Rebecca Martinez

yeah i ran almost exactly this setup for about a year, IC-7610 at the remote end with an RSP1A hanging off the same machine via USB. the SDR stream back to me was the bigger bandwidth hog than the rig control honestly, i was pushing SDRuno at like 2MHz span and it was eating maybe 8-10Mbps on its own depending on compression settings. so on a 15Mbps uplink you'd be cutting it close if you want any headroom for the actual audio
what i ended up doing was running the SDR panadapter locally only — meaning a small headless PC at the remote site just serves the panadapter through a browser via OpenWebRX, and i pull that up in a second window while the RRC handles the rig. works pretty well and the bandwidth for OpenWebRX is way more forgiving than trying to stream raw IQ. latency on the panadapter doesnt really matter since youre just looking at it
the Allstar thing is a whole separate deal, dont mix those two projects up in your head or youll confuse yourself. Allstar is really for linking repeaters and nodes together, not for remote HF control. you could technically run both on the same machine but theyre solving different problems

yeah PSK31 is pretty much a ghost town now on most bands, which is a shame because i always liked it. you could actually have a real conversation, exchange signal reports that meant something, talk about your rig or whatever. FT8 is great but its basically automated at this point, half the contacts i make my radio is doing everything while im getting coffee.
JS8Call i tried for a while but honestly the activity level was kind of frustrating on my end, maybe depends on your region. 40m seems like the best bet. the store and forward messaging stuff is neat in theory especially for emcomm use cases but i never really got a ragchew going the way you describe. might give it another shot on weekends when im not contesting.
RTTY is another one that still has decent activity because of the contests but outside of RTTY Roundup and a few others its hard to find anyone. its kind of sad honestly. the waterfall on 14.080 used to be packed.

hamstudy is the go-to yeah. there's also the ARRL technician manual if you want an actual book that explains the why behind the answers, not just the questions themselves. some people skip that and just memorize the pool which works fine for passing but you end up understanding basically nothing about how anything works. up to you depending on what your goal is i guess. one thing nobody tells you is to look up where VE sessions are in your area before you even start studying, some places only do them once a month and it's annoying to be ready and have to wait around. the ARRL website has a session finder, just plug in your zip code

This happened to me too when I was starting out. The vast majority of dismissals are because people request call signs that aren't actually available or are outside their license class. Make sure you're using multiple databases - AE7Q, RadioQTH, and the FCC ULS search. The $35 fee stings but it's a learning experience!

go friday. seriously dont even bother saturday morning thinking youll get the good stuff, its gone. i went two years ago and by like 10am saturday the decent gear was all picked through and it was mostly coax scraps and old handbooks. friday afternoon is when the serious dealers are still setting up and thats when you can sometimes haggle better too. also bring cash, a lot of vendors dont do venmo or whatever

so we ran a simulated disaster exercise last Saturday with our local ARES group and honestly I wasnt prepared for how much I learned. the scenario was a major flood event, county EOC gets stood up, hospitals and shelters need net check-ins, the whole deal. on paper it sounds straightforward right? but when you're actually trying to coordinate traffic between three different agencies who all want things done differently it gets real messy real fast.
the biggest thing that bit us was logging. we had like four people trying to handle message traffic and nobody had agreed ahead of time on whether we were using ICS-213 forms or just free text logs. total chaos for the first 20 minutes. the net control guy (who is very experienced, been doing this for 30+ years) said this was actually the most realistic part because real disasters always start that way.
we also had a scenario inject where the repeater went down and we had to shift to simplex. that was where things really fell apart because half the team didnt know the backup simplex frequency we'd filed in the EOP. lesson learned there for sure.
anyway curious if anyone else does these drills regularly and what the biggest surprises were for your group. do you do tabletop stuff or full-on simulated exercises with actual radio traffic?

honestly the General exam is not that much harder than Tech, people kind of scare you about it more than they should. the electrical theory questions are the same basic stuff just a little more depth, ohms law, basic circuit stuff, nothing crazy. i studied for maybe 3 weeks using hamstudy and the ARRL General book and passed first try with a decent score. the propagation section is actually kind of interesting once you get into it.
as for the bands, you get HF privileges on most of the major bands, 40m is probably where you'll spend a lot of time starting out especially for domestic contacts, 20m is great for DX when conditions are decent. 10m is fantastic when the solar cycle cooperates and right now we're heading into a pretty good part of the cycle so timing is actually not bad. just be aware you're limited to certain band segments as General, you dont get the full band like an Extra does, but there's plenty of room to operate and honestly most of the activity is in the General segments anyway so you wont feel too squeezed.