Michelle Garcia

so ive been trying to learn CW for about 3 months now and i finally got a decent paddle — picked up a used Bencher BY-1 off ebay and honestly the paddle itself feels great, way better than the cheap single lever thing i started with. but here's the thing, my sending still sounds like garbage and i cant figure out if its my keyer settings or just my technique being bad.
im running it through my IC-7300's built in keyer and i've been practicing around 15 wpm which is probably too fast for where i am honestly. the dits and dahs just blur together sometimes especially when im trying to do letters like C or Y where you have to go back and forth a lot. i watched a bunch of videos and everyone says iambic mode B is better but i honestly cant tell the difference when im actually sending.
does anyone have tips on what keyer settings to actually mess with first, like the weight adjustment or the sidetone or whatever? or is this just one of those things where you have to put in reps and it gets better on its own

the logging thing you mentioned -- that got me. i tried to do a solo deployment at a small community event last year just to get practice and i was absolutely drowning trying to track ICS213 traffic AND maintain a station log AND monitor two different frequencies. never again without a second person at minimum. some people use a tablet app for logging now which speeds things up but you still need eyes and hands free to actually operate.
also dont underestimate how weird it feels to do formal traffic handling under pressure when there's real officials watching. completely different vibe from just doing it with your club on a wednesday night net.

Honestly the plateau you're hitting around 10-12 wpm is super common, almost everybody goes through it. The brain is basically rewiring itself to stop counting dits and dahs and start recognizing whole characters as sounds, and that transition takes time and can feel like you're going backwards sometimes.
One thing that really helped me was the Farnsworth method — sending characters at the target speed you want (like 20wpm character speed) but with longer gaps between them so your overall word rate stays manageable. The idea is your brain learns to hear the characters at full speed from the start instead of getting used to slow drawn-out tones that you then have to unlearn later. G4FON does this too if you havent already played with those settings. Also I'd say copying real QSOs off the air, even just as listening practice before you can really decode everything, gets you used to the rhythm of actual operators which is different from generated practice text. took me probably 8 months to get comfortable around 17-18wpm but i was only practicing maybe 15 min a day so your mileage may vary

dont know what it is but ive been getting on 40m almost every evening this week just to ragchew and honestly its been great. nothing special, just talking to whoever is around, worked a guy in kentucky last night for like 45 minutes about his garden of all things. sometimes i forget why i got into this hobby and then a week like this reminds me. anyone else been having a good run lately or is it just me

so ive been trying to check in to what i think was a regional morning net on 80 meters, i heard about it from a guy at our club meeting a few months back but i never wrote down the frequency or the time and now i cant find anything about it online. i think it was around 3.920 or somewhere close to that, weekday mornings maybe 7am local? not sure if thats right though.
anyway i finally got my HF rig set up properly and the antenna is actually working now (long story involving a balun and my neighbor's tree) so i want to start actually getting on the air and doing something. nets seem like a good way to get comfortable on HF without just sitting there calling CQ and hearing nothing. is there a good place to look up net schedules? the ARRL net directory feels kind of outdated when i tried looking through it last week.

ha that feeling of the first qso never really goes away, i remember mine was on a handheld at like 5 watts and i was standing in my backyard in january freezing because i thought i needed to be outside for some reason. congrats on the 94 too thats a solid score. the repeater guys are usually pretty welcoming to new folks, stick around and youll probably end up as one of the regulars before you know it

ha i remeber my first qso i was shaking a little bit hitting the ptt. congrats on passing the exam, i just got mine about 2 months ago so i know exactly what that feels like. the baofeng will do fine to get started dont let anyone tell you otherwise, i ran mine for like 6 weeks before i upgraded. enjoy it

12 contacts counts same as 100 contacts lol. i did one last spring where i set up in a parking lot instead of the actual park boundary by accident and had to pack everything up and move. check the unit boundaries before you go, some of those parks the actual qualifying land is weirdly specific on the map.

congrats on the General, welcome to the club. so the vanity process — there used to be a waiting period after getting your initial license but the FCC got rid of that a while back, so you can apply pretty much right away now. the application goes through the ULS just like anything else, theres a form 605 involved.
as for call formats, yeah the license class matters quite a bit. 1x2 and 2x1 calls are reserved for Extras only, so if you want something like W4AB or AB4W youll need to upgrade first. 1x3 calls like W4ABC can be held by any class i believe, and 2x3 is just the default sequential stuff most people get. the vanity system basically lets you pick from whatever is available in your call district, or sometimes other districts depending on circumstances — like if you have a club affiliated there or if a close relative held the call. club calls and memorial calls have their own whole thing too which gets complicated fast.
honestly the AE7Q website is the best tool for figuring out whats available and tracking applications, way better than trying to dig through the FCC site directly. worth bookmarking.

i was in basically the same spot about a year ago and ended up just buying the Baofeng to start with because honestly i wasnt sure how much id use it. its fine, i use it, no regrets. but i will say the menu system is genuinely terrible and i did need CHIRP to make it usable. recently picked up a used Kenwood TH-D74 for a crazy good price and the difference in feel and audio is pretty noticeable. so maybe there's something to the whole you-get-what-you-pay-for thing after all.

honestly i had almost the same setup question last year and just ended up putting both up and doing comparisons on the same qso's. what i found was the dipole killed it on anything inside about 400 miles and the vertical was noticeably better once you got past 1000 or so. for the in between range it was kind of a coin flip depending on conditions. if regional is your thing id just work on getting more height on the dipole before spending money on a vertical and a bunch of copper wire for radials

so ive been a tech for about two years now and mostly just been doing local repeater stuff and some APRS. i keep hearing people talk about HF and honestly it sounds really cool but i dont really know where to start with the whole upgrading thing. like how different is the General exam from the Tech exam? i remember the Tech exam being not that bad but people keep saying General has a lot more electrical theory and i was never great at math in school so thats kind of what's been holding me back from even trying.
also i guess my other question is even if i pass, what do i actually need to get on HF? i dont have any HF radio obviously. is it super expensive to get started or are there cheaper ways to get your feet wet first. sorry if this is a vague question i just dont even know what i dont know at this point

honestly cant go wrong with either one but if i had to pick id go with the 7300. the panadapter is really nice and icom generally has better resale value. the 991 isnt bad but that tiny screen for hf work gets old pretty quick. plus if you want vhf/uhf later you can always get a dedicated mobile rig that'll probably work better anyway