Emily Thomas74

yeah i ran a DIY setup for a long time, probably close to three years, before switching most of my stuff over to the RemoteHams ecosystem. the main thing i noticed is the audio latency handling is just better out of the box — my homebrew thing using mumble was okay but i was always tweaking jitter buffer settings and it still wasn't great on marginal connections. RemoteHams seems to have done more work on that side. on the SDR remote question — the way i understand it when you're using an SDR on the host end the SDR remote software is basically doing the demodulation server side and sending compressed audio to the client, so the bandwidth requirements are actually lower than you might think. its not streaming raw IQ data across the link which is what i was afraid of at first. that said i havent run it with a pure SDR setup myself, my remote end is still an IC-7300 so take that for what its worth. the server dependency thing is real. ive had maybe two or three outages in a year that i can attribute to their infrastructure and they were short but yeah it happened. for casual operating its totally fine, if youre doing something time critical like a scheduled net or a contest it could be annoying. direct IP connections do work around that but like you said you need a stable address on at least one end, i use a DDNS service on the radio end and it works fine most of the time.

oh man yeah the 13-15wpm wall is absolutely a real thing, you're not imagining it. i hit it too and i asked around and apparently a lot of people do. what helped me more than anything was forcing myself to just receive on the air even when i couldnt copy everything. like actually tuning around 40m at night and trying to pull calls out, not worrying about getting the whole QSO. your brain starts to recognize patterns and common words and after a while things like CQ and 73 and QTH just come automatically without thinking about individual letters. also and this might sound counterintuitive but i actually backed the speed up for a while. not all the way back to 5wpm but like dropped to 10 and focused on getting really clean copy with zero mistakes before pushing again. the other thing that made a huge difference was the farnsworth timing if youre not already using that, where the characters are sent at 20wpm but theres extra space between them. trains your ear for fast characters while giving you time to process. lcwo does this i think. anyway dont give up, 20wpm is totally reachable you're not even that far off

the question pool thing sounds scarier than it actually is. the real exam only pulls 35 questions from it so you dont need to have every single one memorized perfectly, you just need to get 26 right. what worked for me was using hamstudy.org, just drilling questions every day for like 20-30 minutes. it tracks which ones youre getting wrong and keeps throwing those at you more often. after maybe two weeks i was consistently scoring in the high 80s and 90s on the practice tests and felt pretty ready. the electrical theory stuff, yeah some of it is a little rough if you havent touched it in a while. ohms law shows up a few times and theres some basic stuff about circuits. honestly for the tech exam you dont need to deeply understand it, you kind of just need to recognize the right answer. the ARRL Technician manual is decent if you want actual explanations but some people just grind the question pool and pass fine without it. just depends how you learn i guess.

Congrats on the first activation, 60 contacts on your first time out is really solid especially if you were self-spotting without much of a following yet. To answer your log question -- yes you upload directly to the WWFF website, woodsnwater.net is where most of the global program is coordinated but if you're in the US the KFF references are managed through the WWFF-USA program and they have their own upload portal. The format is just a standard ADIF file same as you'd export from any logging software. Make sure your reference number is in there correctly and it usually processes pretty quickly. As for virgin references, yeah it's kind of bragging rights but there is a first activator award and some hunters specifically look for unactivated references so you do tend to get a small pile when you're the first one there. Worth checking the database before you go out honestly, you might have one closer to home than you think that nobody has hit yet. And yeah the hunters logging contacts with you are working toward their own awards on the flora fauna side, different tiers based on how many unique references they've worked. Pretty fun system overall.

The gauge of wire makes a little bit of difference in the bandwidth you get, but the difference between like 14 gauge and 16 gauge is really not significant. Your narrow bandwidth suggests the antenna is working but may need height adjustment. Try raising it to 50+ feet if possible - dipoles need clearance for optimal performance.