Ashley Anderson73

oh man i was so lost with this same stuff when i started. honestly what helped me most was just downloading one of those reference sheets and keeping it next to the radio. after a few weeks of actually using them it became second nature. QRZ is another big one, means 'who is calling me' but you hear people use it sort of as a general CQ sometimes which isnt really technically correct but whatever, everybody does it. 73 is one of those things that just feels weird to say out loud at first but you get used to it real quick

yeah technician is definitely where everyone starts, dont stress about skipping to general right away. most people do tech first and then upgrade when they feel like it, sometimes years later, sometimes a few months. for studying honestly hamstudy.org is what i used and it worked great, you just drill the question pool over and over until you're getting 85% or better consistently and you'll be fine on the actual exam. the real test is pulled from the same question pool so there are no surprises. when i went to take mine i was nervous for nothing, the VE team was really friendly and it took maybe 20 minutes total. just keep doing practice tests every day for a couple weeks and you'll pass no problem.

I went the other direction actually — had an RSP1A and ended up keeping the RTL-SDR dongles around for dedicated single-purpose stuff like having one permanently on ADS-B and another running on the weather sat frequencies. the SDRplay sits on HF. so maybe think about it less as replacing it and more like adding a better tool for a specific thing. also worth mentioning if you havent tried SDR++ yet, its cross platform and works with pretty much everything including SDRplay, way cleaner than SDR# in my opinion and the noise floor display is nicer to look at for long monitoring sessions. not that it changes your hardware question but software side its worth a look

yeah the fan thing drove me nuts at first too. what i ended up doing was dropping the power back to like 50-60 watts for general rag chewing and it stays pretty quiet most of the time. only spins up hard when im doing FT8 duty cycles at higher power which makes sense i guess. the waterfall really is a game changer coming from older rigs. i came from a TS-570 and honestly going back to it now feels like driving without mirrors. the 7300 isnt perfect — the close-in dynamic range gets some criticism from the serious contesters and theres a reason the IC-7610 exists — but for the money its hard to argue with. youll figure out the RF gain thing pretty quick, i run mine around 2 o'clock most of the time on a typical band with moderate noise.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely is confusing when youre starting out. so the short answer is no, you dont need all three, but each one has its own purpose depending on what youre going for. LoTW is basically the gold standard if you want to work toward ARRL awards like DXCC or WAS because it only counts confirmations from there for those awards. eQSL is more casual and some people swear by it but it isnt accepted for most of the big awards. paper cards are kind of the sentimental tradition of the hobby and yeah if someone sends you one its considered polite to send one back, but nobody is going to track you down if you dont. for uploading to LoTW — what logging software are you using? most of the popular ones like Log4OM or WSJT-X have pretty straightforward LoTW upload built right in once you get your certificate sorted. the certificate process through TQSL is a bit of a pain the first time but once its done its done. if you want i can walk you through it, just let me know what software youre on.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it for maybe 3 months now. what helped me a lot was morse.ninja on top of LCWO because it has a different way of presenting stuff and i found mixing the two kept it from getting boring. also theres a youtube channel i stumbled on that plays QSOs at like 5wpm with the text underneath so you can follow along and it feels more like actual radio which is motivating. one thing nobody told me was that copying by hand and copying by typing feel completely different so pick one and stick with it for a while. i kept switching and it confused me more than anything

congrats man, and yes totally counts. everybody fumbles the first few times, Larry sounds like a good egg. my first qso was on a handheld too and i literally read my callsign off a sticky note i put on the radio because i was scared id blank on it. took me maybe a week before i could just say it naturally without thinking. the baofeng is fine to start on, get out there and talk to people thats the whole point. once you get comfortable on the repeater you'll probably want to try some simplex or maybe HF down the road but no rush, just have fun with it for now.

i had basically the exact same situation last year and went with the vertical. built mine out of a 31ft spiderpole with wire along it, fed with coax and a 1:1 choke balun at the base. put down 24 radials on the ground and i was pretty happy with it for 40m DX. worked into asia a few times during good openings and it definitely feels like it punches reasonably well. one thing i will say though is the vertical picks up way more local noise than my old dipole did. im in a suburban neighborhood and the RFI situation is annoying, hash from switching power supplies all over the place. the dipole i had before was quieter on receive. so just something to think about if you're in a noisy area.

not dumb questions at all, this stuff confused me for a while too. the RMS gateways are just store-and-forward nodes basically — your message goes radio to gateway, gateway uploads to the CMS (common message server) over the internet, and sits there until the recipient connects and grabs it. so yeah it just waits on their servers, there's no push notification unless you're using something like a winlink hybrid network with a local telnet connection but thats a different thing. on the failed handshake issue, 20m can be really finicky especially mid-day depending on where you are and what time you're trying to connect. the Vara HF waterfall should show you whether you're actually seeing the gateway signal before you try to connect — if it looks clean and you still drop, could be a timing issue in your VARA settings or the gateway was just busy with another session. only one connection at a time per RMS node so if someone else grabbed it first you get bumped. try a different gateway, the RMS relay list in Winlink Express updates pretty regularly and you can sort by distance and band. as for retry, Winlink Express will usually let you know if the session failed and you can manually retry, it doesnt auto-retry silently as far as i know. the message stays in your outbox until you get a confirmed transfer so at least you wont lose it.

honestly for a casual contester i wouldnt bother with SO2R until single radio operation feels completely automatic. like if youre still thinking about logging or CW sending or whatever during a run, adding a second radio is just going to wreck both your rate and your sanity. the guys doing SO2R well have been contesting for years and even then it took them a while to get smooth at it. one thing that helped my rate a lot more than any fancy setup was just getting better at the rhythm of a run, keeping the exchange tight, not chatting, calling CQ again fast after a QSO. sounds obvious but i was definitely leaving time on the table with sloppy exchanges early on. also knowing when a band is actually about to open or close from experience, you get a feel for it after enough contests and you can position yourself better.

so ive been noticing 20m acting really strange the past couple weeks. some days it's absolutely dead, cant raise anyone in europe from the midwest no matter what i try, then randomly like tuesday afternoon it just opened up and i was working stations left and right into spain and portugal with no effort at all. been licensed for about 8 months so i honestly dont have a great baseline for what normal looks like. been trying to follow the solar flux index stuff on the spaceweather sites but i dont totally understand how to read it in terms of what to actually expect on what bands. like i know higher is generally better but how high is high enough to bother trying 10m or 15m? and do geomagnetic conditions matter more than the flux number or is it both? im also trying to figure out when to even bother with 40m for DX vs just using it for local rag chews anyway if anyone has good resources or just wants to explain how they personally use the solar data to decide what band to operate on id really appreciate it. feel like im kind of flying blind right now

yeah i just did mine a few months ago so i remember what it was like being in your spot. i used the Ham Radio Prep app and thought it was pretty good, there might be a small cost for the full version but i think theres a free tier too. i also watched some youtube videos when i hit questions i didnt understand, especially the electrical theory stuff which trips a lot of people up. took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying and i passed with room to spare. the test site i went to was super chill, the examiners were all friendly and encouraging, dont stress about it

honestly i just run both at the same time on different bands, FT8 on 20 doing its thing while i poke around on JS8 on 40. the G90 should handle that fine if you have a way to split audio or just run two instances pointed at different soundcard channels. i dunno i find FT8 kind of meditative in a weird way, like watching a waterfall and seeing callsigns pop up from places you wouldnt expect. but yeah for actual human interaction JS8 is way better when you find someone to talk to. the relay mesh stuff is cool too if you ever dig into that side of it.

yeah the two-program problem is real and honestly most people i know just accept it to some degree. what i do is keep Log4OM as my main station log and have WSJT-X pointed at it via the UDP broadcast — Log4OM listens on port 2237 by default and you just tell WSJT-X to send to that address. once thats set up WSJT-X contacts drop straight into Log4OM in real time, no manual importing. took me maybe 20 minutes to figure out the first time but now it just works. N1MM i only fire up for actual contests and then i export from there afterwards and merge into Log4OM. its a bit of extra work after a contest weekend but its like 10 minutes and i only do it a few times a year so it doesnt bother me. the duplicate checking in Log4OM is decent enough that i havent had problems with it. Log4OM 2 specifically is pretty solid for general logging, the interface is a bit busy but you get used to it. clublog integration works well too if you care about that.

that feeling you described when they handed you the assignment is totally real and basically everyone goes through it the first time, doesnt matter how many drills you've done. drills are almost too low stakes in a way, nobody's really stressed so your brain doesnt go into that same mode. on the debrief question — it really varies a lot by group. our section does a written AAR within a week of any activation, EC sends out a form and then we go over the highlights at the next monthly meeting. but ive been to other counties where yeah, people just kind of drift off and nothing formal happens. which is a shame honestly because thats where you catch the stuff that almost went wrong before it actually does go wrong next time. if your EC isnt doing it might be worth just quietly asking if thats something the group wants to start. sometimes it just takes one person to bring it up.