Amanda Thomas

not sure if this applies but i had a weird low power issue on a different radio that ended up being a cold solder joint on the driver stage, not even the finals themselves. symptoms were almost identical to what you're describing. worth a look under magnification if you have it before assuming its the transistors, saves you buying parts you might not need.

i just passed mine last month actually. the math questions were the ones that slowed me down the most, stuff like calculating the resonant frequency or figuring out the -3dB bandwidth on a filter. if your algebra is decent its not terrible but i definitely had to look up how decibels work again because i had completely forgotten. HamStudy.org was a lifesaver tbh, just kept drilling until i was hitting like 85 percent consistently and then went and sat for it. passed with room to spare. the 75m phone segment alone was worth it for me since thats where a lot of the nets i wanted to check into were operating

yeah what he said about the tape. i actually use a combination of coax seal putty and then a layer of self-amalgamating over the top, probably overkill but my last outdoor connector that I didnt seal properly was basically green soup inside after one winter so now im paranoid about it.
one thing i didnt see you mention, are you running the coax away from the antenna at a right angle for at least a wavelength or so? if you just let it droop straight down from the feedpoint it can act as part of the antenna and mess with your pattern and potentially bring RF into the shack. most people use a 1:1 choke balun right at the feedpoint or at least a bunch of coax wound into a choke coil. for a first dipole its not going to make or break you but its worth knowing about for when you start wondering why the SWR is weird.

dont overthink the SDR piece, at least not for a first pass at remote ops. i spent way too long trying to get a fancy panadapter working remotely and honestly just having the rig audio and CAT control solid is 90% of the battle. RemoteHams has gotten a lot better in the last year or so with the audio codec stuff and if your home connection is decent you can run it pretty well.
the internet linking question is kind of a separate thing depending on what you mean — if youre talking about linking into a repeater network or echolink type stuff thats a whole different rabbit hole than just remote HF operation. or maybe you meant something else, hard to tell from the post. either way id just get the basic remote working reliably before piling on more complexity, learned that the hard way myself after a particularly frustrating weekend in a hotel in Denver trying to work some DX through a half-broken setup that i never properly tested before leaving home

so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now. i have a fairly decent station at my QTH — IC-7300, a tribander at 40ft, and an 80m dipole — and i want to be able to run it from work or when im travelling. currently i have a VPN into the shack and i was using a combination of TeamViewer for the desktop and some sketchy audio-over-IP thing i cobbled together, and it kind of works but the latency is brutal and CW is basically unusable above about 18wpm which is frustrating.
ive been looking at RemoteHams and also the SDR remote stuff they have going. from what i can tell the RCForb client does some pretty clever stuff with the audio buffering to smooth out jitter, but im curious how it actually performs in practice over a residential cable connection on both ends. my shack side has about 30mbps upload which should be plenty.
the other thing im wondering about is how people handle the internet linking side when you want to tie in something like a local repeater feed or run some kind of roundtable. ive seen people mention AllStar nodes and IRLP in the same breath as remote HF control and im not totally sure how those pieces fit together or if people are even doing that.
anyway if anyones run RemoteHams for more than a few weeks id love to hear how it actually holds up day to day, especially on HF SSB and CW. the marketing stuff on their site is pretty vague about real world performance.

Practice tests show exactly where you need to improve - I'd recommend taking at least 10 full exams, but focus extra time on those problem subelements. You're already in passing range!

so i finally got around to building a simple 40m dipole out of some 14 gauge stranded wire i had laying around in the garage. cut each leg to roughly 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula and fed it with some RG-8X i had left over from a previous project. center insulator is just a piece of white PVC i drilled and ran the wire through, nothing fancy.
the swr is sitting around 1.4:1 at 7.150 which honestly isnt bad for a first try but something feels off when i transmit. the signal reports im getting on 40m are decent enough but on 20m with the tuner its just... i dont know, feels like im fighting it more than i should be? the tuner gets there but it takes a while and the readings seem to jump around a bit.
antenna is up about 25 feet in an inverted-v configuration, apex tied to a tree. i used no-ox on the connections and soldered everything at the feedpoint. maybe the coax length is doing something weird? its about 67 feet of RG-8X which i think might be a half wave on some band but i cant remember if that matters for unbalanced feed or not.
anyway has anyone else had this kind of experience going from a resonant band to using a multiband tuner setup on a simple dipole? wondering if i should just cut a fan dipole instead or throw up a random wire