Sarah Anderson50

I've been working on CW for about 6 months now and I'm solidly comfortable at 15 WPM, but I just can't seem to break through to higher speeds. I keep hearing that to get beyond 15 WPM you need to switch to head copy instead of writing everything down. I'm using G4FON and LCWO for practice, but I feel stuck. I know progress can be up and down with plateaus, but this one feels longer than usual. Has anyone else hit this same wall? What finally helped you break through to 20+ WPM?

so ive been wanting to do this for probably two years now and last weekend i finally just did it. built a bitx40 from scratch, well mostly scratch, took me about three evenings and one very late night with a magnifying glass trying to identify resistor color bands. the soldering on the toroids was honestly the hardest part for me personally, i kept second guessing how many turns i had done.
anyway got it all together, did the smoke test, nothing died, and i took it out to the park near my house with a random wire up in a tree and the little tuner i built from a kit a while back. ran it on a 3ah lipo i had kicking around from an RC car project.
made four contacts in about two hours, all on 40m, one of them was into ohio which from my QTH is maybe 400 miles? on 5 watts. i know thats not exactly DX but the whole thing felt completely different from sitting at the shack. something about knowing the rig came from a bag of parts and is now talking to someone 400 miles away. hard to explain.
the audio is a little bassy and the sidetone is way too loud, i have to tweak that still. but it works. anyone else do park portable QRP? curious what antennas people are using for this kind of thing because the random wire with a tuner feels a bit wasteful of the little power i have

same here man, i worked like 14 countries on 10m last weekend and i'm only running a vertical. the South America stuff especially has been coming in super strong in the afternoons. i dont fully understand all the flux stuff either but i just watch the DX cluster and when i see a pile of 10m spots i just get on lol

so ive been running an inverted V for 40m for a couple years now, apex at about 35 feet off a push up mast, ends drooping down to maybe 8 feet off the ground on each side. works fine, i get out, no complaints really. but i keep reading that a flat top dipole is supposed to be better and i'm starting to wonder if i'm leaving performance on the table.
the thing is my yard isnt huge and getting a flat top up at any decent height would mean either a really tall support in the middle or two supports at maybe 25-30 feet which i dont have. the inverted V at least lets me use one center mast. so is the radiation pattern difference actually noticeable in practice or is this more of a theoretical thing that doesnt matter much in real world conditions. i feel like on 40m especially the angle stuff gets complicated and im not sure the inverted V is as bad as some people make it sound.
anyone actually compared the two back to back with the same feedline same location? or is this one of those things where the answer is always just get more height

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (technician) and i finally got my HT programmed for the local 2 meter repeater. my elmer helped me get the frequency and offset set up but the CTCSS tone thing is kind of confusing me still.
so from what i understand, you program a tone so the repeater opens up and actually retransmits your signal, right? but someone at the club meeting said some repeaters also have a tone they send back out and you can set your radio to squelch on that too so you only hear traffic from that specific repeater. is that true? because i didnt realize there were two separate tone settings, i thought it was just one thing you had to enter.
also kind of a separate question but related — whats the deal with etiquette on these things. like do i just key up and start talking or is there some protocol i should know about? i listened for a while and it seems like people just say their callsign and wait but i wasnt totally sure. dont want to be that guy who does it wrong on his first real transmission lol

the Canary Islands one is a good get actually, EA8 counts as its own entity which trips up a lot of people. one thing that helped me early on was just downloading the DXCC entity list as a PDF and keeping it open while i was logging, that way you can cross reference as you go. also get on LoTW as soon as you can if youre not already, some DX stations only confirm via LoTW and you dont want to be scrambling for QSLs later when you're trying to apply for the award. club log is worth looking at too, a lot of the big DX expeditions upload there first

yeah you just need the transmit tone set, not the receive side. the receive CTCSS (sometimes called tone squelch) just filters out what you hear on your end — it wont affect whether the repeater opens up for you. so go into the baofeng menu, find the T-CTCS option (not R-CTCS) and set that to 100.0 and you should be good. a lot of new folks set both and it still works fine but technically only the transmit matters for getting into the repeater.
and yes the pause thing is real, not superstition at all. after the repeater drops its carrier there's usually a courtesy tone and then a short tail, and if you jump on too fast sometimes the repeater or the linking system doesnt have time to reset and your first word or two gets clipped. just wait for the beep and then a beat or two and youll be fine. it also gives anyone else a chance to break in if they need to, which is just good operating practice.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and just kind of puttered around doing local stuff and the occasional contest but never really chased DX in any organized way. got maybe 40-50 entities confirmed just from random contacts over the years but never actually submitted anything to ARRL or even logged seriously with award tracking in mind.
decided this year im finally gonna go for DXCC and maybe WAS on the side since i already have most states worked, just not confirmed. couple things im confused about though — do the QSLs i already have in my drawer count if i can match them up in my log? some of those cards go back to 2018 and i wasnt super careful about logging band and mode. also whats the deal with LoTW vs paper cards, do you need a certain mix or can you do all electronic? i know ARRL runs LoTW but im not totally clear on how credits actually get applied toward the award.
also worth going for WAZ at the same time or is that a totally separate rabbit hole. just trying to figure out how to not make this more complicated than it needs to be