Andrew Martinez

haha the baofeng rite of passage, we've all been there. congrats on the ticket. what repeater you on? im in the midwest if thats anywhere near you might hear you on the air sometime

honestly i went through the same thing when i first got on HF. for me the big fix was just turning mic gain down way more than felt right — like it felt too low but the reports got way better. also make sure speech compression isnt cranked, the 7300 has that built in and it can make audio sound really harsh if its set too aggressive. i keep mine around 3-4 and that seems to work okay for most conditions

so i've been running an old Kenwood TS-570 for like 8 years and it's been totally fine but i kept seeing people talk about the 7300 and eventually i just caved and bought one used off QRZ classifieds. paid about 950 for it which i think was fair given it came with the original box and looked barely touched.
anyway couple weeks in and i have some thoughts. the waterfall display is genuinely useful and not just a gimmick like i expected it to be — i actually find myself hunting for signals visually now which i never did before. the receiver feels a bit different from the Kenwood, not sure if better or worse exactly, just different. maybe slightly quieter on 40m but that could also be band conditions, hard to say.
one thing that's bugging me is the menu system, there's a ton of stuff buried in there and the touchscreen is responsive but it's small and i keep hitting the wrong thing. probably just need more time with it. anybody else found stuff in the menus that's actually worth messing with or are most of the defaults fine to leave alone?

i passed mine like three months ago and was in the exact same boat. what helped me was watching the KB6NU no nonsense technician guide videos on youtube, cant remember exactly who made them but if you search that youll find it. way easier to absorb than reading the manual for me personally. i still read the manual for some sections but the videos made the antenna stuff click way faster than anything else did.

i did this exact same thing like 8 months ago, went from tech to general. the propagation questions tripped me up more than the math honestly, like understanding why certain bands work better at different times of day and the whole ionosphere stuff. once i watched a couple youtube videos about how skywave propagation works it clicked and those questions got a lot easier.
also the license privileges section is worth knowing cold because some of those questions are weirdly specific about which part of which band you can use which mode on. just spend an hour with the band plan and it starts to make more sense.

had almost the exact same thing on my 897 a few years back, different radio i know but the architecture is pretty similar. turned out to be a cold solder joint on the LPF switching relay for that band. the relay itself was fine but one of its legs had a hairline crack in the solder that was just barely making contact. you could wiggle the board and the power would jump around. worth getting in there with a loupe and going over the relay connections on the 40m LPF section before you go chasing finals. reflowed it with a iron and it's been solid since.
if you do get in there, check the band switching transistors too while you have it open, they're cheap and easy to swap and they do fail on these sometimes.

dont sleep on having the generator as a backup even if you go battery primary. i know the noise is annoying and yes fuel is a pain but ive been burned twice at actual emergency activations where something unexpected extended the op time way past what we planned and a dead battery stack in hour 11 of a 14 hour activation is not a fun situation. even just having the eu2200 in the truck as a fallback charges the batts while you run off them and you never have to actually start it if things go well
also on the antenna question -- efhw all day for this kind of thing. buddipole is great when you need the flexibility but setup time matters in a real deployment and the efhw on a push up pole is just faster to get in the air. we actually retired our buddipole for most field work for exactly that reason

Built a 40M center-fed dipole using 14 AWG THHN wire, calculated at 66.5 feet total using the 468 formula. When calculating the dipole length, 468 divided by 7.150 gives about 32.5 ft per side. Installed at 35 feet with 1:1 current balun and RG-213 feedline.
Issue: SWR shows 1.5:1 at 7.150 MHz but jumps to 2.8:1 at 7.000 MHz and 3.2:1 at 7.300 MHz. Tried trimming 6 inches from each end but didn't improve band edge performance. Any thoughts on what's causing the narrow bandwidth? Should I consider different wire gauge or balun placement?

had something similar a while back, turned out to be the RemoteHams server software losing sync with the CAT control when the band changed and it was basically confusing the audio routing. upgrading to the newer RCForb server version fixed it for me, not sure which version you're on but worth checking. also 12 up should be fine for this, i run mine on way less and its okay as long as noone else in the house is streaming.

yeah the single yagi EME thing is real but its almost entirely a JT65 or Q65 situation now. CW EME is still done but you basically need a serious array to hear anything that way, most of the old timers running CW have stacked yagis or dishes. for a suburban lot your best shot is probably 2 or 4 yagis on a decent az-el mount, which is still a real project but not completely out of reach.
the path delay on 144 is roughly 2.5 seconds each way so you dont hear your own signal coming back in any meaningful realtime sense, and the doppler shift moves around depending on where the moon is in its orbit so you have to correct for that. the logging software handles most of it honestly, WSJT-X has the EME features built in and it will calculate the doppler offset for you if you feed it your coordinates and the time is accurate.
realistically for your setup as-is, the ft-991a is fine but that 9 element yagi is going to be a tough ask even on JT65. people talk about minimum viable being around 100w and a longer yagi or small stack. the preamp situation matters a lot too, a good low noise preamp at the feedpoint makes a bigger difference than people expect. MGF1302 based stuff or a cavity preamp if you can find one. dont skimp there.

25 feet on 40m is pretty low yeah, you're basically getting a cloud warmer at that height. the takeoff angle is going to be somewhere north of 60 degrees which is fine for regional stuff but not great for working across the country. raising it would definitely help more than you'd expect, even getting to 35 or 40 feet makes a noticeable difference on the pattern.
the vertical argument is real but your radial situation is the limiting factor there. a vertical with a skimpy radial field is going to have ground loss eating into your efficiency and you might not end up ahead of where you are now. ive seen people put up a vertical thinking itll solve everything and then wonder why its not performing. if you can lay down 16 to 32 radials at least a quarter wave long then yeah its worth considering, but with 60x80 feet you're going to be trimming those pretty short on 40m.
honestly id try to get the dipole higher first, its free if you already have the wire and coax. borrow a cheap antenna modeling program like EZNEC or even the free version of 4nec2 and plug in your actual height, it'll show you exactly what the pattern looks like and what you gain by going up 10 or 15 more feet.

Having trouble with my homebrew EFHW on 20m. Built a 49:1 transformer with FT240-43 core, 3 turns primary, 21 turns secondary. Wire is exactly 33 feet for 14.230 MHz. Without any counterpoise, SWR is off the charts on my RigExpert - antenna analyzer shows no resonance whatsoever. Add just 3 feet of wire as counterpoise and suddenly I get 1.2:1 SWR.
I thought EFHWs didn't need counterpoises? What am I missing here? Running coax perpendicular to the wire for the first 20 feet to minimize coupling.