Michael Wu

I just passed my tech exam like two months ago so I can tell you from recent experience -- hamstudy.org was basically all I used. there's also a free app called Ham Radio Prep or something, i used that on my lunch breaks. honestly the hardest part for me was the electrical stuff, like ohms law and calculating things, but there's only a handful of those questions and you can kind of figure out the formulas if you understand the basics. the exam is 35 questions and you need a 26 to pass so you have some room. one thing i wish i knew going in is that you should just keep doing practice tests until you're consistently hitting like 80-85%, not just barely passing the practice ones. good luck it's really not as scary as it looks at first

So i just got my general a few months back and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mostly HF on 40 and 20m. Someone in my local club mentioned i should be uploading to LoTW but then another guy said eQSL is better for certain awards and now im just confused about what the difference even is between all of these and whether i actually need to bother with paper cards at all.
Like i understand the basic concept, you log the contact and the other person logs it and if they match up you get a confirmation. But i dont really get why there are so many different systems. Do most people use all of them? And is there any reason to still bother mailing physical cards through the bureau or direct? Seems like a lot of effort when you could just click a button.
Also somebody mentioned ARRL and DXCC and i think LoTW is related to that somehow but im not sure how it all fits together. Sorry if this is a really basic question, just trying to figure out what i should actually be doing with my log.

ok so i finally got my technician license last month and ive been trying to get on the local 2m repeater but nobody ever seems to hear me. did some reading and apparently i need to program a CTCSS tone into my radio but im not totally sure i understand what that even does or how to figure out which tone to use for a specific repeater.
i have a baofeng uv-5r (i know i know, everyone has opinions about those) and ive been poking around in the menus but theres like two different tone settings, one says T-CTCSS and one says R-CTCSS and i dont know which one i actually need or if i need both. the repeater is listed on repeaterbook and it says the tone is 100.0 Hz but thats about all i know. any help would be great, been lurking here for a while and everyone seems really knowledgeable

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and still kind of confused about when youre supposed to use the NATO phonetic alphabet vs just saying the letter normally. like if someone asks me to confirm my callsign do i always spell it out phonetically or is that only when theres interference or whatever. i feel like sometimes i hear people just say the letters and other times they go through the whole alpha bravo charlie thing and i cant figure out the pattern. my elmer told me to just use phonetics always to be safe but then i heard a net where nobody was doing that and i felt dumb. is there like an actual rule or is it just situational

so ive been running a Diamond X300 for a few years now and honestly its been fine but i keep reading that stepping up to a longer collinear makes a noticeable difference on 2m especially for hitting repeaters that are kind of on the edge. the two that keep coming up are the Comet GP-6 and the Diamond X510 and i cant find anyone whos actually done a direct comparison, most of the threads i find are from like 2014 and half the links are dead.
my situation is im on a flat lot, single story house, antenna is on a chimney mount maybe 20 feet up total. nearest repeater thats giving me trouble is about 35 miles out with some terrain in the way, not a huge hill but enough to be annoying. i know a collinear isnt going to punch through a mountain but wondering if the extra gain is worth the upgrade or if im just chasing numbers at this point.
also the GP-6 is quite a bit longer — does that become a real wind loading issue or are people generally fine with it on a standard chimney mount? im in the midwest so we do get some weather.

I'm getting conflicting advice on SSB mic gain adjustment. My IC-7300 manual says to adjust for slight ALC indication, but several online sources suggest keeping ALC at zero. Currently running a Heil PR-40 with the gain at about 40% and seeing 2-3 bars of ALC on voice peaks.
Audio reports have been mixed - some say it sounds great, others mention it's a bit harsh. People commonly set mic gain too hot trying to squeeze every watt from their 100W rig due to fundamental misunderstanding of how SSB works.
What's the consensus on proper ALC indication for clean SSB? Should I back off the gain even with good audio reports?