Linda Wilson

cant really speak to the specific cap values you need but W4RT used to sell a whole mod kit for the 857 that had everything you needed, not sure if theyre still around though. the schematic is on the yaesu site if you can find the right service manual version for your serial number range, thats probably your best bet for confirming what your specific board has.

honest question — does split even matter if you're running like 100w and a wire? asking because i've tried all this stuff and i still feel like i basically never break anything above maybe a zone 26 or 27. starting to think its just a power game at some point

i had almost the exact same situation last year, was pulling my hair out over the audio delay. ended up switching from the default UDP mode to the lower latency option in RCForb and it helped a bit but honestly the biggest thing was just moving my remote machine to a wired connection instead of wifi. obvious in hindsight but wifi was adding like 80ms of jitter on its own and i hadnt even thought about it.
cant really help with the wires-x linking stuff, never messed with that system. echolink i know a little but not enough to say anything useful about bridging it with a remote session setup like yours.

30 feet isnt bad for 40m but youre right that its not ideal, the antenna wants to be at least a half wavelength up for the takeoff angle to really work in your favor for dx. at 30 feet youre probably getting a fairly high angle of radiation which actually helps for regional stuff — like 300 to 800 mile paths — but kills you for dx or even long skip. if youre comparing to a vertical then the vertical has a lower takeoff angle naturally which is why some guys swear by them for 40m dx even though they have worse gain on paper.
definitely throw a choke balun on there though, the lack of one can cause all kinds of weirdness with common mode current on the coax shield and it might actually be affecting your pattern or causing rf in the shack. i wound mine on a piece of pvc with about 10 turns of the coax itself, works fine up through 20m, but for 40 a lot of people go with a ferrite choke. either way its worth doing before you start tweaking anything else because you dont really know what youre measuring until the feedline is decoupled properly.

same boat as you were like 6 months ago haha. what finally clicked for me was realizing LoTW just does the counting for you once your logs are uploaded, so i'd start there before worrying about paper cards. i was surprised how many entities i already had confirmed just sitting in my log that i hadnt paid attention to. ended up being like 87 toward DXCC which i had no idea about.
WAZ took me way longer than WAS btw, some of those zones are really hard to get on certain bands. Zone 26 and some of the pacific zones were a pain. just something to be aware of if you go down that rabbit hole, its a fun one though

A band plan is an operating guide, while FCC rules define the actual legal limits for US amateur operation. Good operating practice uses both: confirm that a segment is legal for your license and mode, then use the band plan to choose an appropriate place inside that legal window. For 10m as a Tech, you can legally operate 28.000-28.500, but check the ARRL band plan to see where phone, CW, and digital activity typically occurs.

New Extra here, finally ready to try my first QRP kit build! I've had a hankering to build something lately and happened across a relatively new offering from the 4 States QRP Group: the Hilltopper Tallboy, a monoband QRP CW transceiver kit. Looking at the 40m version.
Anyone here built one? How's the construction difficulty for someone comfortable with basic soldering but new to kit building? I think the Tallboy would make a great group or club project. Builders - even new ones - would end up with a good transceiver for park activations or casual operation on the band of their choice. Unlike some kits out there, the construction of this radio is not at all intimidating.

yeah the contact list thing bites almost every group the first time they actually test it. we had the same issue a few years back during a windstorm exercise — our net control had a printed roster from eight months prior and three of those people had moved or upgraded their license and changed callsigns. not a huge deal in a drill but in a real event that kind of confusion adds up fast.
what ended up helping us was assigning one person specifically to be the roster keeper and making it their job to send out a check-in email every 90 days asking everyone to confirm their info and primary frequency. sounds simple but somebody has to own it or it just doesnt happen.
on the message traffic question — we use ICS-213 forms and have someone play the role of an EOC liaison feeding us realistic requests. stuff like 'we need a health and welfare check on this address' or 'the shelter at the high school needs to report their current capacity.' it keeps people focused and feels less like a classroom exercise. not perfect but way better than just making stuff up on the fly