Sarah Moore28

yeah what he said but also dont stress about it too much, i was nervous my first few checkins and honestly nobody cares if you stumble a little. i remember forgetting my grid square on a VHF net and just said something dumb and laughed it off, net control was totally cool about it. the weekly 2m net through our local club was where i really got comfortable just talking on the air. also if you look up echolink theres tons of nets accessible even without a great antenna situation which might be handy while youre still getting your station dialed in

so the short answer is they all count for different things and yeah its kind of confusing at first. LoTW is what the ARRL uses for DXCC and a lot of the big awards so if you care about working toward those thats the one you really want to get sorted. eQSL has its own awards and some people like it but its not accepted for DXCC which matters if you ever get serious about chasing entities.
paper cards are still absolutely worth it in my opinion, i know some people think its old fashioned but getting a nice card from somewhere like japan or south america in the mailbox never gets old. plus for awards like WAS through traditional channels the paper cards work fine. some of the older ops especially DX stations really appreciate when you send a physical card, and a lot of them still send beautiful ones back.
for checking if a contact confirmed on LoTW you just log in to the website and look at your logbook there, confirmed ones show up differently than just uploaded ones. if your tqsl is uploading right you should see your QSOs appearing. took me a while to figure that part out too honestly.

okay so I just passed my technician exam last week and I'm still waiting on my callsign to show up in ULS. my VE team said it usually takes a few days but I've been obsessively refreshing the FCC site like every hour lol. anyway while I was down that rabbit hole I started reading about vanity callsigns and now I'm more confused than before I started.
so from what I can tell, when you first get licensed you just get whatever sequential callsign the FCC assigns you based on your district and license class, right? like I dont get to pick anything at that stage. but then after that I can apply for a vanity call? is there a waiting period or can I do it right away once my initial call shows up? and does it cost anything now — I thought the FCC started charging a fee a while back but I've seen conflicting info online.
also kind of a separate thing but my uncle who got licensed in the 80s has a really short 1x2 call and he said I could potentially get something like that eventually if I upgrade to general or extra. is that accurate or was he just messing with me

I run N1MM exclusively during contests and dont even open Log4OM that weekend, then do the ADIF merge Monday morning. honestly after the first couple times you do it its not a big deal. the duplicate check in Log4OM on import is good enough for me.
the WSJT-X UDP thing though, i had that exact same problem and it turned out to be Log4OM going into some kind of idle state and not listening anymore. there might be a keepalive setting or something, i honestly just restart Log4OM if it goes quiet for more than like 20 minutes during an FT8 session. not elegant but it works

CQ WW SSB is honestly one of the best contests to jump into as a newer op, dont let the size of it scare you. yeah theres like 35,000 logs submitted or something ridiculous but that just means the bands are absolutely packed and its actually easier to find people to work. you dont have to be competitive about it, just set a modest goal like work 50 countries or something and have fun with it. your ic-7300 and a dipole will do just fine for S&P (search and pounce) which is really all you need to do starting out. just tune around, find a strong station calling CQ contest, throw your call out, get the exchange, log it and move on. the exchange for CQ WW is pretty simple too, just signal report and your CQ zone. for North America thats zone 5 usually, look it up for your specific location though.
as for cw vs phone — do SSB for your first one, get comfortable with the flow of it. plenty of time to work the cw weekends later once you feel like you know what youre doing. good luck and seriously just get on the air, worst that can happen is you have a weird weekend and eat too much coffee

tx bandwidth is something i think about a lot actually. ran some tests a while back logging received signal reports on pskreporter and just general on-air feedback and yeah narrower TX does seem to get through when the band is busy even if it sounds a little more AM-radio-ish to people on the other end. the trade off is real.
one thing i dont see people talk about enough is ALC behavior. if your ALC is pumping you can do everything else right and your audio is still gonna sound compressed and weird. keep an eye on that meter when you're talking — ideally it should just barely flicker on voice peaks, not be slamming up near the top the whole time. took me embarassingly long to figure that out when i first got into HF.

I went through this same thing when I started. What helped me was just committing to phonetics anytime I'm giving my call to someone I haven't worked before, especially on SSB where audio quality varies so much. On a clear local repeater or whatever I don't bother but HF is a different story. Some letters just sound too similar when the band is marginal, like B and D or M and N, and you save yourself a lot of repeats if you just lead with phonetics from the start.
The non-standard phonetics thing is pretty common in certain regions and among older operators. I've heard 'Mexico' for M, 'Union' for U, all kinds of stuff. As long as the other person gets it its fine I suppose but I stick to NATO just so theres no confusion especially if im working someone overseas where english might not be their first language and they learned the standard set.