Emily Moore

HamAlert is the one you want for phone notifications, second that. i was in the same situation as you like a year ago and once i set up HamAlert with filters for the entities i still needed it got way easier to actually catch stuff instead of just watching spots scroll by.
also dont forget that a lot of spots in the cluster are just wrong, wrong frequency, wrong callsign, busted spot whatever. so always trust your ears over the spot if something seems off.

That's the moment you stop worrying about gear limitations and remember that propagation doesn't read spec sheets. Your first activation will work fine even with a compromised setup. Just get on the air!

yeah the height thing is almost certainly your problem, or at least a big part of it. when you drop that far end down to 15ft you're putting part of the antenna really close to ground and that's going to shift the resonant frequency down and change the feedpoint impedance noticeably. a dipole close to ground doesn't really see the same 72 ohm impedance it would higher up, ground losses and capacitive coupling to the earth start pulling things around.
the sloper angle itself can also matter more than people expect. if it's a true sloper (one end high, other end lower in a straight run) those can have some interesting radiation pattern effects and the impedance at the feedpoint tends to run lower than a flat dipole, sometimes down in the 30-50 ohm range depending on the angle and height. worth trimming a bit and seeing where it lands. if you can borrow that analyzer again even for an afternoon it would tell you a lot more than the rig's meter will, those built-in SWR meters arent super accurate below like 2:1 anyway.

yeah the question pool thing is actually not as bad as it sounds once you get into it. the current tech pool has like 400 something questions and the actual exam only pulls 35 of them so if you grind through the pool enough times you start recognizing stuff pretty quick. i used hamstudy.org and honestly that site is really good, it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and focuses on those. took me maybe 2 weeks of like 20-30 minutes a day before i felt ready and i passed first try.
the understanding vs memorizing thing -- i get what you mean but honestly for tech a lot of it is just rules and regs stuff that you kind of have to memorize anyway, and the technical parts arent that deep. if you want to actually understand the why behind things the ARRL handbook is great but its definitely overkill just to pass the exam. gordon west has a study guide thats pretty popular and it explains things in plain english if you want something more structured than just flashcards

i went down basically the exact same path a couple years ago trying to automate antenna switching for my 6m setup. ended up ditching the pi for that specific task and just using a standalone arduino mega with a ethernet shield so i could throw a simple web interface on it and control everything from any browser in the shack. way less moving parts than dealing with linux and rigctld and all that. pi is great but for something that just needs to flip relays reliably it feels like overkill sometimes
that said if you want to keep the pi in the loop the nano as a coprocessor idea isnt bad, lots of commercial stuff basically does the same thing with a microcontroller handling the timing-critical stuff and a bigger processor handling the logic. just gotta get the serial comm solid

I checked into my first net about two months ago and felt exactly the same way haha. I just listened for like a month before actually doing it. When I finally did check in I just said my callsign phonetically and my first name and that was totally fine. The net control repeated my call back to confirm which was reassuring.
one thing nobody told me before my first time — if net control doesn't acknowledge you right away dont just keep transmitting, wait and try again when they ask for any additional check-ins or late check-ins. a lot of nets will ask again at the end

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i think i might be going down a rabbit hole that doesnt need to be this deep. basically i have 4 antennas — a 40m dipole, a vertical for 20/15/10, a 6m yagi, and a random wire i use for 80m and sometimes 160. right now i just have a manual coax switch and i get up and physically turn it every time i want to change bands which honestly isnt the end of the world but its getting annoying.
so i started looking at using an arduino mega to drive some relay modules and read band data from my radio (i have an IC-7300 so it puts out CI-V). the idea is it would just automatically switch to whatever antenna makes sense for the band im on. ive got the CI-V parsing mostly working, it reads the frequency fine. the relay board i got off amazon is one of those 8 channel 5v ones and it seems to trigger fine from the arduino outputs.
my question is whether its worth putting a raspberry pi in there too so i can have like a web interface to see whats going on and manually override from my phone. or is that just way too much complexity for something that should be simple. ive built a few arduino projects before so im comfortable there but ive never really done much with pi. anyone done something like this, curious how far down the path you went before you said enough.

so i finally did my first WWFF activation last weekend at a state forest near me, KFF-1234 or whatever the reference number is. had been meaning to do it for months and just never got around to it. anyway i threw the end-fed in a tree, ran 25 watts on the KX3 and just started calling CQ WWFF on 40m. honestly didnt expect much but i ended up with like 47 QSOs in about 2.5 hours which felt pretty good for a first attempt
couple things im not sure about though. first, the minimum is 44 QSOs to count as an activation right? i kept seeing different numbers mentioned on different sites and got confused. also do all those contacts need to be with different callsigns or can you work the same person on multiple bands and count them separately
also noticed there were a few people calling me that had WWFF in their exchange which i think means they were activating another reference at the same time? i logged them but wasnt sure how that works exactly. feels like theres a lot of little rules i dont fully understand yet but the actual operating part was really fun, way more enjoyable than i expected sitting in the woods with a thermos of coffee