Kenneth Lopez

the 7610 is a different animal from the 7300, dual watch, better dynamic range, its not really a fair comparison price wise but if you stretch the budget its closer to what your 590 does in terms of handling a busy band. i made the jump last year and havent looked back but i also do more serious contesting than you described so maybe overkill for your use case. what does your antenna situation look like, sometimes thats where the real difference shows up anyway

i was in the same boat when i started lol. one that tripped me up for a while was QRP vs QRO, low power vs high power. and then 88 means love and kisses which you sometimes see people send to YLs on the air, though honestly that ones a bit old fashioned now. 73 to you too is what people say but technically 73 already means best regards plural so saying 73s is grammatically wrong but everyone does it anyway and nobody cares. the abbreviations in general like ur for your and es for and and pse for please, those come from CW shortcuts that just carried over to voice and digital modes. once you start doing any CW at all it all clicks into place way faster

so ive been licensed for about two years now and mostly just do casual ragchews and some local nets but my elmer keeps telling me i should try a big contest at least once. CQ WW SSB is coming up and i figured why not just jump in and see what happens. i dont really have a serious station setup, just a Yaesu FT-991A into a fan dipole up about 30 feet, nothing fancy.
my main worry is that ill just be spinning the dial hearing wall to wall signals and not be able to work anybody because my signal is too weak or i dont know the exchange format well enough. i looked it up and its just signal report plus CQ zone right? zone 5 for me here in Ohio. seems simple enough but im sure ill mess something up in the heat of the moment.
also wondering if its worth trying to do ARRL Sweepstakes instead since i heard thats more of a domestic thing and maybe less overwhelming. or should i just do both lol. and has anyone done SOTA activations specifically timed around major contests to combine the two? curious if thats even a thing people do or if it would be pointless.

i went through this last year and honestly the hardest part was just figuring out which calls were actually available. there are some third party sites that let you search available callsigns by district and format which saved me a ton of time vs trying to dig through ULS directly. dont remember which one i used but if you google it youll find a couple options
got my vanity on the second try, first one had like three other people going for the same call and i lost out on the tie. wasnt the end of the world, picked my second choice and im happy with it now

so ive been licensed about 3 years now and i went through most of that during the solar minimum so 10 meters was basically a dead wasteland whenever i checked it. but the last few weeks ive been hearing signals out of nowhere, worked a few stations in south america last tuesday around 1400 local which i genuinely did not expect at all.
checked the solar flux index on the NOAA site and it was like 178 or something, which i guess is high? i dont really have a good feel for what the numbers mean in practice. like i know higher flux = better HF conditions in a general sense but how much does it actually matter day to day and is there a threshold where 10m really starts to cook vs just occasionally cracking open for a few minutes. also whats the deal with the geomagnetic indices, K index and A index, i see people mention those a lot but i still dont totally understand when a high K index is bad vs when its not a big deal
anyway if anyone has good resources for learning to actually read propagation forecasts properly id love to know. feels like theres a lot of info out there and i cant always tell whats useful vs just noise

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i keep hearing and seeing all these abbreviations and codes thrown around, like QSO and QTH and QRM and i kind of know what some of them mean from context but then someone on the repeater last week said something was QRT and i had no idea if that was good or bad lol. also on digital modes like FT8 theres even more shorthand flying around and half the time im not sure whats actually being communicated vs whats just protocol stuff the software handles automatically
is there like a master list somewhere or do people just kind of pick these up over time? and are there Q codes that are mostly CW/morse things that you wouldnt really use in voice? feel like i should know this stuff better by now

i had almost the exact same issue when i got back into cw last year, thought i had totally lost whatever skill i had. turned out my keyer speed was actually set a bit higher than what the display said because i had bumped something, and also i was gripping the paddle way too hard out of nervousness which makes everything tense up and rush. once i consciously relaxed my hand and dropped the speed down to like 10wpm just to rebuild confidence it started clicking again. dont give up on it, rusty is normal after a long break

okay so first thing, no morse code requirement anymore, they dropped that years ago so dont worry about that. technician is definitely where you want to start, ignore whoever told you to skip to general, you'll thank yourself for building up the knowledge in order. the question pools are all publicly available which is kind of nice because the actual test questions come straight from that pool, no surprises.
hamstudy.org is honestly all you need to pass the technician exam, just do practice tests over and over until you're consistently hitting 85% or better and you'll be fine. the real test is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass. some people like the ARRL technician book if they want something more in depth but i passed just using hamstudy without buying anything. there's also hamradioprep which some people swear by but i never used it personally.
find a local club too because they usually run VE sessions pretty regularly and sometimes they do license classes that walk you through everything. worth checking the ARRL website to find clubs near you.

JS8Call is definitely more alive in the evenings in my experience, especially 40m after dark when the band opens up regionally. during the day i find 20m a bit better for it. the userbase is smaller than FT8 obviously but the people who are on tend to actually want to chat which is kind of refreshing. i had a 20 minute back and forth with a guy in Colorado last week about antenna modeling software of all things, try doing that in FT8 lol.
the relay/store-forward stuff works better than i expected too. i sent a message one night that eventually got relayed through 3 stations and delivered to someone in New Mexico who i couldnt hear at all. took maybe 15 minutes but it worked. its a different mindset than chasing DX or filling a log, more like you're just... hanging out on the band. PSK31 i havent touched in a few years honestly, feels like it kind of faded out when FT8 took over. shame really because it was a good balance of weak signal capability and actual readable text at reasonable speeds

ok so ive been licensed about 8 months now and ive been making contacts pretty regularly, mix of HF and some VHF stuff. people keep telling me to upload my log to LoTW and also send QSL cards and someone else mentioned eQSL and honestly im just confused about what actually matters and why there are like three different systems.
i get that QSL cards are the old school paper confirmation thing and they look cool, i already got a few in the mail and yeah i understand the appeal. but do i actually need to be doing ALL of these? like is there a reason to do LoTW AND eQSL, they seem like they do the same thing? and what about people who only accept paper cards, is that still common?
also my logging software (using Log4OM) supposedly exports to both but i havent actually set it up yet because i wasnt sure if its worth the hassle. anyway sorry if this is a dumb question just trying to figure out what the community actually does vs what youre supposed to do