Melissa Baker

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it since january and stuck around 11wpm. one thing my elmer suggested was head copying, like put the pencil down and just listen without writing anything. felt totally useless at first but i think its slowly helping? hard to tell. anyway good luck hope someone else has better advice lol

so ive been running WSJT-X for FT8 for about a year now and just using the built in logging to ADIF and then importing to Log4OM after the fact which honestly works fine for casual operating but im starting to do a few contests here and there, did the ARRL DX CW last year with a borrowed station and caught the bug pretty bad the thing is Log4OM is really nice for day to day stuff, club log integration works, lotw sync is solid, i like the interface but when i was trying to use it during a contest it just felt sluggish or maybe i was doing it wrong, the rate tracking wasnt really there and i kept losing my place in the bandmap a buddy at the club says just run N1MM for contests and keep Log4OM for everything else and use the export to merge logs afterward but that sounds like a recipe for duplicate headaches. does anyone actually do this two-software workflow and does it hold up or am i overthinking it also curious if anyone has WSJT-X talking to N1MM directly during like an FT8 contest, i know theres a UDP port thing but i never got it configured right

yeah the direct-to-battery wiring makes such a huge difference, its one of those things that sounds optional until you actually do it and then you wonder why you waited so long. i had similar alternator whine on my old install and it turned out one of my ground connections was just bolted to a painted surface, not actually making good contact with the chassis. added a star washer and scraped down to bare metal and it cleared right up. the NMO mount is the right call too. those mag mounts are fine for portable or temporary stuff but for a daily driver they eventually scratch the paint and the contact point corrodes. ive got an NMO through my roof and after four years its still solid, no issues. what antenna did you put on it?