Brian Harris

yeah Q65 has pretty much taken over from JT65B for most EME work now, at least on 2m. the sensitivity is noticeably better and it handles doppler spread more gracefully which matters a lot when youre dealing with the path losses youre dealing with. if you havent already get WSJT-X updated and just spend some time decoding while the moon is up even before you transmit anything, youll start getting a feel for whats coming through.
single yagi EME is possible but youre really talking about working the big stations only, guys running 4x4 arrays or dishes. you wont be working other small stations. for 4 yagi minimum to start having more realistic QSO rates. the preamp placement is critical too, right at the feedpoint, not down at the rig, every tenth of a dB matters on this path. noise figure on the preamp needs to be under 0.5 dB ideally, MGF1302 or equivalent type stuff. elevation rotor is not optional unfortunately, the moon moves fast enough in elevation that you lose it quick without one. AR-303 or the green heron stuff works fine, doesnt have to be super fancy.
its a rabbit hole for sure but once you make that first contact its hard to go back

NanoVNA readings at that low a frequency can be a little sketchy if you havent done a proper OSL cal recently or if the cal was done with a short lead and then you added a bunch of coax after. not saying thats the problem but worth ruling out. i had mine reading resonance almost 200 kHz off once and it turned out i just needed to redo the cal at the end of the feedline instead of at the device port.

oh man i was so confused about this exact thing when i first got my ticket. what finally clicked for me was just sitting on 7.265 one evening and listening to a traffic net go through the whole thing. once you hear net control say "QNI" and people start checking in one at a time it all makes sense pretty fast.
also worth knowing — a lot of the 2 meter repeater nets in your area are way more beginner friendly than HF nets honestly. less pressure, people can usually hear you clearly, and net controls on local repeater nets tend to be patient with newcomers. check if your local club has one, mine runs every Tuesday and its genuinely just a bunch of people saying hi and talking about what theyre working on.

Honestly for your first antenna just throw up the dipole and be done with it. You can spend months agonizing over this stuff and not have any antenna at all. An inverted-V off a central support works great if you can get the apex up 30-35 feet, and yeah 40m is where you want to be for your first few months of HF, lot of activity day and night.
The vertical low-angle argument is real but it only matters if you're actually chasing DX consistently and know what you're doing. For making contacts and learning the band a dipole is just fine. Clay soil is good for a vertical but you're right that the radial system is a whole project on its own. Get the dipole up, work some stations, then decide if you want to go down the vertical rabbit hole later.

yeah the QRX thing gets people, it literally means please wait i will call you again in X minutes, so basically just means hold on. i got confused by QRO and QRP for the longest time too. QRP is low power like 5 watts or less and QRO means crank it up, high power. theres also QSL which you probably already know means confirm or acknowledge, like a receipt basically, and thats where QSL cards come from. one thing i'll add is that in contests people shorten even more and it gets wild, you'll hear stuff fly by super fast and it takes a while to parse it. ARRL has a decent list on their site if you want to bookmark something

this is making me want to actually finish the kit thats been sitting on my workbench for like four months lol. i got intimidated after i messed up one of the toroids and just kind of... set it down. maybe i should just try rewinding it and push through

i was in basically the exact same spot last year lol. ended up going with the baofeng uv-5r just to save money and honestly for hitting repeaters around town it works fine. BUT i did eventually pick up a yaesu ft-65 a few months later and the difference in audio quality on receive is pretty noticeable. so kind of wish i just started there. if your budget can handle it i'd probably skip the baofeng this time around since you already know what those are like

so ive been using N1MM for a few years now mostly for contests but i also just use it day to day because i never really bothered setting up anything else. it works fine but its kind of overkill when im just logging a few ragchews or some POTA stuff and half the features i dont even know what they do
a buddy of mine keeps telling me to try Log4OM and i downloaded it a while back but never really dug into it. the interface looked a bit different and i just went back to N1MM out of habit. does anyone actually run two separate loggers, like N1MM strictly for contests and something like Log4OM for general use? or is that more trouble than its worth keeping two logs synced up
also i run WSJT-X on the side for FT8 and i know it can log to both but ive had weirdness before where dupes show up or the freq data doesnt come through right. running an IC-7300 if that matters

yeah the math doesnt really capture it. ive run both from hilltop sites and honestly the yagi wins every time for weak signal SSB work, but only if you can point it. the thing people forget is that most of your interesting contacts on 2m tropo are going to come from a fairly predictable direction based on your geography — if youre on a ridge line you probably already know which path opens up most often. a fixed yagi pointed at your best path isnt as limiting as it sounds.
that said i had a 6el on a fixed mount for about two years and i definitely missed a few openings that were happening off the back or sides. it's a tradeoff. if you can do even a simple manual rotator setup with a bearing indicator it changes everything. doesnt have to be fancy, ive seen guys use a tv rotator with a potentiometer and a cheap voltmeter as the indicator and it works fine for VHF where you dont need super precise pointing.
the collinear is fine for FM and general use but for SSB weak signal work you really want that forward gain. 5.5 dBi vs even a modest yagi is a noticeable difference on marginal paths.

yeah the business communications thing trips up a lot of new hams. basically the rule is you cant use amateur radio to conduct business — so like calling a customer, coordinating work stuff, anything that substitutes for what youd normally pay for commercially. but just mentioning that you work somewhere or what you do for a living in normal conversation is totally fine, thats not what the rule is going after.
the music thing is pretty straightforward, its in there as prohibited obscuring the meaning of transmissions or something like that, and broadcasting in general is prohibited which is the bigger umbrella. nets doing trivia are generally fine because theyre not broadcasting to the general public, theres a two-way communication happening and its incidental. nobody is really worried about that kind of thing. your biggest practical concerns as a new tech are probably just staying in your authorized band segments and identifying properly every 10 minutes and at the end of contact. rest of it kinda becomes second nature.

Tech is honestly plenty to get started, most local ARES groups operate heavily on VHF/UHF which is fully within your priveleges. I've been with our county ARES group for about six years now and the majority of our activations are on 2m simplex or our local repeater network — no HF needed at all for most of it. Where HF becomes useful is for longer haul stuff or when you're working with state-level nets, but that's usually handled by the operators who've been around a while anyway.
AUXCOMM is kind of a broader term, it basically refers to any auxiliary communications support for public safety — ARES falls under that umbrella in most places but AUXCOMM is more of a FEMA/government framework thing. Your EC would be the best person to explain how your specific group fits into it because it varies a lot by county and state. Just go to a few more meetings and do the IS-100 and IS-700 courses on the FEMA site, those are usually required before you can actually activate and they're free and not too long.