Sarah Rodriguez

yeah field day is kind of its own weird thing, its technically a contest but the club social aspect makes it feel different. real contesting is more you sitting at the radio for hours which sounds boring but gets strangely addicting fast lol. my first contest i did like maybe 80 contacts and felt like i'd run a marathon, good luck

yeah the 10m opening was legit, i managed to catch about 45 minutes of it before it started fading on my end. worked a couple spanish stations and one guy in the UK which honestly made my whole week. 10m is just fun when its open, something about that band that feels different from 20. the audio just sounds clearer somehow i dont know how to explain it.
on the icom thing, ive heard the same rumors. someone in the DX cluster chat was saying hamvention is probably where theyll make it official if its real. i really hope its not just a cosmetic refresh of the 7300 because that radio is already great, id want to see something actually new, maybe better roofing filters or a real improvement to the panadapter. guess well find out. hamvention is what, like 6 weeks away now?

yeah what he said about Field Day. i was super nervous my first time actually sitting in the chair and within like 20 minutes it just clicks. the club environment means theres no pressure and honestly the other ops WANT you to make contacts because every QSO counts for the score.
one thing i'd add — dont sleep on the smaller sprints either, like the QRP Fox hunts or the state QSO parties. they're lower key than CQ WW and you can actually hear whats going on instead of wall to wall signals. your end fed at 25 feet is totally workable, ive made plenty of contacts with less

AO-91 has been pretty reliable lately so probably not a dead bird situation. one thing that gets people a lot starting out is the doppler correction — if youre manually tuning you really need to be chasing that downlink frequency throughout the pass, it moves more than you'd expect especially when the satellite is coming up over the horizon. gpredict can drive your radio directly if you set up the hamlib interface, makes it way easier.
also double check your antenna polarization. circularly polarized antennas are technically better for sats but two crossed yagis work fine if you have them. if both are vertically polarized you might be getting signal nulls depending on the orientation. the 72 degree pass should definitely be workable though, that's about as good as it gets for a LEO. what preamp are you using and where exactly in the feedline chain is it sitting?