Ashley Miller

check the iambic mode setting too. some keyers default to mode B and depending on how youre squeezing the paddle that can add characters you werent expecting. i switched mine to mode A and a lot of my weird extra elements just went away. might not be your issue but worth poking at while you're in the menus anyway.

i just passed mine like two months ago so this is fresh for me. i used the hamstudy app you mentioned plus watched some of the KB6NU no nonsense study guide stuff on youtube. took me maybe three weeks studying maybe 20 mins a day. the test session thing threw me off too at first but once you find a club near you they're usually pretty welcoming about it, the one i went to had volunteer examiners who were super patient. dont stress too much about the electronics questions there arent that many of them on the actual exam compared to the operating rules and safety stuff

JS8Call does have a bit of a learning curve and yeah the activity is very time and frequency dependent. there are some organized nets, K5SDR runs one i think and there are a few EMCOMM groups that use it specifically because of the store-forward capability which is genuinely useful if you think about it — like you can leave a message and someone can pick it up later even if you're not both on at the same time. that part is actually pretty slick once you wrap your head around it.
for PSK31 i wouldnt say its dead but its definitely thinned out a lot since FT8 came along and ate everything. you still find activity on 20m around 14.070 during the day, sometimes 80m at night. its honestly kind of a nice mode if you want a real back and forth without the 15 second grid exchange thing. just takes more signal than FT8 obviously, like you actually need a decent copy to decode it, so if conditions are rough you'll notice.
my suggestion is pick a JS8Call net specifically and show up a few times before writing it off. the HF JS8 net frequencies are posted on the JS8Call groups.io list.

the ARRL net directory is decent but yeah you're right it can be out of date, the better thing honestly is just to find your regional club and ask around because most nets have a Facebook group or an email list or something these days. the tuesday night net you're probably thinking of — if it's the one i'm thinking of — did move up about 15 minutes a while back, net control mentioned it was to avoid a conflict with another net on a neighboring repeater.
for special event stations i just watch the ARRL website, they post them under operating resources and you can usually see a few weeks out what's coming up. some of them have pretty short operating windows though so it helps to actually put it on your calendar. i missed the D-Day one two years running before i finally caught it. once you get a few special event QSL cards you kind of get hooked on chasing them, fair warning

so ive been running FT8 for about a year now and honestly it scratches the DX itch pretty well but theres something that bugs me about it — like yeah i worked 87 countries and whatever but i never actually talked to anyone. its just grid squares and signal reports flying around and you close WSJT-X feeling like you ran a database query not had a QSO.
anyway somebody at my club mentioned JS8Call a few months back and i finally got around to setting it up last weekend. its basically running on top of the same weak signal foundation as FT8 but you can actually type messages back and forth, relay stuff, even do store-and-forward messaging which is kind of wild. the tradeoff is its slower obviously and the band has to cooperate a bit more but on 40m last night i had like a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in New Mexico and it felt more like ham radio to me than anything ive done in a while.
my question is whether anyone is running both regularly or if you kind of pick one and stick with it. also curious if the JS8Call nets are actually active enough to be worth monitoring — i havent found a ton of activity on 20m during the day. the heartbeat stuff is cool but only if theres people sending them

so i've been an ARES member for about 8 months now and mostly it's been nets and tabletop exercises and honestly i was starting to wonder if i'd ever actually get activated for something real. well last weekend we had that big 10k charity run in town and they needed comms coverage and our EC asked for volunteers so i signed up figuring it was low stakes enough to not mess anything up too badly.
ended up being stationed at mile marker 6 which was kind of in a dead zone between two repeaters and i had to switch freqs a couple times to find what was working. nothing went wrong exactly but there were definitely moments where i was fumbling with the radio while trying to write stuff on my ICS-214 and also a medic was asking me something and i just felt like i had 3 things happening at once. the net control guy was great though, super patient, never made me feel dumb for asking him to repeat traffic.
anyway just wanted to share because i feel like we dont talk enough about what the first activation actually feels like vs all the training. anyone else remember their first one? did you feel totally scattered or is that just me

so ive been chasing 3Y0 and a few other rare ones for a while now and honestly i always felt like i was just yelling into the void during big pileups. tried everything the usual advice says — listen first, work split, all that. but last week i finally cracked one open on 20m and i think i figured out at least part of what i was doing wrong.
the big thing was timing. i was always jumping in right when the DX station finished their last QSO which turns out is exactly when about 500 other guys are doing the same thing. started listening for the rhythm of how the operator was working the pileup — some of them have a pretty consistent pattern, like they'll come back after about 3-4 seconds, some are slower. once i dialed into that i started transmitting just slightly before the peak of the pile and suddenly i was getting through way more often.
also switched from the typical 5-9 and done exchange to just throwing my suffix a couple times. like instead of calling my full callsign i'd just send the last two letters a few times when the band was really thick. worked on CW, not sure about SSB honestly. anyone else doing this or have other tricks that actually work in a real pile? not talking about the contest-style stuff, more like the genuine rare DX situations where the DXpedition team is clearly exhausted and working fast.