Kevin Anderson

That double-squeal thing is called a double — basically two stations keyed up at the same time and their signals mixed together on the repeater. It happens all the time, especially on busy nets. Totally normal and nobody did anything wrong necessarily, just two people with the same idea at the same moment. Net control handles it, thats literally what theyre there for. And yeah what you did sounds exactly right. You give your callsign, say whether you have traffic or comments, and hand it back. Some nets are a little more formal and want you to say the net name or net controls callsign too but most local Monday night type nets are pretty relaxed. If the net has a specific check-in format they usually announce it at the top before taking check-ins, so just listen for that. Waiting a beat or two before keying up is actually good practice — gives the repeater tail time to drop and makes sure the previous station is really done. You were probably doing it right and it just felt weird because everything feels weird the first few times.

yeah i went through basically this exact thing when i started. what helped me was just listening to a lot of CW — like pull up the W1AW practice broadcasts or even just tune around 40m in the evenings and just listen without trying to copy everything. your brain starts to hear what clean code sounds like and then when you send it you kind of self-correct without even thinking about it. took me a few weeks but it clicked eventually

yeah the message handling thing is a real problem everywhere not just your group. we did a similar drill about two years ago and honestly it was almost embarrassing how fast it fell apart once we simulated the repeater going down and everyone had to go simplex. half the guys didnt even know what frequencies we'd agreed on ahead of time. what helped us a lot was doing short 30-minute nets on a random tuesday evening where the only goal was passing practice traffic. no scenario, no roleplay, just hey here's a message, pass it accurately, let's debrief. kept it low pressure and people actually started showing up more once they realized it wasnt going to eat their whole evening. after a few months the muscle memory starts to build and then when you do the big drill it's one less thing to worry about. also the go-bag thing -- we made a laminated one-page cheat sheet with all our primary and backup freqs, the net control call, and a quick ICS-213 format reminder. took maybe 20 minutes to make and it's genuinely saved us during exercises when someone panics and blanks on procedure.

not lazy at all, i went like 3 months barely keying up last winter. just wasnt feeling it. then one night i randomly called CQ on 17m and worked japan on the first call and suddenly i was back at it every night lol. sometimes you just need a break from the hobby side of it and let yourself just enjoy listening again

yeah the learning curve is real and honestly if you're already feeling shaky on rate management with one radio, adding a second one doesnt magically fix that. what it does is let you work a multiplier on 15 while you're running 20, which over a 48 hour contest adds up to a lot. but you gotta be comfortable enough with logging and frequency control that it becomes almost automatic before the second radio actually helps you. your antenna situation is the bigger concern though. sharing a tribander between two radios on adjacent bands with no real physical separation is going to be rough. you'd want at least the bandpass filters you mentioned, i use the W3NQN style filters and they're pretty solid but even then if both radios are cranking into the same antenna system you're going to hear yourself. some people run bandpass plus a good RF-sensing relay system to handle the antenna switching so only one radio keys at a time, which takes some of the mental load off at least. honestly my suggestion would be to try SO2R lite first — meaning you use the second radio purely for listening and spotting mults, dont transmit on it at all. no filter worries, no coordination headaches. get used to splitting your attention before you try to actually transmit on both. took me probably two full contest seasons before i felt like the second radio was actually helping my score.

yeah the SOTA + contest combo is kind of a thing but its pretty niche. some activators will pick a summit during say the ARRL 10m contest and try to work contest stations from the top but honestly most of the time the contest guys arent looking for your summit reference and you're not really optimized for either activity at that point. i tried it once during a VHF contest and it was more chaotic than fun tbh just do CQ WW on its own first and see if contesting clicks for you. some people love it some people find it kind of soulless after a few hours of 59 5 59 5 over and over. no shame either way.

so i finally worked up the nerve to check into the local 2m net last tuesday and it went okay i guess but i kept second guessing myself the whole time. like when the net control asked for any further traffic i wasnt sure if i was supposed to say something or just wait. ended up just saying my callsign again and saying nothing further which felt weird. also i wasnt sure how long to wait before transmitting after they call for check-ins — i jumped in at the same time as another guy twice and we doubled up. net control was really nice about it but still felt embarrassing. is there like a general rule for how long to pause before you key up? and is it rude to just check in and say nothing further every week or is there an expectation that you actually bring traffic or a comment or something? i dont want to be that guy who just checks in to pad the count but i also dont always have something to say

yeah the rx coverage opening up was the main reason i did it on mine tbh, i use it as kind of a shack receiver when im not actually transmitting. did you do anything to the squelch sensitivity while you were in there? i feel like the VHF squelch on mine has always been a little finicky and im not sure if thats a known thing or just my unit.

congrats on the build and the first qrp contact, that feeling never really gets old. 579 on 5 watts into ohio is solid, you picked a good time to get on 40m. to answer your question yeah band conditions and timing matter way more when youre running qrp, like it magnifies everything. i tend to stick to 40 and 20 mostly, 17m can be really good too when the band cooperates. early morning and late afternoon on 40 is usually where i find the most success for domestic stuff. and if you ever get into digital modes like ft8 the qrp thing almost becomes a non-issue, ive worked europe on 2.5 watts plenty of times. for the antenna honestly for portable use a simple linked dipole is hard to beat, you can roll it up in a bag and its just more predictable than an EFHW in my experience. that said a lot of people swear by the end fed half wave with a 49:1 unun and they work fine too, just more fussy about the feedpoint height sometimes. try both if you can, wire is cheap.

you'll do fine honestly. the hardest part is just getting out there the first time. def spot yourself on pota.app, dont rely on someone else doing it for you especially for your first one. just pull up the app, find your park reference number and log yourself as active, takes about 30 seconds once you know how. and if the frequency is busy just grab something else and respot. one thing i wish someone told me early on — if 20m feels dead try 40m especially if it's later in the day. and sometimes just calling CQ a few times with no response you think nobody's listening but then boom three stations come back at once. give it more time than you think you need before moving on. good luck tomorrow, let us know how it went

i remember my first time, i was so nervous i forgot my own callsign for a second lol. just breathe and go for it honestly. the people on my local repeater were super cool when i introduced myself, one guy even offered to do a proper signal check with me. you'll be fine

honestly you're overthinking it. i came from a completely non-technical background, was an english teacher for 20 years, and i passed General on my first try after maybe 3 weeks of using HamStudy.org every day during my lunch break. the math questions look scarier than they are because you dont actually have to derive anything, you just need to recognize which formula goes with which situation and plug in numbers. if you can do basic algebra you'll be fine. the thing that tripped me up a bit was the band plan and frequency privileges stuff, there's more of it than on the Tech exam and it's easy to mix up which modes are allowed where. but just drill the practice tests and you'll start seeing the patterns. i'd say give yourself 4-6 weeks if youre not in a rush, maybe less if you study consistently. the HF bands are absolutely worth it, 40m at night is a completely different world from anything you can do as a Tech.

i had almost the exact same setup in my old jeep, lip mount and feedline through the door, worked totally fine for like two years. dont stress it too much. the voltage thing yeah thats just startup, my ftm-400 does the same thing every time i crank it, drives me a little crazy but i just ignore it now because everything works fine once its running.

curious what your upstream bandwidth looks like at the rural site. ive found that a lot of these sync/drift issues people blame on software are actually just asymmetric bandwidth doing weird things to the streams — especially if youre on a rural connection that might be satellite or older DSL where upload is really constrained. the SDR stream is pretty greedy compared to just voice audio and if theyre competing for the same upload pipe things get messy fast. also not sure if you tried this but theres a guy on the RemoteHams forums who posted a config a while back for running the IC-7300 USB in a way that uses the radios own panadapter data instead of a separate SDR and apparently it cleans things up considerably. cant remember his callsign but worth digging through the threads over there if you havent already.

so ive been licensed for about 8 months now (general) and keep seeing people talk about cw on the bands and honestly it sounds kind of cool, like theres something about it that seems almost meditative or whatever. anyway i dont really know where to start. i tried just looking up youtube videos but theres so many different approaches and some people say learn the sounds not the dots and dashes and others say use an app and i dont know which way is actually going to stick for someone who has zero background with this. i work a desk job so i could probably practice during lunch or something. is there like a standard way people do this now or is it just whatever works for you