Ashley Wilson27

i have the M2 LEO pack and honestly for satellite work its perfectly fine. yeah if you put it on a vna and compare it to a dedicated antenna on each band you'll see the dual band isnt quite as clean but in actual use i havent noticed it being a problem. AO-91 and AO-92 work fine, linear sats are a bit more challenging but thats more about the antenna pointing than the yagi itself.
the bigger thing for me was just having one antenna to deal with during a pass. trying to swap antennas mid-pass while also running the radio and tracking the satellite manually is a headache. one dual band beam connected to a duplexer and youre just focusing on operating. for casual sota satellite work id say go dual band and dont overthink it.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at this about 6 months now. one thing that helped me a ton was just tuning around 40 meters in the evenings around 7.050 or so and just listening even when i cant copy everything. your brain starts to pick out patterns after a while its kind of wild. also the LCWO website is way better than most apps for building real speed imo, you can set it to random 5 letter groups and it forces you to not overthink each letter.
i ended up getting a cheap set of paddles from amazon and just using the keyer built into my radio for now. works fine for learning, ill upgrade eventually maybe

yeah Japan only counts once for the basic DXCC — its one entity regardless of how many bands or modes you work them on. the 100 entities is just 100 different countries/entities confirmed, doesnt matter how many times you've worked each one. where bands start to matter is for the band-specific endorsements, like 5BDXCC where you need 100 entities confirmed on each of five bands separately. that gets expensive in terms of time and postage if youre still doing paper QSLs lol.
as for doing DXCC, WAS and WAZ at the same time — honestly most people just kind of naturally work toward all of them simultaneously without really thinking about it too hard. if youre on 20m calling CQ or working pileups youre gonna rack up states, zones and entities all at once. WAS is probably the easiest of the three to finish if youre in the lower 48, most guys knock that out without even trying that hard. WAZ takes more deliberate effort especially for some of the rarer zones. id say just work everything you can hear and sort it out later, LoTW makes tracking pretty painless these days compared to the old card binder days.

so ive been at this for about 4 months now and im stuck somewhere around 10-12 wpm depending on the day and how much coffee ive had lol. started with the Koch method using LCWO and it was great at first, like the progress was really noticeable week to week, but now it feels like im just spinning my wheels. i can copy most letters fine when theyre sent slowly but the moment someone bumps it up even a little i start falling behind and then i panic and lose the whole thing.
my main practice routine right now is just doing the LCWO word trainer for maybe 20-30 minutes a day, sometimes i hop on 40m and try to copy whatever i can hear but honestly most of what i find is either too fast or in a pile-up which is not exactly beginner friendly. i know people say just do it every day and youll get there but i guess i was hoping someone could tell me if there was a specific thing that helped them break through that plateau. did you change methods, practice longer, find a specific resource? also curious how long it actually took people to get to 20wpm because i see some guys saying a few months and others saying years and that range is a little discouraging

hey dont sweat it, everyone fumbles their first few net check-ins, seriously. the traffic thing just means do you have any messages to pass through the net — like formal radiogram traffic in the NTS system. most of the time for a casual 2m net you just say no traffic and you're fine. some nets are more formal than others so it really depends on which one you're on.
typically when net control says "QNI" or just asks for check-ins you key up, give your callsign phonetically, your name, location, and whether you have traffic or any announcements. something like "W4XYZ, John, in Springfield, no traffic" and that's honestly it for most nets. the more you do it the faster it becomes second nature. i remember my first HF net i was shaking a little haha.
for the W1AW stuff, check the ARRL website, they post the operating schedule for portable operations and centennial stuff well in advance. you just tune to the listed frequency at the listed time and call them. its a pileup usually so be patient.

the ground plane thing is probably hurting you more than anything else. perf board on HF is rough, RF just does whatever it wants without a solid ground reference. ive built a few DC receivers and every time i went back and added even a partial ground plane by soldering braid or copper tape on the bottom things improved noticeably.
that said the SBL-1 has around 6-7dB conversion loss which adds up fast when your preamp gain isnt great. a 2N3904 at HF can be kind of mediocre depending on your bias point and matching. if you have a BF998 or even a J310 FET sitting around those tend to work a lot better as a front end on 40m. the NE602 swap might help but keep in mind it has its own noise figure and dynamic range issues — its not magic, just different tradeoffs. id fix the ground situation first before changing the topology

dont stress too much about CQ WW being your first real contest, i did it about two years into the hobby and just treated it like a big operating weekend. yeah its loud and fast and sometimes guys dont even say their callsign clearly but you pick it up. one thing that helped me was just searching and pouncing at first instead of trying to hold a frequency and call CQ — way less pressure and you can work at your own pace.
also FT8 experience wont totally translate but at least you already know that propagation is everything, so watching the bands in the days before and seeing whats opening up toward europe or japan will give you an idea of what to expect. 15m has been pretty good lately with the solar cycle doing its thing so hopefully that holds into october.

one thing nobody told me when i started was to also look at WAS and WAZ at the same time, like you might as well be chasing all three simultaneously since a lot of your contacts will count toward multiple awards. WAS is all 50 states confirmed, WAZ is the 40 CQ zones. i actually finished WAS before DXCC because working US stations is obviously a lot easier but it was still satisfying to get that certificate. just something to think about so your logging and confirming effort does double or triple duty

welcome to the hobby, congrats on the ticket. dont sweat the phonetics thing, honestly even guys who've been licensed for 20 years still stumble sometimes when they're nervous. the morning net guys are usually real good about new hams checking in, they love it actually. once you get comfortable on the repeater you might want to look at getting your general so you can get on HF, thats where things really open up. but take your time and enjoy where you are for now