James Wilson46

oh man i went through this exact same confusion last year. the mode thing tripped me up too. what helped me was just thinking of mixed as its own separate counter that gets fed by everything, and then phone/CW/digital are their own separate counters fed only by their respective modes. so yeah one SSB qso bumps both mixed and phone at the same time.
87 entities already without really trying is actually a pretty solid start, youll hit 100 for the basic certificate faster than you think once you get deliberate about it. the last 20 or so before 100 might take a little patience depending on what youre missing but nothing crazy. its when you get to like 280+ that things slow way down haha

so its like 9pm local and i figured id spin the dial on 40 for a bit, maybe catch some dx or at least a ragchew or something. absolutely nothing going on. couple of digital stations doing their thing but voice is just dead. not even a net that i can find. maybe im just tuning the wrong part of the band but it feels like nobody's on anymore on weeknights. used to be way more activity a few years back or maybe im just remembering wrong. anyway if anyones out there give me a shout, im running about 50 watts into a dipole up maybe 30 feet so nothing fancy but it gets out ok most nights.

the audio thing is personal but most serious SO2R ops end up going mono in one ear for the run radio and just use the other ear kind of passively for the S&P side. takes a while to get used to but your brain stops trying to process both as equal priority. you basically want the run station to be almost automatic so the cognitive load is on the second radio doing the searching.
as for when to break — there's no perfect rule but the general thing i've heard from guys way better at this than me is that you dont leave a hot run for anything less than a needed mult, and even then you gotta be quick. if you're running 120/hr you probably shouldnt be leaving at all, you let the S&P radio just sit on a frequency and snag stuff passively. its when the rate drops under like 80 or so that actively hunting on radio 2 starts to make more sense mathematically. honestly though the real thing is just doing it over and over. i ran like 6 or 7 full weekend contests before SO2R felt even a little natural and i still make dumb decisions mid-contest all the time

so ive been messing around with this for a few weeks now and i finally have something that kind of works but im not sure if im making it way harder than it needs to be. basically i have 4 antennas on the roof — a yagi for 2m, a dipole for 40m, a vertical for 20m/15m/10m, and a random wire i use for 80m on nights when conditions are weird. switching between them manually was driving me nuts especially during contests when im jumping bands every few minutes.
so i grabbed an arduino mega i had sitting in a drawer from an old project and wired it up to a bank of relay modules, the 8-channel 5v ones you can get off amazon for like 8 bucks. the idea is to have it talk to the PC over serial and the logging software sends a band change command and the arduino switches the right relay. ive got the basic serial parsing working and the relays click when i send the right bytes but im running into issues with the relay coils causing noise on receive. like i can hear it in the audio when a relay switches, little click or sometimes a buzz if the relay is chattering.
i put some flyback diodes on the coil pins which helped a little but its still there. wondering if anyone has done something similar and whether i put the relay board too close to the rig or if its an RFI thing getting into the audio chain. the arduino and relay board are sitting about 18 inches from the IC-7300 right now. also the ground wiring is kind of a mess at the moment if im being honest.

yeah cycle 25 has really surprised a lot of people honestly, they were predicting it would be a moderate cycle but its been tracking above predictions for a while now. the flux being up in the 200s is genuinely exciting especially for those of us who had to suffer through the bottom of cycle 24 when 10m was basically a dead band for like 3 years.
the reason it dies even on high flux days comes down to a few things but the big one is geomagnetic activity. check the K-index and A-index alongside the SFI, if the K is above 3 or 4 you can have great solar conditions but the ionosphere gets disturbed and propagation goes to pieces especially on the higher bands. a solar flare can also cause a sudden ionospheric disturbance that basically blackouts HF for a few hours even in the middle of what should be a great day. DXMaps and the NOAA space weather site are worth bookmarking if you havent already, I check them before I even turn the radio on most mornings.