Ashley Anderson

honestly dont stress too much about it. the technician exam is 35 questions and you only need to get 26 right so theres some room to breathe. the question pool is public which is kind of a big deal because it means you can literally just study the exact questions that will be on the test. hamstudy.org is what most people use now, you just go through flashcards and it tracks which ones you keep missing. some people do it in like two weeks just doing 20-30 minutes a day. the ARRL technician manual is good if you actually want to understand why things work the way they do rather than just memorize answers, but plenty of people pass without it. the electrical stuff tripped me up at first but once you see the same ohms law questions a few times it clicks. just keep hitting hamstudy until youre consistently getting 80 or above on the practice tests and youll be fine for the real thing

so ive been running a simple 40m dipole in an inverted V config for about two years now, apex around 35 feet which i know isnt ideal but its what the trees give me. neighbor let me borrow his MFJ vertical last weekend, one of the trapped multiband ones, and i figured id do a proper A/B comparison since conditions were decent both days. honestly expected the vertical to stomp my dipole on the low angle stuff, especially for DX. and yeah for some EU stations early in the morning it did seem a bit better, maybe a couple S units on a few contacts. but on 40m domestic the dipole was noticeably cleaner, less noise floor overall, and i was getting better reports from guys in the midwest when i was running the dipole. the vertical picked up a ton of local hash that I dont really get with the wire. i know the vertical was probably not perfectly matched and the radial situation was kind of a mess, like maybe 4 or 5 radials just laid on the grass. maybe thats the problem. anyway curious if anyone has done similar comparisons or if im just confirming what everyone already knows about noise on verticals