Robert Williams

long shot but did you try a full factory reset? i know it sounds dumb but ive seen weird firmware glitches do strange things to output on these SDR-based rigs. probably not your issue if its consistent across bands but worth 30 seconds before digging into the hardware.

yeah this happens to everyone when they're starting out, dont sweat it too much. the 'is this frequency in use' thing is genuinely what most experienced ops do, especially on HF where propagation means you might not hear both sides of a QSO. like someone could be in the middle of a contact with a station that's just not making it to your location, so from your end it sounds totally silent.
as for net schedules, the ARRL has a net directory on their website and there are a few other databases floating around. also worth just sitting on 40m for a while at different times and getting a feel for what normally happens where. 7.200-7.300 is phone and you'll start to recognize the regular nets after a bit. some guys are pretty grumpy about it but honestly most people understand if you just say sorry and move on, nobody expects new hams to know everything day one

yeah gpredict absolutely can do rig control via CAT, thats actually how most people handle it once they get tired of manually chasing doppler. for the 817 you need a CAT cable, either the official yaesu one or a cheap FTDI-based one works fine, and then in gpredict you go into the interfaces section and set up the radio with the right COM port and baud rate. 9600 i think for the 817 but double check that.
once its connected gpredict will push frequency updates to the radio in real time and it makes a huge difference honestly. the linear transponders are inverted so when you're correcting for doppler on the uplink you have to remember the relationship is flipped relative to the downlink, gpredict handles all that automatically which is nice. one thing though — even with CAT control you still need to find your own signal on the downlink first and kind of tune around it, the correction gets you close but you still have to do a little fine tuning by ear especially near AOS and LOS when the doppler rate is changing fastest.
SO-50 is FM so forget all this for that one, doppler barely matters on FM for a beginner just set it and forget it roughly. AO-73 is where the linear transponder fun and frustration lives.

so ive been using WSJT-X for FT8 for about a year now and it just logs to its own internal log which i then have to manually import into my general log and honestly its kind of a pain. a buddy at the club uses N1MM and swears by it especially for contests but i dont really do a ton of contesting, maybe a few times a year like the state QSO party and occasionally field day. someone else told me to look at Log4OM which i had never heard of before.
my question is basically which one of these actually integrates well with WSJT-X in a way where the QSOs just show up automatically without me having to do anything. i know N1MM has some kind of UDP logging thing but ive never set it up. also is N1MM even worth learning if im not a hardcore contester or is it kind of overkill for casual use. Log4OM looked pretty feature rich from the screenshots but i couldnt tell if it was actively maintained or kind of abandoned

the single yagi thing is real but you have to be realistic about who you can work. with JT65B on 2m and a single decent yagi, maybe 150-200w at the antenna, you can work the big stations — the guys running 4x or 8x yagi arrays with kilowatts. they have the link budget to close it even with your weak signal. what you probably wont do is work another single yagi station on the other end, the path loss just doesnt leave enough margin for that. its roughly 252 dB of free space loss on 2m EME, so yeah its not nothing.
your preamp situation matters a lot more than people think. what preamp are you running? if its not a very low noise figure unit, like sub 0.5 dB ideally, thats actually where i'd spend money first before worrying about the rotor. the az/el mount is obviously needed but a good preamp right at the feedpoint makes a real difference. for the rotor you dont need anything exotic, a lot of guys use two separate rotors one for az one for el and just deal with the slightly awkward mounting. the tracking software like PstRotator handles the moon position fine.
honestly just get on during a big EME contest weekend and listen first. you'll hear more than you expect if your preamp is decent and you'll get a feel for what the signals actually sound like coming off the moon.

so i've been licensed for about two years now and somehow never really got into the cluster spotting thing until last week. a guy at our club mentioned DXwatch during the meeting and i figured i'd check it out just to see what it was. that was a mistake because now i have it open in a browser tab basically all day at work lol
anyway i'm still trying to figure out the best way to use it. like i understand the basics, someone hears a DX station and spots it with their callsign and frequency, but im not sure how to filter things properly. right now i'm seeing spots for 160m when i dont even have an antenna for that band so its a bit noisy. also started poking around QRZ for the logbook stuff and noticed there's a way to link things up but honestly i got confused pretty fast
anyone have a workflow they use for this? like do you just watch the cluster and jump on things when you see a new one, or is there more to it than that? feels like im missing something obvious

ok so ive been trying to get into DX chasing more seriously and a buddy of mine told me to start using the cluster networks to find activity. ive been poking around DXwatch and also the spotting stuff built into QRZ and honestly im a little confused about how they relate to each other. like are they pulling from the same network or are they totally separate things?
what ive been doing is just going to DXwatch and filtering by band and then when i see something interesting i go try to work it. sometimes the spot is like 10-15 minutes old by the time i get there and the station is gone or the pileup is just impossible. is there a better way to set this up so im seeing fresher spots? also does anyone use the apps on their phone for this or is the browser version good enough
im technician class right now so HF is limited but ive been studying for general and want to be ready when i pass. just trying to learn the workflow before i actually need it i guess

The key is avoiding that lookup table approach your brain wants to use. Morse at 5 wpm and Morse at 15 or 20 wpm are completely different critters, and you don't want to waste time on the wrong one. I switched from random character groups to plain text copied from news articles. Your brain starts recognizing whole words instead of individual letters - that's when the real breakthrough happens.

yeah what he said. i'll add that the physical card thing really does become its own whole thing after a while. i started sending cards through the bureau maybe two years ago thinking it was kind of old fashioned and now i genuinely look forward to getting a stack of incoming cards every few months. there's something about holding a card from like a JA station or a 5B4 that a confirmation email just doesnt replicate for me personally.
the bureau system through the ARRL is really cheap if you're in the US, way cheaper than direct mailing. only downside is it takes forever, sometimes six months to a year to get cards back. direct mail is faster but you gotta include a self addressed envelope and return postage which gets expensive fast if you're doing it a lot.
ft8 contacts by the way — a lot of those stations have logging software that auto uploads to LoTW so your confirmations might already be piling up without you doing anything. check your LoTW account and see what's matched already, you might be surprised

1.8:1 is honestly fine for a first dipole, most rigs will tune to that no problem and if you have an internal tuner itll barely blink at it. but yeah the inverted V configuration changes things — when you droop the ends down like that the feedpoint impedance drops from the typical 73 ohms you'd expect from a flat dipole, so you end up matching closer to 50 ohms actually which should help, but the height definitely matters too. 25 feet on 40m is pretty low, youre going to have a lot of ground interaction messing with the resonant point.
the splice on one side shouldnt matter much electrically as long as you made a solid mechanical and electrical connection. id be more suspicious of your ugly balun — wrapping coax around pvc works but you need enough turns and the diameter matters. common mode current on the outside of the coax shield can really skew your SWR readings and make the antenna look worse than it is. try adding more turns or use a proper 1:1 choke balun with a mix 31 toroid if you can get one, makes a noticeable difference.

this is super helpful, im only a couple months into my technician license and didnt realize 10m was open to tech class ops on phone above 28.300. just looked it up and im definately going to try this weekend with my little whip antenna. is it worth trying even with a mag mount on my car or should i wait until i can set up something better outside?

so anyway i went through this exact same confusion like two years ago lol. what helped me was just picking one to focus on first and i went with WAS because it felt more reachable. finished it in about a year and it kind of gave me the bug to go after DXCC properly after that. the nice thing is a lot of the contacts you make just naturally count toward multiple awards so you arent really wasting time working one vs the other
one thing i'd say is make sure you get your LoTW account actually set up and active if you havent already because getting confirmations the old way with paper QSLs is slow and expensive and honestly most of the serious DX stations use LoTW now anyway