Ashley Anderson73

hamstudy is exactly what most people use honestly, you're already on the right track. two or three weeks is plenty of time for tech, i think i studied maybe a week and a half before my exam and passed no problem. the pool of questions is fixed so what you're practicing is literally what will be on the test, just different combinations.
the electrical theory stuff you don't need to fully understand for the exam, you can just memorize the answers and move on. some people say you should actually learn it and yeah eventually that's useful but for getting the ticket just passing is fine. you can always go back and learn the why later once you're actually on the air.
when you find a test session check if it's with a VEC club near you, a lot of them are free or just a few bucks. and if you pass tech that day some clubs will let you just go ahead and take the general exam right after for no extra fee, might as well try it if you feel good

dont stress too much about memorizing all of them, i been licensed 6 years and there are still Q codes i have to look up. the ones that trip people up sometimes are QSY which means change frequency, and QRT which means im shutting down or stopping transmission. you'll hear QRT a lot when someone is signing off for the night like "going QRT" meaning theyre done for the evening.
oh and QRP is kind of its own whole culture thing, low power operating, theres entire communities built around running 5 watts or less. so if someone says theyre a QRP op they usually mean thats their whole thing not just that theyre turning down the power at that moment

good thread. i'll just say from my experience with a couple small DXpeditions that from the other side of the pileup the thing that stands out most is ops who send their call once, clearly, and then wait. you'd be amazed how many people send their callsign like 4 or 5 times in a row and it just blends into mush on our end. one clean transmission of your call at normal speed is almost always more readable than someone hammering it repeatedly.
also if the DX comes back to someone and you keep calling anyway, i personally would sometimes just skip past the whole mess and work the next frequency just to punish the lid behavior lol. not very diplomatic but after hour 14 of a DXpedition you start doing petty things.

ok so ive been licensed about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got my first HT, a Baofeng UV-5R, and im trying to access a couple of the local repeaters listed on repeaterbook. some of them i can hear just fine but when i key up nobody seems to hear me or the repeater doesnt open up. i went through the settings and i think i have the offset right but im not totally sure about the CTCSS stuff.
from what i understand you need to transmit a subaudible tone to access most repeaters, is that right? but on repeaterbook some listings show a tone and some dont. if theres no tone listed does that mean its open carrier or is the info just missing? also one of the local guys told me i need to set the tone on transmit only and not on receive but i wasnt sure why that matters. my radio has options for like tone, ctcss, dcs and i honestly have no idea what half of them mean. just trying to figure out the basics before i embarrass myself too much on the air

Q65-30 sec periods really increase the number of QSOs compared to longer sequences. Shorter periods mean less thermal stress on your PA. The trade-off is slightly reduced sensitivity, but if you're running 300-400W you probably have enough margin. Also helps reduce Doppler issues and keeps the QSO rate up during good conditions.