Emily Davis71

i was in the same boat when i first got licensed, part 97 is genuinely hard to read if youre not used to legal-style documents. one thing that helped me was arrl has a summary version thats a lot more readable than the actual cfr text. not a replacement for reading the real thing eventually but good for getting the general picture first. the content rules are honestly pretty common sense once you see them laid out plainly, its more about the technical stuff like emission types and frequency privileges where it gets complicated for techs

Honestly the advice you're getting pulling in two directions makes sense because both sides have a point. The cheap Baofengs like the UV-5R work fine for hitting repeaters and doing simplex, and plenty of people including myself started on them without any real problems. The programming can be a headache and the menu system is kind of a nightmare at first but you figure it out. If your main goal is just getting on the air and talking to your brother and checking into a local net, a UV-5R gets you there for like $25 and you can always upgrade later once you know what you actually want.
That said if you have $100 to spend I'd probably look at the Yaesu FT-65 or the Wouxun KG-UV9D. They're in that mid range where the build quality is noticeably better, the audio is clearer on receive, and programming is less of a headache. Dual band is worth it just because most active repeaters in most areas are on 2m but some are on 70cm and you dont want to miss out. The FT-60 is a solid radio but its a bit older and doesn't do a lot of things newer cheap radios do, though its built like a tank and has great receive.
skip the TH-D74 for now, that's a digital APRS radio and while its incredible it's a different category entirely. start simple.

so ive been running FT8 for a while now and honestly love it for working new grid squares and chasing DX but it gets a bit hollow after a while, like youre just exchanging signal reports and thats it. someone on a local net mentioned JS8Call and said it was basically built for actual conversations on weak signal, which sounds interesting but i cant quite figure out if its worth the learning curve or if the bands are just dead on it most of the time
my setup is pretty modest, ic-7300 into a fan dipole up about 30 feet, so weak signal stuff is kind of important to me since im not running a kilowatt into a yagi or anything. i tried firing up JS8Call last weekend on 40m and heard maybe 3 or 4 stations but wasnt sure if i was decoding right or what. the interface is a little different from WSJT-X and i may have had the audio levels off
also curious if anyone still runs PSK31 with any regularity because i learned that years ago and it was kind of fun being able to actually type back and forth in near real time, just feels like nobody is on anymore. or am i looking in the wrong places

i had this same issue with my 2m radio last year and it drove me crazy for weeks lol. turned out my power cable was running right next to the ignition wiring harness under the dash and it was picking up noise from there. tried moving the cable to the other side and it helped a lot. might be worth checking how you routed everything even if the ground ends up being the main fix

AE7Q dot com is your best friend for this stuff, seriously bookmark it. you can search available calls, see upcoming ones, check what class of license you need for a particular format. i spent way too long on that site when i was hunting for a vanity call after i upgraded to Extra lol. ended up getting a 2x2 with a decent suffix which im happy with, the 2x1s i wanted were all taken or had a bunch of people applying for them and i didnt want to gamble on it.
one thing worth knowing is you can apply for up to 25 callsigns in one application ranked by preference so put your absolute favorites first obviously. and dont stress too much if you dont get your first choice, you can always apply again. the fee thing is real btw, just factor it in.

the digipeater coverage thing is almost definitely your problem if you moved somewhere rural or even suburban — a lot of areas have terrible APRS infrastructure and people just dont realize it til they check the RF coverage map on aprs.fi. go to aprs.fi, hit the coverage layer, and zoom into your area. if you're in a gap between digis you might just not have coverage at all no matter how good your setup is.
that said, the audio level stuff on the D710 is worth checking too. from memory i think its buried in the TNC menu somewhere, theres a deviation or audio input level setting and if its too high your packets come out splattered and nobody decodes them right. there used to be a thread on the tapr mailing list about this specific radio having hot audio from the internal TNC. might be worth searching for that.
the squelch noise triggering thing can actually kill you for APRS because if the radio is trying to decode noise as a packet it wont transmit when it needs to. set squelch a little tighter than you normally would for voice.

the mode A vs mode B thing trips up a lot of people starting out honestly. the short version is they differ in how the keyer handles the last element when you release the paddle - mode B will add one more element if you were squeezing both paddles, mode A doesnt. most people end up preferring one or the other after a while but when youre just starting out it really doesnt matter much. just pick one and stick with it until the sending becomes more automatic.
the mush problem is almost certainly tension. new paddle users tend to death-grip the thing and your timing goes right out the window. try to use just your fingertips and let the spring do the work of returning, dont force it back yourself. also your paddle spacing might be too wide or too narrow which makes a huge difference. i spent two weeks thinking i was just bad at it before i realized my contact gap was way off.
the other thing i always tell people is dont practice sending until your receiving is solid at that speed. your brain needs to know what correct CW sounds like before your hands can reproduce it. G4FON's koch trainer is free and it genuinely works if you put in 15 minutes a day consistently.

so i was just doing my usual evening listening session yesterday and stumbled onto 28.400 or so and the band was absolutely packed. like i havent heard 10m like this in probably 8 or 9 years, maybe longer. was working stations in south america, europe, even caught a JA briefly before he faded out. running maybe 50 watts into a dipole up about 25 feet and i was getting 59 reports from places i wouldnt normally dream of hitting.
i know solar cycle 25 has been running hotter than predicted but this felt different, like genuinely surprising. also saw some chatter that there might be a new icom release coming sometime this fall, something in the mid-range HF market but i havent seen anything confirmed yet. just rumors at this point i think. anyway anyone been taking advantage of the current conditions? feels like a good time to dust off whatever antenna projects you had sitting on the back burner

yeah gain staging is probably 80% of it honestly. ive heard guys with $300 mics sound like they're transmitting through a coffee can because their mic gain is cranked and the ALC is slamming constantly. the ALC indicator should barely be moving on normal speech peaks, if its pegged you're already in trouble regardless of what mic you're using.
the compression thing is a whole other rabbit hole. a little compression helps with readability especially on noisy bands, but ive heard people with so much compression its basically just a loud buzz, all the natural speech dynamics get destroyed and it actually becomes harder to copy not easier. the radio's built in compression on most modern rigs is fine if you dial it back to like 4-6 dB of actual compression, beyond that youre usually hurting yourself.
one thing i do think matters more than people admit is where your voice sits in the SSB passband. if you have a real bassy voice and youre not rolling off some of that low end, a lot of your energy is just sitting below where the radio is actually passing it efficiently. bumping presence around 2-3kHz does more for intelligibility than any mic swap ive ever done.

the SDR side of this — yeah RemoteHams doesnt really do native SDR panadapter stuff in any clean way last time i checked, what most people do is run SDR-Console server on the same machine and then connect to that separately on the client end, its a bit clunky having two windows open but it actually works pretty well once you get the PPM correction dialed in on the RTL stick so its frequency accurate against the main rig
Airspy HF+ is worth the extra money if you want the dynamic range to match anything close to the 7300s receiver, the cheap RTL dongles are fine for casual panadapter use but if youre on 40m during a contest the thing gets overloaded and its kind of useless
on your Echolink vs remote HF question thats kind of apples and oranges honestly, Echolink and IRLP are fundamentally VHF/UHF linking with phone patch over internet, youre not actually operating HF youre just accessing a repeater remotely, RemoteHams gives you actual third-party-control of the rig which is a completely different thing and for HF rag chewing theres really no comparison, RemoteHams wins easily if the latency is manageable

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (general) and i keep seeing people mention checking into nets but i honestly have no idea what the process looks like in real time. like i know the basic idea, you call in, the net control takes your call sign and that's... it? is there more to it than that? do you have to say anything specific or is it pretty informal
theres a local 2m net on tuesday nights and i've been lurking on the frequency for a couple weeks just listening and it seems pretty relaxed but i dont want to sound like an idiot when i finally key up. also i noticed they sometimes have a what they called a "traffic" portion at the end — whats that about, do i need to do anything for that or can i just check in for the regular part
also totally separate but i saw something about a special event station for a state park anniversary next weekend, is that something you just try to work like any other station or is there like a specific window you're supposed to call them in

so ive been licensed for about three weeks now (tech class) and everyone keeps telling me to just get a baofeng to start and thats fine but then i went down a rabbit hole and now im looking at the yaesu ft-60 and the kenwood th-d74 and honestly i dont even know what half the features mean anymore
like what is APRS and do i actually need it as a beginner? and dual band vs tribander, does that even matter if youre mostly just gonna be hitting local repeaters? i live in a mid sized city so i dont think range is gonna be a huge issue but i dont know
my budget is probably around 150 bucks maybe a bit more if something is really worth it. just want something that wont frustrate me to death trying to program it and that will actually work reliably. the kenwood is obviously way out of my price range just been reading about it