Betty Johnson

i had almost the exact same thing happen when i went from a pretty steep inverted V to a flatter one trying to get more horizontal coverage. the SWR looked totally different and i spent like two evenings convinced my balun had gone bad lol. turned out the impedance just dropped and my old 1:1 wasnt doing me any favors. ended up just cutting the legs down a bit and accepting a slightly worse SWR at the band edges, works fine now. 40m is pretty forgiving anyway if your rig has a decent internal tuner.

i went through this exact same thing last year. ended up putting up a homebrew vertical on a painters pole in the corner of the yard, about 33 feet of wire with 4 elevated radials at maybe 8 feet. compared to my inverted V which had similar height issues as yours... honestly the vertical felt a bit better for DX but worse for regional stuff which is basically what the books say would happen so not a huge revelation lol. neighbors havent said anything and the HOA hasnt noticed so theres that at least.

so i passed my technician exam last tuesday and spent the whole week trying to figure out my baofeng and programming cables and chirp and all that stuff. finally got on 2m last night and keyed up on the local repeater. completely blanked on my callsign for like 3 seconds which felt like forever, said my call wrong once, then someone came back to me and i had no idea what to do next.
the guy was super patient though and we talked for maybe 5 minutes about nothing really, just signal reports and weather. i was sweating the whole time. anyway just wanted to share because this forum helped me study and i figured id post here now that im actually licensed. KD9 something something, you'll see me around

the ALC thing is almost certainly your issue or at least a big part of it. if the ALC is working hard constantly that usually means youre driving the mic gain too hot and the radio is basically squashing your audio before it even gets transmitted cleanly. on the 7300 i keep my mic gain set so ALC barely ticks on voice peaks, not riding the meter the whole time. took me a while to actually accept that less mic gain usually sounds better not worse.
also the compression — the built in compressor on that radio can sound pretty rough if you push it. i run mine at like 3-4 max and some guys leave it off entirely for casual ragchewing. the PR-40 is a good mic but its a pretty low output element compared to something like the HM-36 so you might actually need more mic gain than you think, which sounds counterintuitive but just means you gotta find the sweet spot. try getting a friend on a nearby frequency and have them record you while you mess with settings in real time, thats honestly the only way to actually hear what youre doing

the message handling is actually pretty solid — if the link drops mid-transfer Winlink Express will just hold whatever didnt get through and you can reconnect and resume. it's not like email over smtp where a failed connection can leave things in a weird state. the RMS basically acts as a store-and-forward node so your message sits there until it gets acknowledged both ways. you'll see the status in the session log window which is worth watching when you're learning the flow.
on the VARA FM vs Packet question, honestly just try VARA FM. the free version is throttled to like 1200 bps or something in that range but it's still usually better than AX.25 packet in real conditions because of how it handles multipath and noise. and your Signalink levels probably wont need much tweaking going from packet to VARA FM on VHF — the audio levels going in are the same deal, just the modem software changes. i went through this same thing last year and spent way too long being precious about not changing my setup. just do it.
as for running an RMS gateway, any licensed ham can do it, general or extra, no restriction there. the winlink.org sysop registration is pretty straightforward, you just fill out the form and agree to keep the gateway running reasonably consistently. the trickier part is making sure your station is set up to be unattended legally under part 97 which means you need to have thought through your control operator situation. most people running VHF gateways just leave a TNC or soundcard setup running and log in remotely if something breaks.

so i've been licensed about 6 years now and for probably the first 4 of those i just couldn't break pileups to save my life. like i'd hear a rare one, get excited, throw my call in maybe a dozen times and then just give up and go do something else. figured it was always the guys with the big linears and stacked yagis that got through and there was nothing i could do with my 100w and a trapped vertical.
anyway a buddy of mine who's worked almost every entity on the list sat down with me during the 3Y0J operation a while back and basically watched me operate for like 20 minutes before pointing out everything i was doing wrong. turns out i was transmitting on the DX's transmit frequency like an idiot, not listening for where they were actually coming back, tail-ending when i shouldnt have been, and my timing was completely off. also apparently i was calling way too long — he said two calls max and then listen, and i was going like 5-6 times before shutting up.
since then ive been working split properly, really listening hard for the DX's pattern before jumping in, trying to send just my suffix when the pileup is really thick, and my hit rate has gone way up even with modest power. worked a couple legit rare ones this past season that i never would have gotten before. curious what other techniques people use, especially for the really brutal ones where it feels like a wall of noise

the serial dropout thing is almost definitely a USB power issue on the zero, those things are notoriously fussy about current especially if youre running wifi at the same time. try adding a small powered hub or just tape a 100uf cap across the 5v rail on the adapter and see if that helps. also worth wrapping your pyserial reads in a try/except and having it automatically re-open the port — i do something like that for my IC-7300 and it just silently reconnects in like half a second, barely noticeable.
for what youre describing the zero will probably struggle once you start adding the cluster parsing on top of everything else. i moved to a pi 3B+ for my logging stuff and it just feels more comfortable, not maxing out the cpu all the time. the zero is fine for like one focused task but juggling serial, wifi, a database write loop and then eventually http requests to pull spot data is going to start getting messy.

oh and dont stress too much about being perfect on the first one -- I did my first KFF activation last spring and completely forgot to log the reference number in the notes field for like the first 15 contacts and had to go back and edit everything later in ADIF master. it worked out fine but just double check your logging setup before you start calling CQ haha. also if you have a phone signal out there the wwff spotter site works on mobile which is handy for checking if anyone else is already on a close frequency

Your modeling aligns with my practical experience. I've run both configurations at my QTH and the vertical dipole consistently shows better signal reports. The elimination of ground loss is significant, especially on poor soil.

Your modeling aligns with my practical experience. I've run both configurations at my QTH and the vertical dipole consistently shows better signal reports. The elimination of ground loss is significant, especially on poor soil.

yeah what he said about N1MM is spot on. one thing i'd add is dont stress too much about being competitive your first go. field day is honestly still one of the best learning experiences because your club handles a lot of the infrastructure stuff and you can just focus on operating. if your club does it again this year i'd try to get some actual seat time on SSB at minimum, even just an hour or two will teach you more than reading about it.
CQ WW is great but it can be a bit intense for a first solo effort, especially the weekend timing and keeping track of zones. maybe look at some of the smaller state QSO parties too, they're a bit more relaxed and the exchanges are usually just signal report and state, very easy to get the hang of things without feeling like you're drowning