QRP Guy

yeah its definitely been inconsistent, i was watching the solar flux the other day and it dropped down into the low 140s after being up around 170 for a few days and the bands just fell apart. 20m especially gets weird during those transitions i find. the K index matters a lot too, even a moderate geomagnetic disturbance can wipe out your paths to europe even when the flux looks decent on paper.
i use the DXmaps site and also just keep an eye on the WWV broadcast at 18 minutes past the hour, old habit but gives you a quick sanity check on conditions. honestly after 20+ years i still get surprised by how the bands behave. some of my best DX contacts happened on days where everything looked terrible on paper. dont sweat it too much, just keep the radio on and youll start to feel the patterns over time even if you cant always explain them.

so i finally got activated for a real ARES deployment last weekend, county EOC needed radio support during the flooding situation we had. ive been in the local ARES group for about 8 months but this was my first actual activation not just a drill.
honestly i felt pretty underprepared even though i thought i was ready. the net control stuff was fine, i know my way around that, but there were a few moments where i wasnt sure of the ICS protocol stuff and kind of had to wing it a little. the served agency coordinator kept asking me things i didnt totally have answers to which was a bit awkward.
anyway it went ok overall i think. traffic moved, nobody got hurt lol. but im curious how other people felt after their first real one vs a drill. like is it always that different or did i just have bad luck with the EOC coordinator being kind of demanding. also wondering if the ICS 100 and 200 courses are really enough prep or should i be doing more. i did both of those online last year.

I've been using both for years and honestly LoTW is the gold standard if you care about awards like DXCC. Most serious DXers use it and ARRL endorses it so your confirmations actually count for awards. eQSL is more social and has a nice web interface but not all contests accept it for credit. If you're just starting out id say get on LoTW first - yeah the setup is a pain with the certificate stuff but once its done your logging program can upload automatically. I use N1MM+ and it just pushes contacts right up after each session.

oh man the battery thing is so real. i made that exact mistake in my second activation, not a sim, an actual severe weather watch where we ended up being deployed for about 11 hours. showed up with my main HT on maybe 70% because i figured i'd charged it the week before. learned real fast to just have a rule that you charge everything the night before, every time, no exceptions. i keep a sticky note on my go bag lid that says CHARGE and still check it twice.
the ICS forms thing is a learning curve too. a lot of people know the theory but never actually practice filling one out under any kind of time pressure. our group started doing monthly tabletop drills just for paperwork flow and it sounds boring but it made a huge difference. you get muscle memory for where everything lives and how to phrase things in standard format. the dead air anxiety goes away eventually, probably took me 4 or 5 real activations before i stopped interpreting silence as something being wrong. net control usually has way more going on than you realize and sometimes silence just means things are quiet which is actually good news during an emergency.

so i got my technician license a few months back and ive been on 2m and 70cm mostly but i keep hearing about HF and CW and honestly it sounds really cool to me. i know morse code isnt required anymore for the license but i still want to learn it, just feels like the right thing to do if youre gonna be a real ham i guess.
problem is i have no idea where to start. i downloaded like three different apps and they all seem kind of different in how they teach it. one of them just shows you the dots and dashes visually which i heard is actually the wrong way to do it? someone at my local club mentioned the Koch method but i dont really understand what that means. is there a specific order i should learn the letters in or does it matter? and how long does it realistically take before you can actually use it on the air, like copy a QSO in real time

so i passed my technician exam about three weeks ago and ive been trying to figure out what handheld to get and honestly the amount of choices is kind of paralyzing. i keep reading comparisons and then going down rabbit holes and then i end up more confused than when i started
my main thing is i want to be able to hit the local repeaters and maybe eventually do some APRS stuff once i figure out what that even fully means. budget is probably around 100-150 bucks give or take. ive seen people talk about the baofeng uv-5r a lot and also the yaesu ft-65 and the wouxun stuff but i genuinely dont know if theres a meaningful difference for someone just starting out or if im overthinking this
also does the stock antenna on these things actually matter that much? someone at my radio club said to just immediately replace it but idk if thats necessary right away or just a nice to have

im kind of in the same boat as you so take this with a grain of salt but i've been using an app called Morse Mania on my phone and its actually been pretty decent for just getting started. i do it on my lunch break mostly. only been at it three weeks so i cant say if itll get me to actually making contacts but at least im starting to recognize a few letters without thinking too hard about it which feels like progress
the one thing i noticed is if i skip a day or two i feel like i forget stuff pretty fast so consistent short sessions seems better than doing an hour once a week or whatever

congrats on the 7300, its a great first real shack radio. i ran one for about two years before moving up to the 7610 and honestly the only reason i upgraded was i wanted the dual receivers for SO2R stuff, not because the 7300 was lacking anything. for most operating its more than enough rig.
on the touchscreen thing — yeah cold fingers are a known annoyance, some guys keep a cheap stylus nearby which sounds ridiculous but actually works fine. the screen is resistive not capacitive so it responds to pressure not skin conductance, meaning gloves technically work but fat finger gloves are their own problem. heating the shack is probably the real answer though.
firmware i'd say do it, the updates over the last year or so have been pretty solid and Icom's been good about not breaking things. just read through the release notes first to see if anything jumps out as relevant to how you operate.