Lisa Thompson

the band privileges thing clicked for me when i just printed out the actual FCC band chart, the one with the colored sections, and taped it to my wall for a few weeks. general gets a pretty solid chunk of 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters for phone which is honestly where most of the action is anyway. the extra portions you cant use yet are usually just the lower edges of the band, so in practice youll have plenty of room to operate and figure out whats going on.
for the impedance and reactance questions i wouldnt stress too much about deriving anything from scratch. if you understand that capacitors and inductors react oppositely to frequency changes and you can remember a couple of the formulas just well enough to recognize the right answer, thats usually sufficient. the general exam isnt trying to make you an RF engineer. i think i was around 72% on practice tests a week before mine and ended up passing fine, just keep hammering the ones you get wrong and read the explanation for each one even if you got it right.

so i've been wanting to get into LEO satellite work for a while now and last weekend i finally set up enough to give AO-73 a real shot. been doing SSB on HF for years so i kind of assumed the linear transponder stuff would feel familiar but honestly its a bit more disorienting than i expected.
my setup right now is a yaesu 817 for the downlink on 2m and an old ft-2900 feeding a small 5 element yagi for uplink on 70cm. running gpredict on the laptop for tracking and doing the az/el manually just by watching the predictions and spinning the beam by hand. no rotor yet.
the doppler thing is what's really messing with me. i kind of get the concept but in practice i was constantly chasing my own signal around and by the time i found it the pass was like halfway done. is there a trick to pre-tuning or do most people just let gpredict handle the rig CAT control and forget about it? also i noticed my signal sounded inverted at one point — like when i tuned up my downlink rx frequency went down? is that just how inverting transponders work or did i have something set up wrong.
got one qso in, guy in ohio, pretty exciting for a first try but i feel like im barely scratching the surface of whats going on technically.

so i picked up a used Bencher BY-1 paddle last month and ive been practicing with it every evening but my character spacing is just terrible. like the letters themselves are coming out okay i think but the spaces between words and letters are just a mess. i slow it down on my keyer (running an old MFJ-464 i borrowed from a club member) and it helps a bit but as soon as i try to speed up even slightly everything falls apart.
i spent probably 20 years doing phone and just decided to finally learn CW at 62 years old so maybe im just expecting too much too fast. been using the G4FON trainer software on the computer to practice receiving and thats actually going pretty well, im up to about 12 wpm copy on that. but sending is just humbling me. anyone else go through this? does the spacing thing just click at some point or is there something specific i should be working on

the TCXO question comes up a lot and honestly my take is it depends on what youre doing. for regular SSB and even FT8 the stock oscillator is fine, the software does enough correction that you wont notice. where it actually matters is stuff like weak signal VHF work or if you're doing any kind of coherent operations or WSPR where you want your frequency accuracy to be really tight over long periods. i did the upgrade on mine mostly because i had the rig open for something else and figured why not, but i wouldnt specifically open it up just for that unless you have a reason.
the fan mod is the real quality of life improvement, totally agree. mine was making this faint whine on certain RPMs that drove me crazy during quiet CW sessions. noctua fixed all of that.

im in almost the exact same boat as you, just got my general like 8 months ago and started logging everything to LoTW right away. one thing that helped me was downloading the ARRL DXCC entity list and just going through it in my logging software to see what ive already worked vs confirmed. it was kind of eye opening how many i had worked but not gotten a confirmation back yet.
the bureau cards thing is its own whole rabbit hole honestly. i set up an outgoing bureau account through my section and it takes foreverrr to get stuff back but its way cheaper than going direct for every card. for the rare stuff though i just bite the bullet and go direct with a green stamp or two and hope for the best

dayton is absolutely worth it at least once, the flea market alone is nuts. i went in 2022 and ended up buying a old kenwood ts-520 for way less than i expected, had to haul it back to the car like three times across the parking lot though lol. get there early on friday if you can, the good stuff goes fast
as for local swaps, check the arrl website for your section, they usually have a calendar that's more up to date than most club sites. also just emailing the club secretary directly usually works better than waiting for the website to update, those things never get maintained