Tom Anderson

i had almost exactly this problem last year, also on a Bencher actually. turned out one of my contact points was slightly tarnished and making intermittent contact. cleaned it with a little deoxit and suddenly half my problems went away. might be worth checking especially if its an older used paddle, hamfest stuff can sit in boxes for years.

i did the mod too but honestly i never use it lol. just wanted to know i could. the emcomm angle makes more sense as an actual reason to bother. one thing i'll say is take photos before you move anything, i was confident i remembered the jumper positions and i was wrong and spent an annoying 20 minutes figuring out which way things were supposed to go back if i changed my mind.

okay so ive been licensed for about 3 months now, tech class, and im still kind of fuzzy on the rules around what frequencies i can actually use. like i know i have HF privileges on 10m but only certain modes right? and then theres the question of what i can say on air, someone at my club meeting mentioned something about third party traffic and i nodded like i understood but honestly i had no idea what they were talking about. also i was reading part 97 the other night and it kind of made my head spin. like is there a plain english version somewhere or do i have to just memorize the whole thing. i dont want to accidentally do something wrong and lose my license before ive even really gotten started

so ive been playing around with online cluster tools for a few months now and i keep going back and forth between DXwatch and the cluster on QRZ and honestly im not sure i fully understand how they relate to each other. like are they pulling from the same underlying spots or are these totally separate networks? sometimes i see a spot on one and not the other within like the same few minutes and it throws me off. also on QRZ specifically there's that little map that shows where the dx station is and where spots are coming from, i find that actually pretty useful for figuring out propagation direction but im not sure how current the data really is. theres a delay right? or am i just imagining that. been using the DX Toolkit app on my phone too and that seems to pull from somewhere slightly different again. anyway just wondering how experienced ops usually juggle all this stuff, do you just pick one and stick with it or is there a reason to cross reference