Amanda Williams

so i decided i want to get my technician license, been interested in ham radio for a while now mostly because my neighbor has one and he showed me some of the stuff you can do with it. anyway i went online and looked up how to get licensed and i know there's a question pool but honestly it's kind of overwhelming. like do i just memorize all 400 something questions? is there a better way to study? i found a couple apps but i dont know which ones are actually worth using vs just wasting my time. also some of the electrical theory stuff is going over my head a bit, i took basic physics in high school but that was a long time ago. does everyone struggle with that part or is it just me

honestly the best thing i ever did was find someone local on a repeater who was willing to do an A/B test with me while i messed with settings in real time. you cant really know what you sound like from recordings because your own voice sounds different to you anyway, and remote SDR receivers are helpful but they're not the same as another ham with a decent radio just telling you straight up what sounds good.
also just to throw this out there, have you checked your ground situation? i had a weird hum/low rumble thing for a while that i kept blaming on mic settings and it turned out to be a ground loop between my rig and the computer i had connected for logging. had nothing to do with the microphone at all. not saying thats your problem but muddiness can come from weird sources sometimes.

oh man the TQSL certificate thing got me too when i first started lol. i had to have a guy from my club walk me through it on zoom before it finally clicked. but yeah once that part is done uploading is pretty easy, i just export from my logging software and drag it in every few weeks or so
i do eQSL too mostly because some of the people i talk to on digital modes seem to prefer it and you do get a little card image which is kind of fun to look at. its not the same as a real card though. i actually just started mailing paper cards for any DX contact i make because i read somewhere that a lot of rare entities still primarily do bureau cards and if you want something back you kinda have to send something. havent gotten many back yet but i did get one from a station in the Azores a couple months ago and that was pretty cool ngl

yeah single yagi EME is very much real on 2m, people do it all the time with JT65B and Q65 these days. the old school guys with the 4x16el arrays would laugh but honestly with a good preamp you can work it. you want something in the 12dBd gain range at minimum, so a longer boom yagi like an M2 2MXP28 or a Tonnaerre or home brew equivalent. the key thing people underestimate is the preamp, you really want something like 0.3dB NF or better and it needs to be RIGHT at the feed, like within a foot, every tenth of a dB matters more on EME than anything else youll ever do in radio.
doppler and delay yeah the software handles it, WSJT-X just needs accurate time (GPS locked or at least NTP synced well) and you need to set your grid square exactly right. the moon tracking is the other thing, you need an az/el rotator setup, you cant just point it and hope. some guys use a cheap dish rotator for elevation and a normal yagi rotator for azimuth and that works fine. its a rabbit hole but a fun one

honestly your neighbor isnt wrong but hes also not telling you the full picture. a vertical with a good radial system will beat a dipole at 25 feet for low angle dx stuff, thats just kind of physics. but 60 radials is the ideal, not the minimum — even 16 or 20 decent length radials gets you most of the way there and the improvement curve flattens out pretty fast after that. so the labor isnt as insane as it sounds if you dont go full overkill on it.
that said, a dipole even at 25 feet isnt useless, you're still making contacts and it has better high angle radiation which actually helps for regional stuff, nets, that kind of thing. if you mostly care about dx and can stomach laying down some wire, the vertical would probably open things up a bit. if you're happy with what you're working now, maybe dont fix what aint broke. i ran a similar setup for years before i finally went vertical and yeah it helped but it wasnt like night and day, more like a consistent improvement on marginal paths.

i went through this exact thing last year and ended up just building a fan dipole instead of switching to a vertical lol. didnt really answer your question i know. but my takeoff angle situation improved a bit when i moved the dipole feedpoint up to about 45 feet and inverted-v'd it instead of flat top, not sure if thats a real thing or just placebo honestly

so ive been running a pretty basic 40m dipole for about two years now, inverted V config with the apex around 35 feet up on a push-up pole. works okay but ive always wondered if i'm leaving something on the table by not trying a vertical. the noise floor at my QTH is already kind of rough — suburban lot, lots of switching power supplies and LED drivers from neighbors — and i keep reading that verticals are worse for that kind of thing but then other guys say theirs is quieter because of the lower angle radiation and it nulls out local junk somehow. honestly im confused.
my main use is casual ragchewing on 40 and sometimes 80, not contesting or anything serious. i thought about building a simple quarter wave vertical with a few radials just to see, wouldnt cost me much. but before i spend a weekend doing that i wanted to see if anyone has actually set both up at the same location and done any kind of real comparison. not looking for EZNEC models, i can poke around with that myself, im more interested in practical real world experience. does the vertical actually perform differently enough to notice on receive? transmit i assume theyre in the same ballpark if the radial system is decent.

stranded wire runs a bit longer electrically than solid from what ive read, so that might be nudging things too. not a huge effect but stacks up with everything else you got going on. im dealing with something similar on a 20m dipole i threw up last month, mine resonates like 400kHz low and i still havent figured out if its the wire or the fact that half of it runs along the roofline of the house