Steven Brown

the RFI thing is real and it took me probably two years of messing around to get it manageable. i'm on a 75x120 lot and running an IC-7610 as radio 1 and an old FT-1000MP as radio 2. what actually made the difference for me wasn't fancy filtering, it was getting the antennas as physically separated as i could and using good bandpass filters — i run the Array Solutions stuff and it helped a lot but its not cheap.
honest take though: if youre just starting to think about rate optimization, SO2R is probably not where i'd put energy first. learning to run a frequency efficiently, when to S&P vs when to hold a run, how to work a pileup fast — that stuff will get you more QSOs than a second radio if you haven't already drilled it. i spent a whole contest season just focusing on my CW speed and exchange timing before i touched the SO2R question and my score went up way more than i expected from that alone.
that said yeah the top guys are doing SO2R and if you want to compete at that level eventually you'll probably need it. just dont expect it to fix rate problems that are actually operator problems, if that makes sense

the weight adjustment in Winkeyer adds or subtracts time from the dit length which then kind of cascades and affects everything else perceptually. default is 50 and i'd honestly just put it back there if you've been tweaking it and leave it alone until you actually know what you're listening for. the mushy sound might also just be your paddle tension and gap — Bencher paddles can drift over time, the tension springs get lazy. worth checking the gap on both sides with a business card or something similar, you want it consistent left and right.
and yeah coming back after that long a break is rough. i did it after about 8 years and it took me probably 3 months of daily practice before i stopped feeling like a total lid. the muscle memory is still in there somewhere, it just takes a while to surface again.

so ive been playing around with online cluster spotting for the past few weeks since i finally got my general ticket and honestly its a little overwhelming at first. i mostly use DXwatch and the QRZ logbook page but i cant quite figure out if im supposed to be cross-referencing them or if one is basically just pulling from the other anyway.
like yesterday i saw a spot on DXwatch for a station in the Maldives on 17m and by the time i tuned there it was already gone. not sure if thats a timing thing with how the clusters update or if i was just slow. also noticed some spots seem really old even though the timestamp looks recent? dunno if thats a propagation thing or a cluster thing.
also been messing with the HamAlert app on my phone which is pretty cool, you can set it to ping you when certain entities show up. anyone else use that combo or have a better workflow for chasing dx without sitting glued to the screen all day

i did the headliner route on my 2017 F150 about two years ago and honestly it wasnt as bad as i expected. maybe 6 or 7 clips came loose and i only broke one, which i replaced for like a dollar at the ford dealer. the A pillar trim just pops off if you work it slow from the bottom up, theres a clip near the top that can be stubborn. i ran RG-8X and left a little service loop behind the dash and havent had any issues since.
the door jamb thing works for a while but ive seen it chafe through the jacket after a year or two of the door opening and closing, especially in winter when everything gets stiff. not worth the risk of a short or water getting in.
as for alternator noise, i did need a ferrite choke on the power leads and also ended up putting one on the mic cable. the newer ecoboost engines seem worse about it than the old 5.4s in my experience. worth checking your ground too, i grounded mine directly to the chassis with 12 gauge and it cleaned up a lot.

you've got the right idea with transmit tone only, that's exactly how it works for most repeaters. the CTCSS tone (some people call it PL tone, same thing different name) gets sent along with your audio when you key up, and the repeater's receiver is set to only open up when it hears that specific tone. so without it programmed on transmit, the repeater just ignores you completely even though you can hear the output fine. receive tone on your radio is a different thing — thats for your radio to mute itself unless it hears the tone, kind of like a secondary squelch. most people leave that off unless they want to filter out noise.
as for calling on repeater, yeah just kerchunk the repeater first (key up briefly to make sure you're getting in) and if you hear your call sign come back or the courtesy tone beep then you're in. then just say your callsign and say something like "any stations?" or "W1XYZ monitoring" and see what happens. if the repeater has a courtesy beep between transmissions, wait for that before you start talking again. you'll pick it up fast, honestly most people on repeaters are pretty welcoming to new hams.