Jessica Williams53

yeah I had almost the exact same thing happen with my first 40m dipole, ends were too low and I couldnt figure out why the swr was terrible at the frequencies I actually wanted to use. ended up adding about 6 inches to each leg actually, not trimming — the ground was loading it and making it act electrically longer or shorter, I forget which way it goes honestly. one thing worth checking is whether your coax has a choke or anything at the feedpoint. without a current choke the braid can radiate and basically becomes part of your antenna which throws everything off. I just wound about 8-10 turns of coax into a coil right at the feedpoint, nothing fancy, and it cleaned things up a lot. probably not your whole problem but worth doing anyway.

honestly the dipole is probably your better bet given that lot size and the tree situation. 35-40 feet isnt gonna give you a screaming low angle pattern on 40m but its not terrible either, and the big advantage is you can run it as an inverted V and get decent coverage in multiple directions without worrying about ground losses. verticals are only as good as their ground system and if youre putting 4-6 radials down in a suburban yard youre leaving a lot of efficiency on the table compared to what the textbooks describe. the 15 feet from house thing is a real concern btw. ive had a vertical close to my garage and the pattern was definitely wonky, worked okay but i could tell something was off when signals that should have been louder werent. moved it further out when i reconfigured the yard and it made a noticeable difference. if your trees can support a decent inverted V apex around 35 feet id just go that route and not second guess it. you can always add a second dipole for 80 later and run them off the same feedline with a good tuner.

the latency question is the right one to be asking. ive used RemoteHams for about a year on a node someone else hosts and honestly for SSB its livable if you have a decent connection on both ends — like 20-30ms ping to the node. anything over maybe 150ms and it starts feeling weird, you get that half-duplex awkwardness where you're not sure if the other station stopped talking or if you're just lagging. CW is actually more forgiving in my experience because you're not trying to have a real-time conversation per se, you can chunk things differently in your head the SDR piece is genuinely useful — being able to pan around a couple MHz while someone else is on a different part of the band is something you just can't do with a conventional rig remote unless you set up something like SDRangel feeding a panadapter alongside the main CAT control. RemoteHams integrates that more cleanly. for the 7300 specifically there are people running it via the USB audio and CAT simultaneously so that should work fine the Echolink/AllStar linking thing I think you're confusing with something else or maybe saw a post about someone's specific node that happened to have both. they're not really the same category of thing, RemoteHams is HF remote access and the linking stuff is more VHF/UHF repeater infrastructure. you could theoretically run both on the same Pi but it's not like a built-in feature as far as I know

so ive been meaning to do this for like two years and after last months storm knocked out power for three days i figured i really need to stop procrastinating on this. i put together what i think is a decent go-kit but i have this nagging feeling im forgetting something obvious. right now ive got my FT-891 in a pelican case, a 40ah lithium battery, a basic dipole i can throw up in a tree, and a bunch of coax. also threw in my logging stuff and a laminated copy of local repeater freqs and the ARES nets in my area. oh and a hand crank weather radio because my wife insisted and honestly shes probably right about that. i guess my question is — people who have actually deployed with this stuff, what do you wish you had brought that you didnt, or what seemed important at home but was totally useless in the field. im trying to keep the kit under 50 lbs because i might be the only one hauling it.

yeah what he said about decoding it yourself first is the right move. i wasted a week once thinking my igate setup was broken and it turned out my callsign had a typo in the config lol. literally one wrong character and aprs.fi just had no idea what to do with it. worth a sanity check on the most obvious stuff before going deep into audio levels and path configs.

had almost the exact same thing on my 897 a while back, different rig i know but similar architecture. turned out to be a cold solder joint on the driver board, totally invisible until i reflowed it. worth going over the board under good light with magnification if you havent already, especially around any connectors or anything that might have had mechanical stress. probably not your issue but took me two weeks of chasing more exotic faults before i found something that basic so figured id mention it.

im kind of in the same boat, just started working on CW a few weeks ago. one thing that helped me was just slowing way down and sending individual letters over and over until they sounded right before worrying about actual words. also i read somewhere that you should be able to hear a clean crisp tone on each element — if it sounds smushed the gap between the contacts is probably too small or your sidetone monitor speed doesnt match the keyer speed setting. not sure if thats your issue but worth checking that the speed on the keyer itself matches whatever youre practicing to.