David Davis

the inverted V is probably your best bet for that lot size honestly. yeah 30 feet isnt ideal for 40m but an inverted V at that height is going to outperform a vertical with a mediocre radial system almost every time, especially for domestic stuff. the low angle radiation people love about verticals only really shows up when you have a serious ground system under it, and on a small suburban lot thats just not happening unless you want to spend a weekend laying out 32 radials and your neighbors are cool with that.
i ran an inverted V at about 28 feet for a few years on 40 and worked plenty of stateside stations, even managed a few EU contacts during good openings. the apex angle matters more than people think — try to keep it above 90 degrees if you can, so dont pull the ends down too steeply. and if you can slope it slightly off-center to fit the yard that usually doesnt hurt much. just make sure your coax has a decent choke balun at the feedpoint or youll have rf on the shield and wonder why your audio sounds weird on certain bands.

so ive been thinking about this a lot lately after the last CW sprint where my rate was pretty decent on radio 1 but i kept fumbling around trying to get radio 2 doing anything useful. like the theory is solid, while one radio is sending your exchange the other is hunting for a new mult or just scanning for a run frequency, but in practice my station just wasnt keeping up with my brain.
part of it is probably the SO2R setup itself, im running a microHAM MK2R+ and two K3s which honestly should be plenty capable, but the interlock timing between the two rigs when theyre close in frequency is still driving me nuts. ive got bandpass filters on both but i think im still getting some bleedthrough on 40 because the antennas are not exactly ideal separation. anyway the actual question i guess is — at what point in terms of rate does SO2R actually start paying off vs just killing your focus and making you slower overall. ive read that some guys dont even bother with the second radio during a run until they drop below like 80-90/hr but that seems high to me. curious what others are actually doing

so ive been at this for a while now and I honestly dont know what im doing wrong. Started learning morse back in the spring, got up to about 13wpm pretty comfortably and then just... hit a wall. Every resource I read says to just listen to faster code but when i bump it up to 15 or 16 it all turns to mush and I cant copy anything. Then i drop back down and feel fine again.
A buddy at the club said something about the Farnsworth method where you keep the character speed high but slow the spacing, which I had been doing, but maybe not long enough? My characters are set at 18wpm with 5wpm spacing and i practice maybe 20-30 minutes a day with the LCWO site. Is that enough time or do I need to be doing more sessions? Starting to wonder if some people just have a ceiling and 13wpm is mine lol
For context im trying to get to 20wpm eventually so I can actually have real QSOs without panicking. Right now anything faster than about 12 and i start missing stuff and then i lose the whole sentence trying to catch up.

the self spotting thing is a real issue on certain summits yeah. few options — APRS spot works great if you have a TNC or a radio that can do it, the KX2 cant do that natively but you could carry a cheap baofeng with an APRS tracker. or honestly just call CQ on 14.285 or wherever and the chasers will find you fast once somone hears you and posts to SOTAwatch. the chaser network is surprisingly active, especially on weekends. dont stress too much about the 4 QSOs, once you get one the pile usually takes care of itself.
also your link dipole plan sounds solid. id bring the 20m option for sure, 40m gets weird during the middle of the day especially in summer. good luck on your first one, the first activation is kind of addictive

totally normal confusion, chirp labels it as Tone for transmit-only which is what you want for most repeaters. you only need to encode the tone on your TX side so the repeater opens up. the receive tone (TSQL in chirp) would be for filtering out noise on your end and most people dont bother with that unless the band is busy or there are multiple repeaters close in frequency. so just make sure the Tone column in chirp has 100.0 and the Tone Mode column says Tone and youre good. double check you saved and wrote to the radio after changing it, that gets people all the time.
as for jumping into a QSO, yeah just wait for a gap between overs and then key up and say your callsign. something like just your call sign is fine, most folks on a repeater will recognize you're trying to check in. if its a roundtable going back and forth they'll usually work you in on the next pass. dont worry too much about messing up, everyone on a local repeater remembers being new.

congrats on getting it up on 10 GHz, thats not trivial. ive been running a 905 since late last year and yeah the documentation for the external unit setup is kind of rough in places. the GPS lock thing threw me off too at first — took me a bit to realize i had the antenna cable slightly loose and it was causing intermittent issues i blamed on the radio for like a week before i found it.
for activity in the midwest, check out the ARRL microwave activity weekends, theres usually a decent cluster of guys on in the Chicago and KC areas during those. also the VHF contests bring out some 10 GHz activity even from people who dont normally operate up there. September VHF contest especially seems to wake people up. might also be worth posting on the weak signals reflector to see if anyone in your grid is interested in a sked.

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out where i can actually transmit on 40 meters. i looked up the FCC part 97 stuff and also the ARRL band plan and they dont totally match up and now im more confused than before lol
like i know generals get 7.175 to 7.300 for phone but then i see people say dont operate right at the band edge and i dont really understand why. is 7.300 off limits or what? and whats the deal with the lower part of the band, i see CW down there but someone told me digital modes are in there too. just trying to figure out where i can actually park without stepping on someone or doing something wrong

not a dumb question at all, honestly most of us fumbled through our first few net check-ins and nobody's born knowing this stuff. the format really does vary net to net which makes it confusing at first. most directed nets -- which is what you were probably on -- the net control is running the show and you basically only transmit when they call on you or specifically ask for something. so after you check in you just listen until net control either calls your callsign directly or opens it up for general discussion.
the check-in format is usually just callsign, name, and location but some nets want you to say if you have traffic or announcements right when you check in so they can work that into the flow. best thing honestly is just listen to the net a few more times and watch how the regulars do it, you'll pick it up pretty fast. and dont worry about the off-frequency thing, happens to everyone with a new radio, some of those repeaters have a slightly different input than what you'd expect.