David Johnson45

yeah the chainsaws thing is pretty accurate honestly. it took me probably a full contest season before SO2R stopped costing me rate instead of adding it. the thing nobody tells you upfront is that the second radio is only useful if your run frequency is locked in and you have genuine dead time to fill — if youre in a pileup or calling CQ every 5 seconds there really isnt a window to work it
for learning id actually suggest trying it during a slower part of a 48 hour contest rather than a sprint. sprints move too fast and you end up just abandoning the second radio out of panic. like sunday afternoon of CQWW when NA is thinning out and europe hasnt fully come up yet, thats when you can actually practice using the second radio to snipe mults on 15 or 10 without it wrecking your 20m run. also make sure your logging software is doing the heavy lifting on dupes, N1MM with the bandmap doing the checking for you is basically essential, youre not gonna do that manually under pressure

the bounced reply thing happened to me too when i first set it up, turned out i had the address slightly wrong — i was using my callsign lowercase and i think there was a dot somewhere that shouldnt have been there. once i fixed it worked fine. also worth checking the winlink.org website directly, you can log in there and see if messages are actually hitting your account or getting dropped before that
btw totally off topic but are you using VARA FM or just VARA HF? i ask because if you have a local gateway on VHF that might be way more reliable for just checking email stuff day to day, saves the HF hassle. i use 40m for when im away from home but locally its all 2m VARA FM and it connects in like 20 seconds usually

ive been looking at the 7300 for months and posts like this dont help me keep my wallet closed lol. question though — how does it handle weak signal stuff, like are you doing any CW or SSB DX with it? most of what i see talked about is FT8 and i want to know if its actually a good CW rig day to day. im coming from an old Yaesu FT-857D which i love but its not exactly a shack radio, more of a mobile that lives on my desk.

The G90 uses a more efficient final amplifier design - that's probably the main difference you're seeing. A solar panel can be a good investment, especially if you like to camp. You can use it to charge your battery or even run the rig while the battery is charging. Worth considering for longer activations!

so i just passed my technician exam last week (finally) and now im trying to figure out what handheld to get. ive been lurking here for a while and everyone seems to have strong opinions about this stuff so figured id just ask directly.
my main thing is i want to be able to hit the local repeaters, maybe do some simplex if anyone around here actually does that, and i dunno maybe eventually get into APRS or something. budget is probably around $100-150 but i could stretch it a bit if something is really worth it.
ive been looking at the Baofeng UV-5R because its like $25 and seems like everyone has one, but then i also saw people talking about the Yaesu FT-60 and the Kenwood TH-D75 which is way more expensive. i genuinely cannot tell if the cheap ones are fine for a beginner or if im just going to regret it and have to buy again in 6 months. also does any of this matter if im mostly just going to be listening for a while anyway

yeah what he said about the tone is right. also just to add — once you do get on and youre not sure if anybodys around, a lot of people will just say their callsign and say "listening" or "monitoring" and leave it at that. dont feel like you have to do some big formal thing. some repeaters also have a weekly net night where theres always people on, worth looking up if your local one does that, good way to actually have a qso when youre starting out