Amanda Wilson

so this has been bugging me for about three weeks now. picked up a used 7300 from a guy at the club swap, seemed fine at first, put it on the bench and noticed it was only doing around 28-32 watts max no matter what band or mode i put it in. ALC looks normal on the display, power output slider is all the way up, and i already reflashed the firmware thinking maybe something got corrupted at some point. no change.
i pulled the lid and dont see anything obviously cooked, no burnt smell, all the finals look intact visually. i havent probed anything yet because im waiting on a few components before i tear into it further. the SWR is fine, dummy load shows flat, so its not a matching issue. the guy swore it was working perfect but honestly who knows.
has anyone seen this specific behavior on a 7300 before where it just kind of... plateaus at low power and doesnt throw any fault codes or anything? wondering if its a bias issue on the PA or maybe something upstream in the drive chain before the finals even see signal. would love to hear if somone has been down this road before digging into it myself.

All station components should be grounded to a single point - it's the station that needs grounding, not the antenna. Use a short section of copper plumbing pipe as your single point ground. The station ground is a DC safety ground - any ground wire is a single wire circuit without an equal and opposite conductor.

i went through this exact same thing last year. what finally clicked for me was the Morse Mania app, i used it on my phone during lunch breaks and stuff. its got the Koch method built in and it kind of gamifies it a little which helped me stay consistent. the thing nobody tells you is that consistency matters way more than how long you practice in one sitting, like 15 minutes every day will get you further than 2 hours on a saturday and then nothing for a week.
also there are some youtube videos by a guy called the CW academy i think, or maybe its just CW ops who runs it, but they have actual structured courses with instructors and practice partners which sounds pretty great if you want something more structured than just an app. i havent done the full course myself but ive heard good things on here before.

Dayton is worth it at least once honestly, even if you dont buy anything the sheer amount of stuff to look at is wild. i went a few years back and just kind of wandered the flea market area for like 3 hours. bought some coax connectors and a random SWR meter from some guy who had no idea what he was selling lol. your local club probably does something, most of them do a spring event at least, id just email whoever the club contact is or check their Facebook if they have one, a lot of the older clubs barely update their websites

honestly the difference between an inverted V and a flat top at those heights on 40 is pretty marginal in practice. yeah the flat top theoretically has a lower takeoff angle but your ends at 25-28 feet are still not high enough to really take advantage of it — you generally want the ends at least 0.1 wavelength above ground for the pattern to clean up nicely and on 40m thats like 14 feet so you're probably fine either way.
what kills the inverted V more than the geometry is when the included angle between the legs gets too narrow. if you're at 35 feet apex and your legs are only dropping to 10-12 feet and the span is reasonable you probably have a decent angle. anything below like 90 degrees and the feedpoint impedance starts doing weird things and your 1:1 balun situation becomes more important. i ran both configs back to back a few years ago switching between them over a few weeks and honestly couldnt tell much difference on 40 for typical stateside stuff. dx was maybe slightly better flat but we're talking like half an S unit on a good day, not some revelation.

yeah the UDP thing will absolutely bite you if both programs are listening on the same port, WSJT-X only broadcasts to one destination at a time by default. what some people do is run something like JTAlert in the middle which can rebroadcast to multiple apps but honestly for a serious contest i just close Log4OM completely and let N1MM handle everything. you can import the ADIF back into Log4OM after the contest is over and it merges pretty cleanly as long as you dont have overlapping contacts from other modes that weekend.
the other thing worth knowing is N1MM has gotten a lot better with FT8 support through the contest modules, its not perfect but for something like ARRL DX where youre mixing CW and digital it handles the dupe checking way better than trying to keep two logs in sync live. i tried the two-program thing for about one contest and never again.

i just passed my tech last month so this is pretty fresh for me. the thing that helped me most was just doing practice tests over and over on hamStudy until i was consistently getting like 85% or better, then i felt ready. there were a couple questions on the actual exam i didnt recognize but enough felt familiar that i passed no problem. one thing i wish someone told me is that some test sessions have walk-ins and some require you to register ahead of time so check before you just show up somewhere

ok so ive been licensed for about 8 months now and i keep hearing different things about how to confirm contacts. my elmer told me to sign up for LoTW which i did but then someone in a pileup mentioned eQSL and now i see people mailing actual paper cards and i genuinely dont know what the expectation is here. like is there some kind of standard or do you just pick one and go with it?
i uploaded my adif from WSJT-X to LoTW and i think it worked but honestly not sure if i did it right because i have like 200 qsos in there and only 12 show as confirmed. is that normal or did i mess something up in the setup. the tqsl thing was confusing to set up and i wasnt sure which station location to use so i just guessed
also what do people actually DO with paper qsl cards these days, like do you need them for any awards or is that just kind of a tradition thing at this point