John Peterson

i had the exact same thing happen when i got my first decent paddle. took me a while to realize i was gripping it way too tight, like a death grip. once i consciously relaxed my hand it got a lot better. also are you resting your wrist on the desk or floating? that changed everything for me personally, i float now and have way more control.

the fence thing would bug me personally. ive had chain link just completely mess up a low dipole before, like changed the pattern in ways i never fully figured out. moved the antenna and everything improved. might be worth ruling that out before you spend a lot of time trimming.

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out the 40m band. ive looked at the arrl band plan and also the fcc part 97 stuff but im getting confused because they dont always match up and i dont really know which one i'm supposed to follow.
like the band goes from 7.0 to 7.3 MHz but i keep hearing people say dont get too close to the edges. my radio can tune down to 7.000 but should i actually transmit there? and whats the deal with the CW only portion at the bottom, i thought i saw it was up to 7.025 or something but then someone on the air told me its 7.125 which seems way off.
also is there a difference between what the band plan says and what the actual rules are? like if i transmit on a frequency that the band plan says is for CW but i use SSB am i breaking the law or just being rude basically

the antenna isolation thing will bite you if you dont plan it out. i tried a ghetto SO2R setup a while back without filters and yeah, totally stomped my own S-meter on the second rig every time i keyed up. not fun. bandpass filters arent optional if both radios are anywhere near each other frequency wise.
one thing nobody really talks about enough is the logging software side of it — N1MM+ handles SO2R pretty well with the right configuration but you gotta set it up properly or it'll just log everything to the wrong radio and your dupe checking gets all confused. spent like two hours before a contest once figuring out why my second radio entries weren't showing up right. also if you're doing phone contesting and not CW the SO2R thing is even harder imo because you can't just let a macro handle your run transmission while you tune around, you actually have to talk and that kind of splits your attention in a messy way.

the generator question is pretty much always gonna come down to runtime vs noise floor and logistics. i've run the EU2200i at a couple EOC activations and it's solid but man the fuel logistics for a 14+ hour op get annoying if you dont pre-position gas cans. that said i'd still take it over babysitting a battery bank any day during an actual exercise where i'm already thinking about a hundred other things.
for what its worth we did a hybrid setup last fall — ran the Honda most of the time but had a 100Ah Dakota Lithium as a buffer so if the genny needed to shut down for refueling or whatever the stations stayed up. worked really well actually. the battery also cleaned up some of the noise that was getting into the 7300 when we were running close to the generator.
on the antenna side if you're doing NVIS on 60m seriously just throw up the EFHW at low height and call it done. the Buddipole is great gear but it takes longer to tweak and on a 60m setup you're already fighting the band plan restrictions, last thing you want is to be fussing with element lengths when the net control is waiting on you.

this is super helpful to read, i'm pretty new (just got my general last year) and i keep seeing people talk about solar flux and K index and i sort of nod along but i dont fully get how it connects to what i actually hear on the radio. like i checked the numbers one day when 15m sounded dead and the SFI was only like 110 and then i checked again a few weeks later when things sounded amazing and it was way higher, so i think i get the basic idea but the geomagnetic stuff still confuses me. is the K index like a bad thing when its high? i think i read that somewhere but then someone else in a different thread seemed to be saying something different and i got confused

Check your MYCALL setting in the TNC config — sounds obvious but if there's a mismatch between what the radio is beaconing and what's actually set as the station identifier for message routing, messages just go nowhere. Also make sure message acknowledge is enabled, theres a setting burried in the APRS menu on the D710 specifically for that. I think its under APRS MSG or something like that, been a while since i had mine out.
Also worth checking if your squelch is too tight and youre just missing the incoming packets. Messages need to actually be received on frequency to display, the radio doesnt pull them from aprs.fi or anything like that, it only sees what comes over RF. If your local digi is transmitting the messages back and your squelch is clipping the audio you'd see yourself fine on the internet but never receive anything locally.