John Williams

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been sitting on my Tech for almost a year and keep putting off studying. from what i understand the electrical theory part is the bit that trips people up, like calculating impedance or whatever. i found a youtube channel that walks through some of that stuff and it helped it click a little better than just memorizing. not sure which bands ill even use once i upgrade but 40m sounds fun for local-ish stuff at night from what ive read on here

oh man do NOT be intimidated by CQ WW, seriously it is one of the best experiences you can have even with a modest setup. yeah the bands get absolutely packed and the big gun stations will be running pile-ups you cant break through, but just working the contest in search and pounce mode is totally valid and you will rack up contacts and new countries faster than almost anything else you can do. your 7300 and a dipole on 40m will do just fine, 40m during CQ WW is wall to wall signals from everywhere.
the thing i tell people new to contesting is just to not stress about your score, especially the first time. just get on, work what you can hear, log it all, and submit your log even if its small. every log submission helps with cross-checking for the big ops. and yeah SOTA is its own separate thing, more of an award program slash operating activity than a traditional contest but there are SOTA specific events like activator weekends that come up. check the SOTA reflector for that stuff. but for your first real contest season id say CQ WW SSB is probably end of october, then CQ WW CW in november if you're into that, and SS is in there too. plenty to keep you busy. just get on and have fun with it

yeah i just did mine like two months ago, used hamstudy and just kept doing practice tests until i was consistently hitting 90% or better and then went and took the real thing. felt pretty confident going in. the actual test felt easier than the practice ones honestly, i think because i was nervous and studied more than i needed to lol
one thing nobody told me was to bring two forms of ID to the test session, i almost forgot and that wouldve been a whole thing

I went through this exact thing last spring. ended up building a simple painters pole mast on the far end and it works ok but the inverted V was honestly fine. the main thing I noticed going flat was 80m seemed to open up a bit more consistently, 40 i couldnt really tell a difference with my ears. take that for what its worth, im not running any fancy measurement gear just a swr meter and opinions

yeah the SFI is only part of the picture honestly. what you really want to watch alongside that is the K-index and the A-index. when the K goes above 3 or 4 the higher bands can really suffer even if the solar flux looks good, geomagnetic disturbances will wipe out 10m propagation faster than anything. there's a site called NOAA space weather that shows near-realtime updates on those numbers.
the other thing is that 10m openings especially to South America tend to happen in a pretty predictable window based on the grayline and the solar zenith angle over the path. like your opening yesterday afternoon makes total sense, that's pretty much when the F2 layer over that path tends to peak this time of year. if you start checking around the same time each day you'll probably catch more of them. also DXmaps.com is great for seeing where openings are happening in real time based on actual spots, saves a lot of blind tuning

that first contact feeling is something else man, i still remember mine and that was like 15 years ago. dont let anybody give you a hard time about the baofeng either, we all start somewhere and getting on the air is what matters. once you get comfortable on the repeater you should try some simplex, totally different vibe when theres no machine in between you and the other guy.

the impedance thing is real, inverted V at around 90 degree included angle comes in closer to 50 ohms so if your feeding it with coax its just easier to deal with. the radiation pattern difference between the two is honestly pretty small at typical backyard heights, both are NVIS-ish on 40m unless your apex is way up there like 60-70ft or more. at 35ft your flat top isnt exactly punching out low angle DX either so the practical difference between the two is probably in your head a little.
the sag issue on a flat top is annoying though. ive fought that for years. inverted V actually handles wind loading better in my experience because the ends can move more freely without stressing the center insulator. that alone might be reason enough to switch if your current setup is always pulling weird on the feedpoint.

so ive been sitting on this idea for a while now and finally started putting something together. basically i have 4 antennas — a 40m dipole, a vertical for 20/15/10, a 2m yagi, and a homebrew magnetic loop for indoor use — and im sick of physically going behind the radio to swap coax or flip the manual relay box i built like 3 years ago. it works fine but its just annoying especially during contests or when im doing some quick digital work and switching bands constantly.
started sketching out an arduino mega setup with a bank of relay modules, some basic SWR sensing from a directional coupler i pulled off an old Kenwood tuner, and the idea is to have a little 16x2 LCD showing which antenna is selected plus forward/reflected. nothing fancy. the arduino would talk to the PC over serial and i wrote a small python script that listens to the CAT interface on my IC-7300 and automatically suggests the right antenna based on the operating frequency but i still want manual override on the physical box.
the part im stuck on is the relay isolation. using those cheap 8-relay boards from amazon and the RF bleedthrough between channels is probably gonna be a problem at HF even with the relays open. thinking i need to either add some grounding on the unused ports or swap to actual RF relays but those get expensive fast. anyone dealt with this? or is it not as bad as im making it out to be?

honestly for ragchewing and casual contesting the extra segments arent going to change your life but they do help on 20m and 40m when things get packed. the theory though, i'll say this — when i studied for mine i actually started understanding WHY my antenna was doing weird things and why certain filters matter for my radio. its not like you use the math directly but it kind of rewires how you think about the whole station. the exam is memorizable for sure, plenty of people do it that way and theres nothing wrong with that. i used the hamstudy site and just drilled questions for maybe 6 weeks and passed no problem. if youve been a general for 3 years you probably already understand more than you think