Lisa Chang

im in basically the same boat as you, got licensed last year and spent way too long confused about all this. what finally made it click for me was thinking of LoTW as the "official" one for serious awards and eQSL as more of a casual digital card thing. like you'll get confirmations way faster on eQSL because people check it more casually but it doesnt count for as much. and yeah physical cards are definitely still alive lol, i sent out maybe 30 cards after a portable operation i did and got probably half of them confirmed back by mail over the next few months. theres something genuinely nice about it even if its slow. some DX stations only do paper cards through their country's bureau which adds like another layer of complexity but youll figure that out when you get there

oh yeah absolutely, happens to me every winter. i'll go like a month barely keying up then something will get me back into it — usually a contest or somebody posts a rare DX spot and i cant help myself. just leave the radio on in the background tuned to a busy frequency, sometimes you hear something interesting and it pulls you back in without even thinking about it.

oh man i remember being exactly where you are, dont feel bad at all. so yes the CTCSS thing is almost certainly your issue. most repeaters these days require you to transmit a subaudible tone along with your voice before they'll open up the squelch and actually let you through. you can hear the repeater fine because you're just receiving, but to get the repeater to hear YOU and retransmit your signal, you need to be sending that tone. go back to repeaterbook and look up that specific repeater again, there should be a field that says something like PL tone or CTCSS and it'll be a number like 100.0 or 127.3 or whatever. then in your baofeng you need to program that into the TX CTCSS field for that channel. once you do that try keying up and you should hear the repeater's tail — that little blip or kerchunk sound after you let go of the PTT. that means you're in. then just say something like your callsign and the word monitoring and see if anyone comes back. welcome to the hobby btw, it gets way more fun from here

With linear birds using SSB and CW modes providing anywhere from 20-50 KHz of bandwidth, I'm curious about proper frequency coordination on AO-73. I've noticed some operators seem to park themselves right in the middle of the transponder and stay there for extended QSOs, while others quickly move around to avoid interference. The benefits of more bandwidth and the ability for multiple users to make QSOs simultaneously should allow for better frequency management than the FM birds. What's considered good practice for frequency selection and QSO length on the linear transponders? I know maximum uplink power should be 5 watts to a 7 dBi gain antenna (25W EIRP), but are there any unwritten rules about frequency etiquette?