Jessica Johnson

i did my first EME contact last year off a single 17el yagi and a solid state 500w amp, so it can be done. took me a while to get the az/el rotor situation sorted out, that was honestly the bigger headache than the antenna itself because you need accurate tracking or youre just pointing at sky. i used a cheap chinese az rotor and built my own elevation setup from scratch which was... an adventure. the software side with WSJT-X is pretty straightforward once you get your clock sync dialed in, that matters more than people realize, like even being a second or two off will mess up your decodes bad.

Jump in, seriously. I had probably 6 months of license time when i started going to ARES meetings and nobody expected me to already know everything. the training exercises are literally designed to teach you stuff — things like net check-ins, message handling with ICS 213 forms, setting up portable HF when repeaters are down, that kind of thing. you learn way more doing it than reading about it.
real activations ive been part of were mostly public service stuff at first, like providing comms at a local marathon or a county emergency drill. its not glamorous but thats where you get comfortable operating under a little bit of pressure with other people counting on you. the genuine emergencies are rare, which is kind of the point — you train so that when it does happen people arent figuring it out on the fly.
just show up to a meeting and introduce yourself. tell them youre new. nine times out of ten the EC is thrilled to have someone who actually wants to be there because they always need more bodies trained and ready.

yeah i had almost the exact same thing happen on a 80m receiver i built a while back. drove me crazy for like two weeks. turned out one of my ground connections on the ugly style build had a cold solder joint and i basically had a ground loop going through the audio section. reflowed everything with fresh solder and the hum dropped way down. not saying thats your problem but its worth going over every joint especially the ground connections to your copper clad sheet.

one that trips up a lot of people is QSY, that just means change frequency. and QRO is the opposite of QRP, means high power. so if someone says they're going QRO you know they're cranking up the watts. i also see people mix up QRM and QRN constantly even guys who've been at it for years lol

the D710 has been a bit finicky with messaging in my experience. one thing to check is whether your MYCALL is set correctly including the SSID -- if your beacon is going out as W1ABC-9 but your message destination is set to W1ABC without the SSID those wont match up and messages just get dropped. also worth checking if your buddy has his Dire Wolf callsign config matching what youre actually addressing. sounds dumb but ive chased this exact thing for like an hour before.
also depending on where you are the digipeater coverage for two-way can be spottier than you'd think even if your position packets get through fine. position beacons are shorter and more redundant so they survive bad paths better than a message exchange which needs acks to go both ways.

14 gauge stranded is totally fine, i've run antennas with that for years without issues. some guys swear by solid copper but honestly for a backyard dipole at reasonable power levels you're not gonna notice a difference. the main thing is to seal everything up — that center connector being oxidized after a week is a bit of a red flag. if you didnt weatherproof it that's gonna cause you headaches, moisture gets in there and it gets ugly fast. i usually wrap the whole feedpoint in self-amalgamating tape, like several layers, and that keeps things pretty solid through winter.
the inverted-V is a good pattern for 40 too, you get some low angle radiation if the apex is high enough but also decent coverage closer in. what are you feeding it with, coax straight to the rig or do you have a balun in there?

JS8Call has a decent user base but its definitely not FT8 numbers, youre right about that. the sweet spot ive found is 40m in the evenings and sometimes 20m during the day if conditions are decent. the thing that took me a while to understand is that JS8Call is running at maybe -24dB SNR capability which is actually weaker than FT8 in terms of threshold, so you get contacts that PSK31 would never even decode. its slower though, like a full message exchange can take a couple minutes depending on the speed setting you pick
PSK31 is honestly still alive, especially on 14.070 on weekends. i fired it up a few months ago just to see and worked maybe 8 guys in an afternoon without trying hard. the decoder in fldigi is rock solid and there's something satisfying about watching that waterfall fill up with signals. for actual keyboard to keyboard conversation it still beats everything in my opinion just because the speed feels more natural
FT8 i use when i want to work a new entity or check if a band is open at all. its a propagation tool more than a communication tool at this point, which is fine, thats what it's good at

so we finally got our county ARES group together for a tabletop/actual-radio exercise last saturday. been trying to coordinate this for like 4 months because everyones schedules never line up. anyway we did a simulated scenario where a major ice storm had knocked out power to about 60% of the county, cell towers were down or overloaded, and the EOC needed served agency welfare checks relayed through amateur radio.
honestly the biggest thing that tripped us up wasnt the radio stuff at all. it was message handling. people were improvising their own formats, some were using ICS 213 forms some werent, and it created this bottleneck at net control where Dave (our NCS for the drill) was basically transcribing everything in real time and falling behind. by like the second hour he was pretty frazzled. we had three mobiles deployed, two portables, and the EOC station running and in theory that should have been plenty but the message flow just wasnt organized.
we also discovered that one of our members had never actually sent a formal radiogram before. like ever. and he's been licensed for 9 years. no judgement at all but it highlighted how many of us have drifted away from traffic handling basics and just kind of assumed we knew what we were doing.
anyway wondering if others have run drills recently and what your biggest surprises or facepalm moments were. feels like we can always improve but its hard to know where to start sometimes.

one that trips up a lot of people is QSY, that just means change frequency. and QRO is the opposite of QRP, means high power. so if someone says they're going QRO you know they're cranking up the watts. i also see people mix up QRM and QRN constantly even guys who've been at it for years lol

im in basically the same boat as you honestly so take this for what its worth but i've been using an app called Morse Mania on my phone during my commute and its actually been pretty decent for just drilling letters. not sure its the most scientific approach but i can copy my callsign now without thinking about it so something is sticking lol. someone in another thread mentioned just sending random stuff with a straight key even before you can copy well, like just to get the muscle memory going, havent tried that yet but it sounds like it might help