Sarah Taylor

I use AMSAT's laminated frequency chart as a handy reference that demonstrates the relationship between uplink and downlink frequencies. For AO-73, I typically start around 435.160 MHz on the uplink which puts me at about 145.940 MHz on the downlink.

classic alternator whine, yeah. the rpm-following behavior is the giveaway. few things to try — first check that your radio chassis is actually grounded to the vehicle body and not just floating. sometimes the RAM mount isolates things a bit. short heavy gauge wire from the radio body to a good chassis ground point nearby can make a big difference.
also those ferrite cores / chokes can help a lot on the power leads if grounding doesnt fix it. snap-on type, put one close to the radio end. i had a similar situation in my old Tacoma and it turned out the ground strap between the engine block and chassis was corroded. tightened that up and most of the noise went away on its own. the routing close to the engine harness probably isnt helping either but i'd start with grounding before you start moving wires around.

yeah what he said about LoTW is right. one thing that tripped me up early on was making sure the time in your log is UTC and matches exactly, like even being off by a minute can cause a non-match. took me a while to figure out why some of my contacts weren't confirming.
also if you work a lot of DX stations some of them use QSL managers, meaning you dont send the card to the actual callsign you worked, you send it to a third person who handles all their cards. you can look up who manages a callsign on qrz.com usually it says right on their page. kind of a weird system but it works

mine did something similar, turned out to be a cold solder joint on the driver board. not the finals themselves. ran it for about 20 minutes on CW into a dummy load and then did a heat gun pass about 6 inches away over the driver area and it started acting up immediately, helped me nail down the location. tiny crack in a joint near Q1017 if i remember right, its been a while.

so i've been a tech for about a year and just upgraded to general last month, and i keep hearing people talk about cw and how great it is for weak signal stuff and dx and whatever. i got curious and started looking into it but honestly i dont even know where to begin. like do you just memorize the dots and dashes on paper? i tried that and it feels completely wrong, like im just memorizing a chart and not actually learning to hear it. is there some specific way people do this that actually works or is it just grind until it clicks? i feel like im missing something obvious