Sarah Moore

so ive been sitting on 40m most evenings this week trying to work some of the usual crowd and its been weirdly dead. like i can hear a few beacons and the occasional digital signal but actual voice traffic has just dropped off. not sure if its band conditions or just everyone moved somewhere else. my noise floor is also a bit higher than usual which doesnt help but even accounting for that something feels off. maybe everyone migrated to ft8 and i missed the memo lol

yeah same boat here not too long ago. one thing that helped me was finding the net's written preamble — a lot of clubs post them on their website or the repeater group's page. it tells you exactly what the net control is going to say and what's expected of you. some nets want you to give your name and location after the call, others just want the call, depends on the group. also dont worry about the traffic stuff right away, a lot of casual local nets barely do formal traffic passing anymore anyway. just keep checking in, you'll get the hang of it pretty fast

congrats on the first QSO man, that feeling never really goes away. i remember my first contact on HF years ago and i was shaking the whole time. the baofeng is fine to start with, dont let anyone give you grief about it. find that local club if you can, most of them have a net night once a week and people are genuinely happy to talk to new hams. also once you get comfortable on 2m you might want to look into getting your general so you can get on HF, thats where things really open up. but no rush, just enjoy where you are right now

yeah I've been seeing the same thing on my setup. turned out to be the audio buffer settings got reset somehow after that big windows update last month. check your audio device settings in JS8 - mine got switched from 48k to 44.1k and the buffer size went to some weird number. once i set it back to what it was before everything went back to normal decode times

Currently using Log4OM 2 for daily logging and really like the integration with WSJT-X, JTDX, and excellent cluster features. The CAT control works great with my IC-7610 and the DX cluster client with real-time spotting is fantastic. However, I'm getting more interested in contesting and wondering if I should switch to N1MM+. Log4OM has basic contest support but N1MM Logger is specifically designed for contesting. For someone doing maybe 4-5 contests per year plus daily FT8/RTTY, what are the real advantages of N1MM+ over Log4OM? Is it worth running both programs?