Sarah Wilson93

so i've been doing contests for probably 8 or 9 years now and always heard the big guns talk about SO2R like it was some magic thing that doubled your rate. tried setting it up a few times and it always felt like i was fighting the radios more than working stations. QRM from my own second radio bleeding into the first one, timing felt off, all that stuff.
anyway this past CQWW phone i finally just sat down and thought about it differently. stopped trying to run on both radios at once and just used radio 2 purely for S&P during the gaps when radio 1 was waiting for a pileup to settle or whatever. rate went up noticeably, probably 20-30% more Qs in the same time. not doing anything fancy, no SO2R automation software, just manual switching with a footswitch.
curious if anyone else went through this kind of learning curve or if theres a smarter way to use the second radio that im still not seeing. feels like im still leaving contacts on the table somehow

this is making me want to push our club to do something similar, we basically just talk about emcomm at meetings but ive never actually done a real drill. how did you coordinate getting everyone to show up and commit to a whole saturday? that seems like the hard part with volunteers

Clay soil definitely changes things - much better RF ground than sandy stuff. Your antenna is probably seeing a different ground reflection pattern which messes with the radiation resistance. I'd start by checking the SWR across the whole band, bet you'll find the resonant point shifted down in frequency. Might need to trim a few inches off each end or add some capacitive loading if you cant make it physically longer.

meteor scatter decoding with an RTL dongle and SDR# actually works surprisingly well if you havent tried yet, just throwing that out there. got my first MS decode last summer off a sporadic-E opening using nothing fancier than a V3 dongle and a yagi I had laying around pointed roughly northeast
anyway yeah the RSP1A is the move for receive, HackRF if you wanna do weird stuff. thats basically the whole answer lol

yeah and there's a ton more that you'll run into. QTH is your location, QSL means confirming a contact which is also why those confirmation cards are called QSL cards. one that confused me for the longest time was QRP which just means low power operation, like 5 watts or less. people who run QRP rigs are super into the challenge of making contacts with minimal power. oh and QRZ is when someone is asking whos calling, so if you hear someone say QRZ? theyre asking who just called them. its a lot to take in at first but honestly most of the common ones you'll just memorize from hearing them over and over

Working on a discussion with my local club about repair strategies for current-generation rigs. Component-level repair replaces defective parts rather than entire boards, with individual components costing only about 3% of board replacement cost. However, with increasing SMD density and specialized test equipment requirements, when does it make economic sense to attempt component-level work versus seeking factory service?
What factors do you consider when deciding repair approach for modern solid-state transceivers?

oh man this sounds exactly like what happened to me when i came back to cw a few years ago. the muscle memory is still kinda there but its like it gets scrambled when theres actual pressure to perform. what helped me was just slowing WAY down, like embarrassingly slow, 8 or 10 wpm even if you used to run 20+. your hands need to relearn the rhythm without the brain panicking.
on the paddle itself, the gap adjustment on a Bencher is pretty forgiving, you want just barely a business card thickness between the contacts, some guys go tighter but i find that leads to exactly what you're describing, squeezing too hard and double-clicking dits all over the place. also check the icom keyer speed and make sure the weight setting isnt cranked up weird, sometimes those get bumped. the 7300 keyer is decent honestly, probably not the paddle or the radio its just rust, give it a few weeks of daily practice even if just 10 minutes