Carlos Martinez

so ive been trying to learn CW for about three months now and i finally broke down and bought a decent dual lever paddle last week. been using one of those cheap single lever things that came with a kit and i think it was actually making things worse for me honestly. anyway the new paddle feels way nicer but im still having trouble with my timing, like my dits and dahs are coming out kind of mushy sometimes, especially when i try to speed up past maybe 13 wpm or so.
im using an old MFJ keyer that i borrowed from a buddy and i think the squeeze keyer mode is confusing my fingers more than helping right now. somebody at the club told me to just turn off iambic mode and treat it like a single lever for a while until my muscle memory catches up. is that actually good advice or am i gonna have to unlearn it later? i really want to get on the air but i dont want to build bad habits. any of you go through this when you were learning?

the ink smearing on the forms got me, we did the exact same thing at our drill two years ago. now we use cardstock and keep everything in zip lock bags in the go kits, cheap fix but it works. honestly your debrief sounds like it went better than some ive seen where people get defensive and nothing ever gets written down so the same mistakes happen again next time.

this is making me think I should actually join our local ARES group. ive got my general and some decent HF gear but I always assumed emcomm was kind of just... showing up with a radio. sounds like there's a lot more to it than that. the ICS stuff especially, I dont think I know any of that.

congrats on the first contact, that Pixie moment is something you dont forget. i remember mine, it was years ago and i was convinced the thing was broken because it seemed too simple to actually work.
for portable ops my biggest advice is antenna, antenna, antenna. at QRP levels a bad antenna will kill you but a good one and suddenly 5 watts feels like a lot more. i use an end fed half wave with a small 9:1 unun and a lightweight tuner, fits in a sandwich bag basically. for camping a 40m EFHW strung up between trees with a bit of height gets you surprisingly far especially in the evenings when 40 opens up.
also if you havent tried WSPR yet, throw your signal up on there before a camping trip to see whats actually getting out from your location. gives you a real picture of whats happening with just a few hundred milliwatts. its kind of addictive actually.

so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing FT8 but been trying to get into SSB more lately and i keep getting reports that my audio is kind of muddy or bassy sounding. running an IC-7300 into a dipole, nothing fancy. the mic is just the stock HM-219 that came with the radio. i watched a few youtube videos about the speech processor and compression settings but honestly came away more confused than before — some guys say max compression, some say none at all, some say a little. i set my ALC to be just barely moving and i thought that was the right thing to do but apparently my transmitted audio still sounds off to me when i record it on a SDR dongle across the room.
the recording sounds like im talking into a bucket. tried rolling off some bass on the radio's TX equalizer but i dont really know what im doing there. is this a mic technique thing or a settings thing or what? any starting point would be helpful because right now im just kind of poking around in the dark with menu settings

Had both at the same time for a few months and yeah the RSPdx wins pretty handily on HF, its not even close to be honest. The 8-bit ADC on the hackrf sounds fine in theory until you have a 50kw broadcast station two MHz away and suddenly your whole band is unusable. The RSPdx handles that a lot better, not perfectly but way better. The HDR mode below 2 MHz is actually useful too if you ever want to do NDB hunting or mediumwave DX.
That said the HackRF is more fun to tinker with and if you want to do any transmit experiments later or play with stuff like portapack firmware it has a whole ecosystem. For pure receive on HF though the SDRplay is the better tool. SDRuno is a bit clunky but SDRplay also works fine with SDR# and HDSDR. If you're doing WSPR you'll probably end up in WSJT-X piping audio from whatever receiver software anyway so the frontend matters more than the software honestly.

ran into the exact same thing a few years back trying to hit a 440 repeater about 18 miles out through some terrain. ended up just adding a cheap 7 element yagi on a second run of LMR400 and left the collinear in place. yeah it was another cable but once you do it its done and you stop thinking about it. the gain difference on 70cm from even a modest yagi pointed at a fixed path is pretty noticeable, especially if theres any hills or buildings in the way. i wouldnt pull the collinear down though, just run both if you can stomach the extra feedline.
the one thing id say is make sure youre not losing all your gain back in crappy coax. if youre running RG8X up to the roof on 70cm youre already giving up a chunk before the signal even gets to the antenna.

I had the exact same problem with my MK2R+ setup last year. The SO2R controller started randomly switching split headphones back to combined, then would not switch back until the transmitting radio stopped. Very frustrating when about to copy a serial number. In my case it turned out to be RFI from the AL-1500 getting into the control lines. Adding ferrite cores on all the audio cables between the controller and radios solved it completely.

Oh man I just got my tech license like two months ago and didnt realize I could actually use 10m for voice. Just looked it up and yeah we get a slice of it. Gonna have to try this, I only have a little handheld right now but my elmer said he'd help me put up a simple dipole in the backyard. This is actually really exciting to hear about, gives me motivation to actually build something instead of just hitting the local repeater all the time.

Had the exact same problem with my first HT! The tone is definitely your issue - if you're not hitting a repeater when you think you should be, first check to see that you're transmitting the correct CTCSS tone. Don't feel dumb, we've all been there.