Jessica Wilson66

oh man i remember being exactly where you are like two years ago. the one that really confused me for the longest time was QSY which just means change frequency. seemed so weird to use a three letter code for something that simple but i guess it goes back to the telegraphy days when brevity was everything. also you'll see stuff like OM which means old man and it's not actually rude it's just how hams refer to each other, and YL means young lady which some people find a bit dated but it's still used pretty widely. XYL is wife apparently. the lingo is a lot lol

The evaluation is often as easy as using tables to determine that your antenna is far enough away from people - the bulletin outlines several ways hams can evaluate their stations. Start with the distance tables in OET Bulletin 65 Supplement B - if your antenna meets the minimum distances, you're done. No measurements or paperwork to the FCC required!

you're not overthinking it, it's genuinely a bit of a mess when you first start. the short version is that most of these tools are pulling from the same underlying cluster network (the DX Spider nodes and similar) but they filter and display things differently. DXwatch tends to have pretty good filtering options and the interface is clean once you get used to it. QRZ spots are fine too but i've noticed they sometimes lag a bit behind or have slightly different propagation data depending on which nodes they're connected to.
honestly for casual DX chasing i just use DXwatch and have been happy with it for years. if you want to go deeper, look into setting up a direct telnet connection to a cluster node in your logging software — that way you're getting spots as raw as they come and can filter however you want. WSJT-X has its own spot integration too if you're doing FT8 which is worth knowing about. but for now yeah just pick one and learn it, you can always add more tools later.

so ive been wanting to get into LEO satellite work for a while now and last weekend i finally just went for it. borrowed a pair of cross-yagis from a club buddy and set up in the backyard with my FT-818 and an old laptop running gpredict. the pass looked decent on paper, maybe 6-7 minutes, elevation peaked around 52 degrees which i figured would be plenty of time.
the problem is i completely underestimated how fast you have to tune on the linear transponder. AO-73 has that inverting transponder so when youre doppler correcting on the uplink it goes the opposite direction from the downlink and my brain just could not keep up in real time. i kept hearing my own signal wandering all over the place. got one contact, barely, some guy in Ohio who i think was also struggling because his audio was all over the place too.
i know people do this with just a single dual band radio and manual tuning and i honestly dont know how. is there some trick to it or do you basically just have to run SDR on the downlink and have a separate radio for the uplink so you can at least hear yourself? or does it just take a bunch of passes before your hands know what to do automatically

the LPF relay idea is a good shout. i'll also say — did you verify the TX path enable voltage is actually making it to the PA board? on mine there was a cold solder joint on a tiny SMD transistor near the TX/RX switching that was intermittently dropping the bias voltage and it looked totally normal visually. had to actually probe it under power to catch it. the 817 is a nightmare to work on at that level cause everything's so crammed in there but its doable if you're patient.

Some people prepare for the Technician exam in less than 5 hours using video lessons and interactive games. I used HamStudy's adaptive system which focused my practice on weak areas - very efficient approach.

oh man i remember feeling exactly like this when i first started checking into nets, you're definitely not alone. i actually sat on the frequency for like three weeks before i worked up the nerve to check in lol. the thing that helped me was just accepting that everyone there was new once and most hams genuinely like helping newcomers figure it out.
one small thing i picked up -- some nets specifically ask for new or visiting stations first, so if you hear the NCS say that, thats your moment to jump in early and maybe even mention youre new. a lot of net controls will give you a little extra time or acknowledge you specifically which is nice. worth paying attention to how your particular net runs because they all have slightly different formats.

yeah ground layout kills more homebrew projects than anything else, i learned that the hard way on a regen i built years ago. glad you got that sorted.
for the audio filtering the TL072 is totally fine for this, i used one in a Sallen-Key lowpass configuration in my DC receiver build and it worked great. two poles gives you enough rolloff to clean things up without adding a ton of phase issues. if youre mainly doing SSB you probably want cutoff somewhere around 2.5 to 3kHz, maybe a bit lower if you find yourself doing more CW. the component math isnt too bad and there are calculators online that do the work for you. just keep the op amp supply clean, another bypass cap close to the pins, that kind of thing. the NE602 can put out some garbage on the supply rail so dont let the audio stage share a filter with it if you can avoid it.

so ive been going to this one for like 4 years now and its usually pretty decent, lot of the same vendors but you occasionally find something good in the flea market area. last year i grabbed an old HF transceiver for almost nothing just cause the guy wanted to get rid of it before loading up his car. wondering if anyone else from around here is planning to go, maybe we could meet up at the club table if our group has one this year

i had the exact same issue with a receiver i built last year, drove me crazy for like two weekends. turned out the problem for me was i had the input and output wiring of the 386 running parallel to each other for a few inches and it was just oscillating at a low frequency and presenting as hum. rerouted the wires and it cleaned right up. might not be your problem but worth looking at the physical layout before you go changing component values.

the SDR piece in RemoteHams is kind of optional depending on how you set it up. if you have a real radio with a CAT interface at the remote end you configure that as the primary control path and the SDR part is more of a panadapter/monitoring thing rather than the actual transmit path. at least thats how mine works — IC-9700 at the remote end, RCForb client on my laptop here, and i have an SDRplay hanging off the same machine for the bandscope view. they dont really talk to each other natively but its workable.
on the NAT thing yes it does handle traversal through their relay servers, you dont need open ports which was honestly the thing that sold me on it over just running VNC plus some audio bridge. the relay adds a tiny bit of overhead but for SSB you really wont notice. CW i find anything under 50ms round trip is fine for me but some guys are more sensitive to it than i am.