Andrew Jackson

does it do it on all bands or just certain ones? my buddy had something similar and it was only on 10m, ended up being a bad filter cap in the LPF board. not saying thats your problem but worth narrowing down. also what firmware version are you on, theres been a couple weird bugs over the years with ALC behavior on older firmware that icom quietly fixed.

the band privileges thing honestly just kind of sticks after you do enough practice questions, dont stress about trying to memorize the chart directly. the pattern starts to make sense after a while, generals get the lower portions of the phone segments and extra gets the upper edges basically. just keep hammering the practice tests and itll click. hamstudy is what i used and i passed first try with like a week of studying.
for the propagation stuff, 40 meters is your friend for getting started on HF, especially in the evenings. 20 is great during the day when the bands are open. if you dont have a rig yet dont worry about it, just pass the test first and then figure out the gear. you can always find a used radio on qrz classifieds or radioreference forums for not too much. a lot of people start with something like an older icom or yaesu and just run a wire antenna in the backyard and honestly that gets you on the air just fine

i built almost the exact same thing last spring and had similar swr shape. mine turned out to be the feedline acting up more than the antenna itself. i added a choke balun like 5 turns of coax through a FT240-43 toroid right at the feedpoint and the curve got way more symetrical. also 30 feet apex on 40m inverted V is a little low, the angle of the legs affects the radiation angle and also the feedpoint impedance dips below 50 ohms when the legs get steep, so youre not really feeding a 50 ohm load anymore. some people use a 4:1 balun for inverted V specifically because of this but honestly at 2.8:1 most rigs and tuners wont even care, mine handles it fine.

so this has been driving me absolutely nuts for about three weeks now. my 7300 will just cut out mid transmission, not like a full shutdown, more like it drops to like 5 watts for a split second then comes back. sometimes it doesnt come back and i have to cycle power. happens more on 40m than anywhere else but ive seen it on 20 too.
already checked the power supply — its a Rigrunner setup going to an Astron RS-35M, voltage holds steady at 13.8 under load, i put a meter right on the radio terminals. fan is spinning, no thermal shutdown codes that i can see. tried a different coax and different antenna just in case it was a swr spike doing something weird but same deal.
the weird part is it seems worse after the radio has been on for maybe 45 minutes or so. like it runs fine for the first chunk of a session then starts acting up. makes me think thermal but i cant find anything obvious and the finals dont seem to be getting that hot. anyone dealt with anything like this before or have ideas where to start poking around?

the motorboating is almost definitely a power supply decoupling issue, 100uF alone isnt gonna cut it on an LM386 circuit. what you want is a combination of a bigger electrolytic AND a small ceramic right at the supply pin of the chip, like a 10uF or 47uF electrolytic plus a 0.1uF ceramic bypassed together. the LM386 is notorious for this. also check pin 7, theres a bypass cap that goes there too that a lot of people miss when they build these from scratch.
the microphonics on the VFO are just part of life with a colpitts unless you do something about it. you can try potting the coil in wax or just enclosing the oscillator section in a small tin box, even an altoids tin works. definitely shield it from the rest of the circuit too because the mixer diodes can inject noise back into it. direct conversion receivers are kind of sensitive to all of this stuff, its not just you, they take some fiddling to get right.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff is genuinely confusing when you first get into it. so yeah they're all separate awards from different organizations essentially. DXCC is the big one from ARRL and it's based on working 100 or more DXCC entities which arent quite the same as countries — more like geographic/political entities so some places count separately even if theyre technically the same country. you need 100 confirmed to get the basic certificate and then there are endorsements for working more. WAS is Worked All States, also ARRL, you just need all 50 US states confirmed. WAZ is Worked All Zones and thats from CQ magazine — the world is divided into 40 CQ zones and you need all 40 confirmed for that one.
the LoTW thing sounds pretty normal actually. not everyone uploads to LoTW right away or at all, so your match count will go up slowly over time as other people upload their logs. some guys only upload once a year or after contests. just keep logging and keep uploading and the confirmations will trickle in. 40 entities in 8 months is honestly pretty solid if you're on HF, keep at it

I went through this last year and got my vanity on the first try which i was pretty surprised about honestly. I used a site called AE7Q which basically shows you available calls and upcoming ones — it was way more useful than trying to figure it out from the FCC website which is kind of a nightmare to navigate. definitely worth checking out before you apply so you can pick something thats actually open and not already taken or in a waiting period.

For QRP field use, I just let it warm up 5 minutes before making contacts. Simple solution that works - most ops understand if you need to "warm up the rig" at the start of an activation. Thermal mass helps too - I potted mine in thermal compound.

the 7300 is what i started on when i upgraded to HF and honestly the waterfall changed how i operate completely. like you actually learn band conditions way faster because you can see whats happening instead of just spinning the dial hoping. your ts-450 is a classic but yeah once you go SDR-style display its hard to go back.
cant speak to the 7610 comparison since ive never owned one but the 7300 community is huge so theres tons of help online if you run into anything weird with setup or digital modes.

I went through this last year and got my vanity on the first try which i was pretty surprised about honestly. I used a site called AE7Q which basically shows you available calls and upcoming ones — it was way more useful than trying to figure it out from the FCC website which is kind of a nightmare to navigate. definitely worth checking out before you apply so you can pick something thats actually open and not already taken or in a waiting period.

For QRP field use, I just let it warm up 5 minutes before making contacts. Simple solution that works - most ops understand if you need to "warm up the rig" at the start of an activation. Thermal mass helps too - I potted mine in thermal compound.