Linda Johnson

the SO2R thing is cool but i'd say squeeze everything out of SO1R first. like are you running assisted and actually working everything off the cluster quickly or are you cherry picking. also foot switch for PTT if you're not already using one, sounds dumb but it frees up your hand and speeds up your rhythm more than you'd expect. same with a DVK for your CQ message so you can be typing the callsign while the voice is still going out. i run a pretty modest station and broke 100/hr in SS phone last year just by being more disciplined about not sitting on dead runs too long and keeping my exchange short and clean. multiplier timing matters too -- chasing mults at the wrong time tanks your rate and you end up with neither good rate nor all the mults. theres kind of an art to knowing when to go hunting vs just sitting and grinding

Field Day is great prep actually because youve already done exchanges under a little bit of time pressure. CQ WW is similar in rhythm just more chaotic because everyones piling on at once. your dipole at 25 feet will work, maybe not into Japan but you'll definitely work Europe and South America if conditions cooperate, and this time of year the solar cycle is being pretty cooperative lately. one thing i'd say is just listen for a while before you jump in, even 20 or 30 minutes on Saturday morning just tuning around 20m will give you a feel for the cadence. and dont feel bad about asking for repeats, everyone does it. the experienced operators are usually pretty patient during the slower parts of the contest. the really fast gun stations might be a bit harder to break through but theres plenty of others. oh and look into SOTA if you havent, totally different vibe than contesting but really addictive once you start chasing summits on the log. not the same thing obviously just mentioning it since you seemed interested in trying different operating modes

so ive been a general for about two years now and honestly the privileges have been fine for what i do but lately ive been eyeing some of the extra class portions of the bands especially on 20m and 40m where a lot of the dx action seems to happen and i keep getting shut out anyway i downloaded the question pool and started going through it and some of this stuff is pretty dense, like the filter theory and the Smith chart questions and stuff about transistor biasing... i passed my general without too much trouble but this feels like a different animal. is the extra actually as hard as it looks or does it kind of click once you spend some time with it? i dont have an engineering background or anything, just been a hobbyist for a few years also wondering if the full privileges are actually worth it day to day or if im just romanticizing it a bit

honestly just grind the question pool, thats what i did. i think i went through it maybe twice on ham study and then took a practice test a few times until i was consistently hitting like 85% or better and then just went and sat for it. passed first try. some of the electrical theory questions are a little annoying but there arent that many of them and you can kind of learn which answers to pick even if you dont totally get why the HF stuff after is where it gets fun though, first time i made a contact on 20m with a guy in germany using just a wire antenna in my backyard i was pretty hooked