Sarah Brown

the Mobilinkd with APRSdroid combo is actually pretty solid, i ran that same setup for a while before i got a dedicated tracker. one thing to double check is your audio levels going into the TNC, if the input is clipping your packets will decode like garbage at the other end even though they look fine on your screen. aprs.fi showing your position doesn't mean the packet was clean, just that it was decodable enough.
also unrelated but if you ever want to step up from APRSdroid, Xastir on a laptop or even a raspberry pi running direwolf as a software TNC is a whole other level for seeing whats happening on the channel. you can see every packet, decode rates, all that stuff. kind of overkill for just tracking but its fun to poke around with

yeah the last-heard timestamps are kind of sketchy sometimes, i noticed that too. i think it updates based on when the gateway checks in with the CMS servers and not necessarily based on actual RF activity so a gateway can look current but have its radio offline or something. the Winlink sysop mailing list occasionally has posts about gateways going down, thats one way to know but its not exactly real time either.
one thing that helped me was just building a short list of like 3 or 4 gateways that i know work reliably from my QTH and just cycling through those manually instead of letting the auto-connect logic pick randomly. takes a bit of trial and error upfront but once you know which ones actually respond to you consistently its way less frustrating.

i was in basically your exact situation about 8 months ago and ended up going with the baofeng just to save money and honestly i kind of wish i hadnt. its not that it doesnt work, it does, but i had a lot of trouble getting it programmed right and a few times people on the repeater said my audio sounded kind of muddy. upgraded to a yaesu ft-65r a few months later and the difference was noticeable right away. both to me and apparently to the people i was talking to.
so yeah if you can swing the extra 30-40 bucks over the baofeng price i think its worth it. also check if your local club does any kind of loaner equipment or if theres a hamfest coming up near you, sometimes you can snag a decent used HT for way less than retail and that would let you spend more on other stuff

I was in the exact same spot about a year ago and ended up going with a Yaesu FT-65 which nobody really talks about but its basically a stripped down simpler version of the FT-60 and I really liked it to start. Easier menus, sounds good, built solid. Eventually got a Kenwood TH-D74 which is a whole other thing but that was way later after I knew what I was doing haha.

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and i keep hearing people talk about chasing DX and getting credits toward different awards but honestly the whole thing is kind of overwhelming. like i understand the basic idea — you work stations in different countries or states or zones or whatever and you submit logs and eventually get a certificate. but theres so many different ones and i dont really know where to start or what makes the most sense for someone at my level.
right now i have a decent HF setup, a Yaesu FT-891 running into a G5RV up about 30 feet, nothing fancy. ive been making contacts pretty regularly on 20 and 40m and im logging everything in WSJT-X plus some SSB. some of my contacts are definitely outside the US. i just havent been doing anything intentional about chasing specific entities or zones.
so my question is basically — should i just pick one award and focus on it, or does working toward one naturally help with the others? and is DXCC even realistic for someone who isnt running big power and a beam? i see guys on here talking about 300 confirmed entities and i feel like thats a different universe from where i am lol

theres a project called "rotctld" that might be worth looking at for the software side, its part of the hamlib package and a lot of logging programs can talk to it natively including N1MM and Log4OM. if your arduino presents itself as a serial device and speaks the right protocol you can get computer control working without writing custom integration code for every program. just something to keep in mind before you go too deep designing a proprietary serial interface

I started with a UV-5R three years ago and still use it regularly. Those 128 channels held all my local repeaters, NOAA weather, and even some aviation frequencies I like to monitor. Once you get comfortable and want to explore more bands or travel frequently, then consider upgrading to something with more memory.

the chasers really are patient i was surprised too when i did my first pota activation at a state park near me. i was fumbling around with my logging app and a guy just waited on frequency for me to get sorted, didnt even say anything just came back when i was ready. made me feel alot better about the whole thing. what logging app were you using for sota, im still trying to figure out if i should use goat log or just paper

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been chasing DXCC this year and the LoTW thing took me a little while to wrap my head around but once you get your station certificate set up its pretty painless. the tricky part is some of those older contacts you have to make sure the dates line up with when the entity was valid, like if a country changed status or whatever. probably not an issue for stuff from 2018 but just something to be aware of.
WAS i started at the same time and honestly its not that complicated to run both since youre just watching two different columns in your tracking software. i use TQSL for LoTW uploads and just keep a spreadsheet on the side. probably overkill but it keeps me sane

yeah its all multiple choice and 35 questions, you need 26 right to pass. most VE sessions ive seen will give you scratch paper if you ask, sometimes they just have it out on the table already. you can definitely skip around and come back, at least every session ive been to worked that way, just let the VEs know if youre unsure about the process when you sit down.
honestly the regulations stuff that trips people up is usually the band privileges and the part 97 rules around things like third party traffic and stuff. if you're using hamstudy and youre consistently hitting above 80% on the practice exams you're probably fine. the real test feels a lot like the practice ones. just read every question all the way through before picking, thats where most people mess up, they see a familiar phrase and jump at the first answer that sounds right without reading all the choices.