David Wilson59

honestly the doppler on LEOs still makes my head hurt sometimes and ive been doing this for years lol. one thing that helped me was just doing a few passes in receive only — dont even transmit, just track yourself listening to other guys working the sat and watch how the signals move across the passband as the pass progresses. gives you a real intuitive feel for the rate of change before you add the complexity of trying to work someone at the same time.
also are you accounting for the transponder inversion offset correctly in gpredict? theres a setting where you put in the transponder passband limits and whether its inverting, and if that data is wrong the auto doppler correction is going to fight you the whole pass. the AMSAT website has a satellite status page with all those parameters updated pretty regularly

yeah the stock mic on the 7300 is pretty mediocre, most people ditch it pretty quick. but before you buy anything new honestly go into the menu and pull up the TX monitor so you can actually hear yourself on the air, thats the first thing. a lot of guys dont realize how bad their audio is until they listen to it themselves.
for the ALC issue — you want that meter barely ticking, like just kissing the bottom of the ALC range when you talk loud. if its bouncing hard youre overdriving it and that will make you sound like garbage and also splatter onto adjacent freqs which nobody appreciates. back the mic gain down until the ALC is calm, then adjust from there. the parametric EQ is worth learning, i know its a pain but even just boosting the 2-3kHz range a little and rolling off some of the low end under 200Hz makes a huge difference for voice clarity. SSB bandwidth is limited anyway so you dont need all that bass rumble eating up your passband.
also are you talking too close to the mic? distance matters more than people think, like 2-3 inches is usually good, closer than that and you get proximity effect making everything boomy.

okay so i passed my technician exam like two months ago and ive been mostly on 2m and 70cm which is fine but i want to get on HF and i keep reading different things about what techs are allowed to do. someone at the club told me i can use some HF privileges but then another guy said basically no you cant really do anything useful down there without a general.
i looked up part 97 but honestly its kind of hard to parse if youre not used to reading that kind of legal document. something about 10 meters and CW on some other bands? im just not sure what the actual limits are and whether its even worth buying an HF rig before i upgrade. also does any of this change depending on if you have a Technician license from before 2000 or something, i saw something about that online

hamstudy.org is genuinely all you need, i didnt buy anything and passed first try. the way it works is it tracks which questions you keep getting wrong and drills you on those more, so its not like just reading through 400 questions in order. once youre hitting like 85-90% consistently on the practice tests you're pretty much ready. the actual pool repeats a lot of the same concepts just worded differently so once stuff clicks it clicks.
the electrical stuff tripped me up at first, ohms law and calculating things with antennas, but theres youtube videos that explain it way better than any book. just search for tech license study and youll find people walking through the hard parts. i think it took me maybe 3 weeks of casual studying, not every day. dont stress too much, the test really isnt that bad once you stop looking at the whole pool as one giant wall of text.

so i finally did it after putting it off for like two years. studied for about three weeks using hamstudy.org and passed with an 87 on my first try. went to a VE session at the local club which was a little awkward because i didnt really know anyone but the guys were all super nice about it.
anyway got my callsign assigned four days later and immediately panicked because i had no idea what to do next. ended up just listening on the local 2m repeater for a few days before i got brave enough to say anything. my first QSO was with a guy about 20 miles away, just a quick signal report exchange but honestly i was shaking a little haha. he gave me a 5 by 9 and told me welcome to the hobby which felt really good.
still figuring out what direction i want to go with all this. HF is obviously the dream but that feels like a whole other mountain to climb. anyone else remember what those first few weeks were like?

yeah 1.4:1 without a balun and a choc block center is pretty solid for a first build honestly. i ran a dipole for almost a year with no choke and the main thing i noticed was my feedline was picking up noise from somewhere in the house, took me forever to figure out that was the issue. once i added a cheap 1:1 choke balun it got noticeably quieter on receive. might not be your situation but worth keeping in mind if you start hearing weird noise floors.

congrats man, that first contact feeling is something else. i remember mine, i was shaking a little and completely blanked on the phonetic alphabet when he asked me to confirm my call. been licensed about 3 years now and i still get a little buzz when i work somewhere new. dont stress too much about not knowing what to say, everyone on the repeater knows youre new and most of them genuinely enjoy elmering newcomers. get on there as much as you can and youll find your rhythm pretty quick.

yeah every dB absolutely matters more at QRP, youve basically figured out the core thing that makes the whole pursuit interesting. when youre at 100w you can kind of throw power at problems but at 5w a bad coax connector or a poorly matched antenna will really show up in your log as... silence. most serious QRP ops ive talked to end up spending more time on antenna work than anything else, and a lot of them run end-fed halfwaves or resonant dipoles specifically to avoid losses in tuners and such.
as for portable, yeah thats really where QRP shines in my opinion. ive been doing POTA runs for about two years now and a 3ah lipo will last me most of a morning activation easy at 5w, especially if youre running CW which your radio should be pretty efficient at. the whole thing fits in a small bag and you can hike somewhere nice and just operate which is a completely different vibe than sitting in the shack. dont let anyone tell you its frustrating, it is sometimes, but the contacts you do make feel earned in a way that 100w contacts just dont for me anyway

done almost exactly this with a pi zero w and an uno clone for my shack. works most of the time lol. the one thing i'd add is think about what happens when the pi crashes or the script dies — make sure the relays fail in some sane state so you're not transmitting into an open or into the wrong antenna. i added a watchdog timer on the arduino side that defaults back to the vertical if it stops getting commands from the pi after a few seconds. took me a while to think of that but glad i did because the pi has locked up on me twice and it just falls back cleanly now instead of leaving things in a weird state.

yeah the single yagi thing is real, EME has changed a lot since the JT65 days and even more since people started running Q65. a single long yagi, like a 9 or 12 element reasonably high gain one, can work if your station is otherwise tight. meaning low loss feedline or ideally the LNA literally at the antenna, and a decent power amp. you wont be running skeds with everyone but activity weekends you can find stations with big arrays that will hear you even if you cant hear them as well.
for your space situation honestly a 2-3m dish is pretty compelling. the gain on a proper 2.4m dish is somewhere around 20-21 dBd at 144 which is competitive with a 4x9 array and its a lot simpler mechanically in some ways, though you absolutely need decent az/el tracking which is its own rabbit hole. yagi arrays have the advantage of being more forgiving on the pointing and you can build them incrementally, start with 2 yagis, add more later.
the LNA placement is not optional if you want to be serious about it. coax loss before the first amplification stage kills your noise figure. even 1dB of loss there matters at moonbounce signal levels. most people use a relay-switched LNA right at the boom or at the feed. SSB Electronic and Kuhne make good ones, some people roll their own. your ft-991a should be fine as the IF radio if you bypass the preamp stage and manage levels carefully into wsjt-x.