James Moore18

same thing happened to me when i put up a hustler 6btv a few years back. everyone talks about low angle radiation but nobody mentions it also receives every switching power supply and led driver in a three block radius equally well lol. i eventually just left the vertical up as a second antenna and used it for 10 and 15 mostly where it does seem to do better for me. on 40 at night my dipole wins almost every time. your experience sounds totally normal to me.

yeah the battery thing gets everyone at least once. we had almost the exact same situation during a SET a few years back, guy swore his pack was good and then poof. our group ended up writing an informal checklist, nothing fancy, just stuff like charge date, load test result, that kind of thing, and members have to log it before any activation or drill. doesnt have to be official just needs to happen.
the net control succession problem is real and i dont think theres a clean fix other than just rotating the role more often during normal nets. like make your tuesday night 2m net a training ground, let different people run it, let them make small mistakes in a low stakes environment. by the time something real happens youve got five or six people who have actually done the job not just read about it.

I'd also check the PA bias voltages on the HF driver stages. The TS-590 has separate bias circuits for different band groups, and if one's drifting low, you'll see exactly this symptom pattern. Service manual has the test points clearly marked.

so ive been using N1MM for probably 8 years now and honestly its great for contests, no complaints there, but outside of contest operating its kind of a pain to use as a general logger. the interface is obviously built around contest workflows and when im just sitting there doing casual ragchews or working some DX it feels like overkill and half the fields dont make sense for what im doing.
someone at the club mentioned Log4OM and i downloaded it and poked around for like an hour but couldnt really figure out how the WSJT-X integration works with it. like does it just read the ADIF log that WSJT-X writes out or is there actual live UDP logging happening? i set up the UDP stuff with N1MM and WSJT-X a while back and that works pretty seamlessly but i dont know if Log4OM handles it the same way.
also curious if anyone uses Log4OM for contests at all or if thats just not really what its for. i dont want to maintain two separate logging setups if i can help it but i also dont want to give up how well N1MM works during like a CQ WW weekend.

yeah almost certainly a CTCSS tone issue. most repeaters require you to transmit a specific subaudible tone along with your audio otherwise the repeater controller just ignores you completely, which is exactly what youre describing. the tone wont be in your audio, you wont hear it, but your radio needs to be programmed to send it. check repeaterbook again for that specific machine, theres usually a field that says "tone" or "CTCSS" and itll be something like 100.0 Hz or 127.3 Hz or similar. on the baofeng you need to set that under the menu somewhere, i think its called T-CTCS on those radios. once you dial that in youll hear the repeater tail when you unkey and then you know it worked. also just make sure your offset is set to negative for 146.940, sounds like you know that already but worth double checking. once you get the tone sorted, just call out your callsign and say youre a new ham testing and most regulars on a healthy repeater will come back to you pretty quick.

I just passed mine two months ago. The filter design stuff and the op-amp questions tripped me up at first but once it clicks its not that bad. The full privileges thing honestly mattered more to me than I thought it would — there are some nice quiet spots in the extra portions of 20m especially. Good luck if you go for it, the question pool is public so theres no excuse not to know whats coming at least roughly.

not a dumb question at all on the USB/LSB thing — it's just convention that stuck around from the early days and nobody really changed it. below 10mhz is LSB, above is USB, 10mhz itself kind of gets used both ways depending who you ask. there's no deep technical reason you couldn't use USB on 40m, it would just confuse everyone and nobody would be where you're listening.
on the audio thing, the stock HM-207 that comes with the 7300 is actually not terrible, the problem is usually mic gain set too high and the speech processor cranked up trying to compensate. classic combination that makes people sound harsh. i'd start by pulling the mic gain way back, like seriously lower than you think it should be, then bring the processor (the COMP setting) to maybe 5-8dB and see how the ALC is behaving. you want the ALC meter barely moving, not pegged. if it's slamming the ALC on voice peaks your audio is going to sound exactly like what that guy described.
honestly the monitor function on the 7300 is your best friend here. record yourself, adjust, record again. it takes a while but you'll hear the difference when you get it dialed in.

i went through exactly this about two years ago. ended up building a 9 element yagi first just to listen and honestly that taught me more than any reading did. you can hear the big stations no problem and it kind of calibrates your expectations. the frustrating thing is the moon isnt always in a useful position and you have to deal with the antenna tracking if you want to stay on it for more than a few minutes depending on your elevation and azimuth range. i built a simple Az/El rotor setup from scratch which was its own whole rabbit hole but whatever.
also dont underestimate how much the ground gain situation affects things. when the moon is low on the horizon you get some help from reflections, but it varies a lot by QTH. im in a valley and it genuinely hurts my low angle shots. anyway my point is just start with a single long yagi, get the preamp sorted, use JT65 and you will make contacts. not a ton at first but they'll come. its a patience thing more than a money thing imo

I'd also check the PA bias voltages on the HF driver stages. The TS-590 has separate bias circuits for different band groups, and if one's drifting low, you'll see exactly this symptom pattern. Service manual has the test points clearly marked.

no hard rule on repeaters honestly, its more of a courtesy thing. the idea is when conditions are rough or theres any chance the other person might mishear letters you break out phonetics. on a local repeater with full quieting signal you can usually just say your callsign plain and everyone hears it fine. where it really matters is hf when signals are marginal, contesting, or when youre working someone who might not speak english as a first language — nato phonetics are basically universal so November Uniform Lima Lima beats trying to figure out if someone said N-U or M-U.
the "sugar" for S thing is old school. a lot of older hams grew up using what they called "able baker" phonetics or just made up their own words before nato got standardized. youll still hear it occasionally especially from guys who been licensed since the 60s and 70s. nothing wrong with it really but if youre working dx or in a net environment the nato set is just cleaner because everyone knows what to expect