Dave Patterson

same boat as you about 6 months ago haha. what helped me was just picking one thing at a time — get LoTW solid first since thats what actually moves the needle for awards, then mess with eQSL later if you feel like it. i honestly mostly use eQSL just to see the card artwork people make which sounds dumb but some of them are really cool.
one thing nobody told me — make sure your QRZ page has your eQSL address listed if you sign up, otherwise people cant look you up to send confirmations. took me forever to figure out why my inbox was empty lol

yeah what he said about the buffer setup, thats pretty standard for serious field ops. one thing i'd add — watch the honda's runtime at that load. the EU2200i at like quarter load is gonna sip fuel but if you're also running a charger pushing 20+ amps into a partially depleted battery it'll be working harder than you think for the first couple hours. bring more gas than you think you need, always.
the pushup mast in a gravel lot situation, ive been there. get yourself some sandbags or water jugs for the base, wind comes up and a 31 footer with wire attached becomes a problem real fast. learned that one the hard way at a SET a few years back, mast went over and took out someones coffee setup. no one was hurt but it was embarassing lol

so we have this county-level ARES exercise coming up next saturday and ive been going back and forth on whether to bring the honda eu2200i or just run off the 100ah lifepo4 and a couple panels. the exercise is supposed to run about 8 hours and were going to have at minimum a ft-991a running plus a laptop for winlink and maybe a second rig if we get the traffic volume we're expecting.
my math says the 991a at moderate duty cycle maybe 20-25% transmit is probably pulling average 8-10 amps at 13.8v so call it like 110-140 watts average. laptop another 45w or so. that's roughly 155-185 watts continuous-ish over 8 hours which is pushing what i want to pull from a single 100ah battery even with the lifepo4 being more usable than AGM. i have a 200w panel but its a field exercise and i cant guarantee i get a good solar angle all day depending on where they set up our position.
the generator just feels like overkill and its noisy and i hate dealing with fuel at a community center parking lot type of environment. but i also dont want to be the guy whose station goes dark at hour six because he was too proud to bring the genny. anyone run similar setups in the field, curious what your actual experience is with runtime on battery-only for a full day exercise like this

ok so i passed my technician exam like three weeks ago and got my callsign and ive been reading through part 97 trying to figure out what im actually allowed to do. some of it makes sense but some of it is really confusing especially the frequency privileges part. like i know i get HF on 10 meters but is that the whole band or just certain parts of it? and what about phone vs cw, im seeing different things in different places online and some of it seems contradictory or maybe just outdated i cant tell.
also someone at my local club told me techs can do some stuff on 15 meters too but i looked it up and couldnt find anything about that, maybe he was thinking of something else? just want to make sure im operating legally before i actually key up anywhere, dont want to get in trouble right out of the gate.

dont stress too much about the band edge thing in normal operation. i mean unless youre running like a kilowatt into a mismatched antenna or something your splatter isnt going to be some huge problem. the main thing is just knowing 7.175 is your lower limit and stay above it. i got confused by the same thing when i upgraded, kept second guessing myself before calling CQ. just get on and operate, youll figure it out pretty quick just by listening to where everyone else is hanging out