Jennifer Walsh

not a dumb question at all, everyone starts somewhere. so the question pool is legit the actual questions the test is pulled from, like they publish the whole thing publicly which is kind of nice honestly. the FCC requires that all the questions come from that pool so if you study every question in the pool you literally cannot fail. hamStudy.org is probably the best free resource, just do flashcard mode every day for a few weeks and youll be fine. the ARRL book is good background but you dont need to read the whole thing cover to cover to pass, some people just grind the question pool and show up and pass no problem. i'd say spend maybe 2-3 weeks on hamStudy and then take a practice exam until you're consistently hitting 85% or better before you go sit for the real thing.

yeah 30 seconds stationary is pretty bad, the general rule of thumb most people follow is something like 10 minutes when you're not moving. smart beaconing on the D710 is actually pretty decent once you dial it in right, the key parameters are the low speed threshold and the time settings. basically you want it to slow way down when your speed drops below like 5mph. for a home station a lot of folks just set a fixed beacon around every 10-30 minutes depending on how important it is to stay on the map. if youre not doing anything emcomm related or actively being tracked there's really no reason to beacon more than that. also check your decay settings if you have them, some firmware versions handle that differently.
the 144.390 channel really does get hammered in some areas, especially near cities. people running 1 minute intervals parked in their driveway are the reason digis get congested. so yeah good on you for catching it early.

Amateur radio operators use a subset of the full international Q-code extensively, and in many countries learning this code is necessary to obtain a ham radio license. I'd suggest making flashcards with the common ones - it becomes second nature pretty quickly once you start using them on the air.

Not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of new hams with those radios. So the Baofeng has separate settings for TX tone and RX tone. For hitting a repeater you pretty much only need the TX CTCSS set to 100.0 — that's what tells the repeater to open up when you key. The RX tone is different, that would filter what YOU hear on your end, so if you have it set you might actually be blocking signals you want to receive. Try turning the RX tone off (set to none or off depending on the menu) and leave only the TX tone on at 100.0.
As for the courtesy tone thing, yeah that's pretty common etiquette on a lot of linked repeaters especially. The idea is you just pause for a second after someone finishes talking so the repeater can drop and give a courtesy beep, that way people know the frequency is clear before someone else jumps in. On some machines if you step on that it can cause all kinds of weirdness especially if the repeater is linked to others. Worth asking your elmer or whoever the trustee is what the local customs are because it really does vary.

omg yes i thought it was just me being a new ham and not knowing what im doing lol. i got my general back in march and ive been trying to figure out propagation ever since and it feels like every time i think i understand it something weird happens. someone in my club told me to just watch the DX cluster and jump on anything i see but half the time by the time i find the frequency its gone already. still learning i guess

timing is everything and most people never figure that out, they just key up with everyone else and wonder why they cant break through. the other thing i'd add is freq discipline on your transmit side — if youre running split and you keep landing on the same freq as 50 other guys youre just adding to the noise. i actually move my tx freq around slightly, like 1-2 kHz, between attempts and pay attention to where the DX seems to be digging. some ops work the pileup systematically, low to high or the reverse, and if you can figure out the pattern youre already ahead of 80% of the pile.
the partial call thing is real too. a lot of newer operators dont realize the DX op is trained to pull a fragment and confirm, they dont need your whole call every time. just your suffix or even just the last letter pair. less is more in a big pileup honestly.

wild shot here but have you checked the mic connector? i had a dropout issue that turned out to be the PTT line on the mic connector going flaky, just enough resistance to occasionally drop PTT mid-over. was maddening to find. swapped to a different mic and the problem went away for two days then came back which told me it was the jack on the radio side not the mic itself.

so i finally did my first real SOTA activation last weekend, summit was only a 2 mile hike but man i was not prepared for how much the wind was gonna mess with everything. brought my ft-818 and a linked dipole and spent like 20 minutes just trying to get the thing up in a tree and the whole time my fingers were going numb. made 6 contacts on 20m which i guess is fine but i needed 4 so technically a success. didnt even try 40 because by that point i just wanted to go home. not complaining though it was honestly really fun and im already looking at other summits near me, just gotta figure out a better antenna situation because fighting that dipole in wind is rough

I've been using the DX Spots app for about a year now and it's pretty solid. It has many filters to choose from, though I'd like to see current zulu time in the app and a dark mode option. For notifications of specific calls, HamAlert is definitely the way to go - saved me from missing several new ones!