David Thomas

im kind of in the same boat as you honestly, got my ticket in 2020 and just recently started caring about confirmations. one thing i didnt realize until embarrasingly late is that not all QSOs on LoTW match up automatically -- both sides have to upload their log for it to confirm. had a bunch of contacts where i uploaded my side and waited forever and nothing happened. so if you worked someone and its been a while with no LoTW confirm, sometimes sending a direct QSL or even a card via the bureau is worth it just to have a backup.

thats pretty much every night for me lol. i usually just end up on 2m talking to the guys in the local club instead. 40 feels like a gamble

could also be the ALC feedback loop doing something weird — i know you said it looked normal but what does it look like during the rolloff, is it climbing as the power drops? if the radio thinks its getting too much RF back for some reason it'll throttle itself down. had a cap in the ALC circuit go soft on an older Kenwood and it did something similar, took forever to figure out because the symptom looked thermal but wasnt. also worth checking if you have the RF power control set to max or if something got changed in the menu settings, ive seen people accidentally bump the output setting and then spend days debugging what was basically a user error lol. not saying thats your problem just worth ruling out quick

yeah what he said about the noise, inverter gens are generally pretty clean but chargers can be a wildcard. i'd also make sure your genny is downwind of the operating position if you can manage it, exhaust smell gets old real fast and depending on how warm it is you'll be miserable by hour 3. one thing i'll add — have you thought about where the 7300 is sitting relative to the battery? i fried a DC connector once running too long of a thin cable from a 100ah and the voltage drop under transmit was enough to make the radio do weird things. probably obvious but worth double checking your wire gauge for whatever run length you end up with.

the paper QSLs are absolutely worth sending in, dont let them sit there. you mail them to the ARRL with a check or credit card info and they go through an outgoing QSL bureau process for checking — wait actually no, for DXCC specifically you send them directly to ARRL HQ or bring them to an accredited DXCC card checker at a hamfest which is way faster and cheaper honestly. i got like 30 extra credits that way from old paper cards that werent in LoTW as for tracking multiple awards at once, just make sure your logging software is set up right and most of it handles WAS, WAZ, and DXCC simultaneously in the background. log4om should do that fine. i run DXKeeper personally but same idea. you'll figure out pretty quick which states or zones you're still missing just by pulling the reports

so i've been putting off building my own dipole forever because i kept thinking i needed to buy something commercial, but last weekend i finally just did it with some #14 stranded wire i had sitting in the garage and a SO-239 chassis connector i pulled off an old project. cut each leg to about 33.5 feet based on the 468/f formula for 7.150, got it up in an inverted V config with the apex at maybe 28 feet off a fiberglass push-up mast. center insulator i just made from a chunk of PVC pipe with some holes drilled through it, nothing fancy. ran 50 ohm coax straight down to the shack. put the analyzer on it before connecting anything and it came back with an SWR of like 1.4:1 right at 7.150 which honestly surprised me, i was expecting to have to do a lot more trimming. bandwidth on 40 is usable basically across the whole band with the tuner helping at the edges. i did end up cutting about 4 inches off each leg to bring the resonant point up a tiny bit but thats it. anyway the point is i wish i had just done this years ago instead of buying that multiband trapped vertical. the wire probably cost me less than 8 bucks total. if anyone's been on the fence about doing a homebrew dipole just do it, the math really does work out pretty close to right the first time most of the time.

So ive been seeing a lot of chatter about the IC-905 on various groups and someone at our club meeting last week was going on about it for like 20 minutes straight. I'll be honest I zoned out a bit but from what I gathered its doing some pretty wild stuff on the microwave bands which is not something I ever thought id be interested in but here we are. Also unrelated but kind of related — anyone been noticing 10 meters lately? We had a solid opening here in the midwest last thursday afternoon, worked a bunch of south american stations without even trying, was just sitting there with the radio on in the background and suddenly the band was just alive. Reminded me of why I got into this hobby in the first place honestly. Anyway back to the original question, has anyone actually put hands on the 905 or is this still mostly a "wait for stock" situation everywhere. And is the price as bad as people are saying or is that just the usual sticker shock that goes away after a week