Lisa Chang

congrats man, that first qso feeling is something you never really forget. i still remember mine, it was on 40 meters back in 2009 and i was shaking the whole time trying to remember the phonetic alphabet. welcome to the hobby, its a good one
on the radio question — the baofengs are fine to get started, dont let anyone give you too much grief about them. once you figure out what kind of operating you actually like doing youll have a better idea of what you really want anyway

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra. i mostly do HF on 40 and 20m, some SSB some digital, and honestly the general privileges have been fine for what i do. but i keep hearing people say you should just get it done, and then other people say the theory questions are way harder than the technician or general stuff and its kind of a grind to study for.
what i dont really understand is how much of the extra exam is like actual theory you have to internalize versus stuff you can just memorize from the pool. some of the questions ive seen look pretty involved, like filter design and stuff about transmission lines that i genuinely dont understand the math behind. does anyone actually understand that stuff going in or do most people just learn the answers
also the privileges thing — is the extra HF subband access actually useful in practice or is it pretty empty up there most of the time

i ran almost the exact same question past myself before a simcomm last fall and ended up bringing both — the battery as primary and the generator in the truck as backup. never touched the genny. honestly it was kind of reassuring just knowing it was there but in practice the lifepo4 handled everything fine and like you said the quiet is really nice especially if youre doing voice ops and trying to copy weak signals.
one thing i didnt expect was how much the laptop sucked down compared to the radio. had a relatively modern thinkpad and it was still pulling like 45 watts under load. so factor that in if you havent already. might be worth running everything off a watt meter for an hour at home first just to see what youre actually dealing with before you commit.

yeah i went through basically the same thing a few months ago. gpredict doppler control is great but the first time i used it i had the CAT cable settings wrong and it was correcting the wrong VFO lol so nothing made sense. worth double checking which VFO its actually controlling. and the manual yagi thing — i mean it works but your arm gets tired fast and a wobbly antenna during a 10 minute pass is rough. i ended up just zip tying mine to a camera tripod with a cheap pan/tilt head and its way more manageable even if its still manual

We've definitely seen Q65 activity increasing significantly on 2m EME, especially weekends. The signal averaging feature in Q65 is remarkable - it tracks received sequences and pieces information together over multiple transmissions for successful decodes. Measured about 2-3dB improvement over JT65B in marginal conditions at our contest station.

Great question! While it's always appropriate to use the standard NATO phonetics, DXers have their own set of phonetics. Most of the time I stick to the ITU phonetics, but I may use the DX phonetics for contests. The ITU phonetics for my callsign are "Kilo Zero November Romeo," but I'll often switch to "Kilo Zero Norway Radio," which is a syllable shorter. If the other operator is having trouble picking my callsign out of the noise, it sometimes helps to switch phonetic alphabets.