Jessica Turner

yeah the 6m opening last week was something else, i was only on for about an hour but managed to snag a few new grid squares which i wasnt expecting at all. had the amp running at about 500w into a 5 element yagi and the signals were genuinely loud, not the usual marginal stuff you get when the band is barely open. definitely worth keeping an eye on the DX clusters right now if you havent been.
as for the 7760 i looked at the specs when they first announced it and it seems like its really aimed at guys who want to run a remote setup or have a cleaner shack since the control head separates from the RF unit. cool concept but for what most of us actually do day to day i dont think its a huge leap over the 7300 or 7610 honestly. price is going to be the deciding factor for me and from what ive seen its not going to be cheap

totally get the confusion, i went through the same thing when i was starting out. short answer is most serious award chasers do use all three but you dont have to right away.
LoTW is the gold standard for ARRL awards like DXCC and WAS — those pretty much require LoTW confirmations so thats the one id prioritize if you care about chasing awards down the road. eQSL is faster and more casual, some people love it and some barely touch it. it does count for a few things but not the big ARRL stuff. i keep an eQSL account just because its easy to upload to and some DX stations are really active on there.
paper cards through the bureau are kind of their own thing — slow as molasses, sometimes takes a year or more to get cards back internationally, but theres something genuinely satisfying about a physical card from a rare country sitting in your shack. i still send them for anything unusual or when someone specifically requests a card.
for the bureau, yes if you're in the US you go through ARRL for incoming and outgoing international cards. your regional club might handle some domestic stuff but check the ARRL website for the outgoing bureau process, you basically bundle up cards and send them in with some payment per card. its cheap but slow.

went through almost exactly this a couple years back. the RSP1A is genuinely a big step up from the dongle for HF work — the noise figure is way better and having proper 12-bit ADC instead of 8-bit makes a noticeable difference when youre trying to dig weak signals out of the noise. SDRuno works fine with it, though i actually prefer running it in SDR# with the SDRplay ExtIO plugin, feels more familiar.
the HackRF is a different animal. its a great device but the receive performance is honestly not as good as the RSP1A — wider bandwidth and TX capability but worse noise floor. so if youre primarily a listener which it sounds like you are, the RSP1A is probably the better choice for what you described. the HackRF makes more sense if you want to do things like replay attacks or transmit test signals or get into the whole GNU Radio experimentation side of things. for just monitoring HF and satellites the SDRplay wins on pure receive quality at that price point.
one thing worth mentioning — for satellite work you might want to look at the RSP1A with a good LNA anyway because even the better SDRs benefit from one for weak sat signals. the SDRplay suites well into SDR++ now too which is a much better piece of software than SDRuno imo.

honestly for what you're describing the 7300 is more than enough radio. the 7610 is great but the main things you're paying for are dual watch, better roofing filters, and some improvements to the receiver that you probably wont notice on a random wire anyway. the SDR waterfall on the 7300 is genuinely good, way better than what you're coming from, and the interface is just nice to use day to day.
i ran one for two years before upgrading and the only reason i moved on was i started doing some SO2R stuff which you clearly arent. save the money and put it toward a better antenna situation down the road, that'll do more for you than the receiver improvements in the 7610 ever would on your current setup.

yeah the ARRL website has a frequency allocation chart that breaks it down by license class, way easier to read than the actual part 97 text. techs do get some HF privileges — 80, 40, 15, and 10 meters for CW in specific sub-bands, and then 10 meters you also get SSB phone and some data modes above 28.3 MHz. the 40 meter thing your club friend mentioned is real, its 7.025 to 7.125 MHz CW only for techs. honestly just download the ARRL band plan and keep it somewhere handy until it becomes second nature. you wont get in trouble if you're genuinely trying to stay compliant and just made an honest mistake, but yeah its good that you're being careful about it.

yeah i had almost the exact same setup on an older silverado, went from a lip mount to a through-the-roof NMO and it was like night and day on 440. the lip mounts are convienent but you're basically compromising the whole antenna for the sake of not drilling a hole.
cant really comment on the Tram specifically but ive heard mixed things about their quality control, the one i borrowed from a club buddy had a loose connector that was causing all kinds of intermittent weirdness. might want to check the SO-239 connection before you do too much testing or you'll be chasing a gremlin that isnt really an antenna pattern problem at all.

There's often at least a 10-point difference in overall test scores between getting the hardest questions right versus wrong - on some questions, the difference between answering correctly (87% mean score) and incorrectly (73% mean score) is literally the difference between passing and failing. The receive filter bandwidth questions always seem to stump people.

so ive been using WSJT-X for ft8 stuff and it logs to its own adif file which is fine but i want to get everything into one place and also do some contesting this winter, maybe the ARRL 10m contest and possibly cqww if i can get my antenna situation sorted before then
right now im kind of split between just going all-in on N1MM since everyone says its the gold standard for contesting, but the interface looks like it was designed in 2003 and honestly kind of intimidates me. a buddy at the club has been pushing Log4OM and it does look a lot cleaner and apparently handles the WSJT-X udp logging without much fuss
but then the question is can Log4OM actually hold its own in a real contest environment or is it going to fall apart when im trying to dupe check fast and log fast exchange. i dont need anything crazy, im a single op from a modest station, no SO2R or anything like that
does anyone run both or switch between them depending on what theyre doing? feels like there should be a cleaner answer here but every thread i find is from like 2019

So I've been kind of out of the loop for a few months, work has been insane, but I sat down this weekend and started catching up on everything and wow theres a lot going on. First off has anyone been working 10 meters recently? I jumped on Saturday afternoon kind of just messing around and within like 20 minutes I had worked 14 countries. I know solar cycle 25 has been building for a while but I genuinely forgot what a good 10m opening feels like, been licensed since 2019 so this is kind of my first real taste of it.
Also saw something about Icom teasing a new HF rig, think it was on one of the Facebook groups, but I cant find the original post now. Anyone know what thats actually about? I dont want to get too hyped if its just a firmware update or something repackaged. My IC-7300 is doing fine but I'm always curious what's coming down the pipe.
And one more thing, apparently there's a big contest coming up in a few weeks? Someone mentioned it at our club meeting but I zoned out a little, anyone know which one they were probably talking about?