing that as a tech you get full HF privileges on 10 meters is one of those things i kept forgetting. anyway just keep at the practice tests and youll be alright, the real exam felt easier than the practice ones to me honestly.

Bit of a tangent but have you considered just skipping the RTL entirely and using the 7300's built-in spectrum scope streamed via the audio/control interface? I know it's not as wide a view but it's one less thing to troubleshoot. I run a remote IC-705 and honestly gave up on SDR panadapter stuff over internet links because the latency mismatch between the rig audio and the spectrum display drove me nuts. By the time the spectrum shows a signal the audio is already halfway through it.
If you really want the wide panadapter view, some guys are using SDR-over-network locally at the remote site and just running WebSDR or SDR++ with a local network stream, then VNC-ing into a box there for the display. Adds complexity but the SDR traffic never has to traverse your internet link which eliminates the bandwidth problem entirely. Just something to think about.

yeah same thing happened to me last week, completely missed it because I had the squelch set too tight and didn't notice until a buddy texted me. By the time I got on it was already fading. Ugh. One of these days I'll actually be ready when a good opening hits.
On the IC-905 thing, I saw a review video on youtube from a guy who got an early unit and it looked pretty impressive but he was having some issues with the remote head cable or something, might have just been a setup problem though. I dunno, the price point is pretty steep for me right now.

yeah same thing happened to me last week, completely missed it because I had the squelch set too tight and didn't notice until a buddy texted me. By the time I got on it was already fading. Ugh. One of these days I'll actually be ready when a good opening hits.
On the IC-905 thing, I saw a review video on youtube from a guy who got an early unit and it looked pretty impressive but he was having some issues with the remote head cable or something, might have just been a setup problem though. I dunno, the price point is pretty steep for me right now.

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra exam. i like operating and honestly the general privileges have been enough for me most of the time, but i keep getting annoyed when i tune around and hear something interesting happening on a frequency i cant touch. especially on 20m and 40m cw where the extra portion seems way more active sometimes.
the thing holding me back is everyone says the theory questions are genuinely hard, like not just memorize a band chart hard but actually understand the math and electronics hard. ive been reading through the pool a little and some of the questions on things like impedance matching and filter design and i dont even know where to start. is it realistic to self study this stuff without an engineering background or do i need to take a class or something. i picked up a copy of the arrl handbook but its kind of overwhelming honestly
also does anyone actually use the full privileges once they get it or is it more of a just to have it thing

yeah the 44 QSO thing got me too on my first couple activations, i was basically refreshing my log count every few contacts toward the end. one tip someone gave me was to try and get on earlier in the day when more hunters in europe are active if youre in north america or vice versa, makes hitting the threshold way less stressful. also dont forget you can combine modes if youre set up for it, mixed ssb and ft8 counts fine i think as long as the reference is logged correctly on each contact

I'm a newly licensed Tech and want to get started with CW but feeling overwhelmed by the different approaches I'm seeing. The Koch method and Farnsworth timing seem to be mentioned everywhere, but I also see people talking about mnemonic phrases and other approaches.
What would experienced CW operators recommend for someone starting completely from scratch? Should I pick one method and stick with it, or combine approaches?
Any specific software recommendations would be great too - there seem to be tons of apps and programs out there.