Patricia Nakamura

so ive been on the hobby about 8 months now and finally decided to stop using the little mag loop i bought and just build something proper. ended up going with a simple half wave dipole for 40m, cut the elements to roughly 33.5 feet each using some 14 gauge stranded wire i had leftover from an old extension cord project. fed it with 50 ohm coax through a SO-239 center connector i picked up at the hamfest last spring.
got it up in kind of an inverted-v configuration because i only have one decent support (a tree in the backyard, maybe 30 feet up at the apex) and the ends slope down to about 8 feet off the ground on each side. antenna analyzer is showing me around 1.4:1 SWR right at 7.150 which is honestly better than i expected but im wondering if i should try to get it flatter or if thats already good enough to not worry about. also the resonant point seems a little low, like around 7.080 or so, not sure if i should just trim or if the inverted-v configuration affects it vs a flat dipole.
also curious if people bother with strain relief or any kind of weatherproofing on the coax connector. right now its just soldered and taped with electrical tape but ive seen people do all kinds of stuff with coax seal and self-amalgamating tape and i dont really know whats overkill vs necessary in a wet climate (PNW here).

so ive been a general for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the extra class exam. i mostly do HF, some digital modes, a bit of CW here and there. my elmer keeps telling me to just go for it but honestly the stuff i've heard about the theory sections kind of intimidates me. like the filter design questions and the oscillator stuff and whatever else they throw at you. i did fine on the general but that felt more like memorizing band plans and regulations than actually understanding anything. is the extra class exam actually testing whether you understand the theory or is it still mostly just memorization from the question pool? and is the full privileges thing even worth the hassle for the average person or is it mostly just bragging rights at this point

went two years ago and it was pretty meh honestly. maybe 30 tables? but I did snag a nice Kenwood mic for cheap so who knows. the outside swap meet part is usually where the better deals are in my experience, people just trying to get rid of stuff from their garage not actual vendors so the prices are way more reasonable

so ive been messing around with this idea for a few weeks now and finally decided to just start building it. basically i have an old cd-45 rotator that i picked up at a hamfest for almost nothing, the controller works but its pretty dumb, no feedback, no way to connect it to anything digital. what i want to do is pull the pot signal from inside the rotator and feed it into an arduino analog pin so i can at least get a heading readout on a little oled display, and then eventually tie that into my logging software somehow.
ive got the voltage divider sorted out i think, the pot in there runs something like 0-5v across the rotation range which is pretty convenient for the arduino. my main question is whether anyone has done this and had issues with noise on the analog read — like is it worth throwing a small cap across the pot leads or just do software averaging on the readings. also thinking about a raspberry pi zero w instead so i can serve up a little web interface but that feels like maybe more complexity than i need right now.
anyway if youve done anything similar with rotator automation or just general shack automation stuff im curious what route you went

so we have a county ARES exercise coming up in about three weeks and im trying to nail down the power situation before i show up and embarrass myself in front of the EC. last time i ran everything off a 100ah lifepo4 and it was fine for a few hours but we ended up going like 8 hours and i was babysitting the voltage the whole second half of the day which is not great when youre supposed to be handling traffic.
the exercise this time is going to involve running a net control station so probably more continuous TX duty cycle than i usually deal with. im running an IC-7300 and a separate 2m/70cm mobile rig, plus a laptop. rough math says maybe 30-35ah if i keep the HF rig at like 50 watts most of the time, but that assumes a lot and i know it.
a few guys in the group are pushing for a small honda generator as backup but my concern is the noise — RF and otherwise. ive heard the eu2200i is pretty clean but i also dont want to be that guy running a generator 10 feet from the antenna. anyone dealt with this in a real field deployment? also on the antenna side im probably going to throw up a linked dipole for HF and maybe a jpole for the 2m stuff but im open to suggestions if theres something that sets up faster without sacrificing too much.

yeah the stock mic thing is real, i went through the same thing. eventually just got a Heil PR-40 on a boom arm and suddenly people were commenting on how good i sounded without me doing anything else. not saying you need to spend that kind of money but the stock mics on most rigs are kind of mediocre and designed to be acceptable rather than good.
one thing nobody told me early on — your mouth distance to the mic matters a lot on SSB. closer gives you more bass from proximity effect which sounds warm on FM or in a studio but on a 2.4khz wide SSB signal it just turns into mush. id start about 6-8 inches away and talk across the mic rather than directly into it if youre getting plosives or that congested sound.

so the short version is the FCC allocations are the legal part and the band plans are kind of a gentlemens agreement that the ARRL and other orgs put together to keep things organized. you wont get fined for operating outside the band plan as long as youre within your licensed frequency range, but you might annoy people or cause interference to stuff like digital modes that tend to cluster in certain spots.
on 40m for general class you can do phone starting at 7.175 MHz up to 7.300 on the upper end. the 7.125 to 7.175 segment is also available to you for phone. the lower chunk down around 7.025-7.125 area is where a lot of CW and digital stuff lives so thats probably why your elmer said stay away from the low end, less because you cant go there and more because if you fired up SSB down there people would not be happy.
as for band edges, thats a real practical concern. your signal isnt a single frequency, it has bandwidth. so if youre on SSB your suppressed carrier might be at 7.300 but your actual voice is spreading maybe 2-3 kHz above and below depending on your filter settings. go too close to the edge and part of your transmission could legally be outside the band. thats why people say leave a little room, not just courtesy but to make sure your whole signal stays within the allocation.

yeah it definitely feels impossible at first, i wont lie to you. the big thing that made a difference for me was switching away from trying to count dots and dashes and just learning the sound of each letter as like a rhythm or a word. theres a method called Koch where you start with just two characters at a time at a faster speed, like 15-20 wpm, and only add new ones once you can copy the first ones accurately. sounds counterintuitive but it works way better than learning slowly because your brain ends up hearing each letter as its own sound instead of a series of elements you have to decode.
LCWO dot net is free and pretty much what most people use for Koch method practice. there's also the Morse Code Ninja guy on youtube who has a ton of drills at different speeds which are great once you have the characters down and want to start building speed. the apps are okay but most of them teach it wrong honestly, too slow, too much visual association with dots and dashes.
people absolutely still use CW on air, the low bands especially, 40 and 80 meters at night you'll hear plenty of it. and QRP guys love it because you can make contacts with like 5 watts that you just cant do with SSB.