Lisa Wang

the 990 is a beast but its also a boat anchor, thing weighs like 30 lbs i think? my buddy has one and the DSP and filtering is legitimately impressive especially on 40m when its a warzone at night but you kind of have to commit desk real estate to it. also the UI is very kenwood circa 2013 which takes some getting used to after the 7300 touchscreen stuff.
not saying dont get it, just depends what your shack looks like and how much you care about ergonomics vs raw rx performance. personally id probably go 7610 in your situation just for the continuity with icom and you already know how to drive it.

yeah the Q codes go way back to like early telegraph days, they were designed so operators who spoke different languages could still communicate. most of them are questions when you send them alone, and answers or statements when someone replies with them. so QRM by itself is basically asking "are you getting interference" but if someone just says QRM in a sentence they usually mean "there is interference" -- it gets a little loose in practice.
the ones youll hear most on voice are probably QSY which means change frequency, QRM is interference from other stations, QSB is fading signal, QTH is your location, QSL means acknowledged or confirmed (thats also where QSL cards come from), and QRN is static or natural noise. QRZ means "who is calling me" and you hear that a lot when someone is trying to figure out who just called them. honestly just grab the ARRL handbook or even just google "ham radio Q code list" and keep it next to you for a while, it clicks pretty fast once youre actually using them

so i finally got my direct conversion receiver for 40m to actually receive something other than static and i have to say i did not expect it to work this well for a first attempt. been messing with electronics for about 15 years but never actually built a radio from scratch before, always just kit stuff or bought commercial gear.
the design is pretty basic, LM386 audio amp, NE602 mixer/oscillator combo, nothing fancy. wound my own coils on a T50-2 toroid which took like three tries to get the inductance anywhere close to where i wanted it. trimmer cap for tuning across the band. whole thing fits on a piece of perf board about the size of a paperback book.
first night i fired it up i heard a couple of ssb signals which honestly just sounded like garbled noise because DC receivers do that whole mirror image thing and both sidebands come through at once. but then i figured out how to tune slightly off center and suddenly i had this guy from ohio coming in clear as anything talking about his antenna situation. sat there for like an hour just listening and feeling unreasonably proud of myself.
sensitivity is decent enough that i can hear stations that my FT-891 also hears, not all of them but enough to know the thing works. selectivity is obviously not great without any real filtering ahead of the mixer but for 40m SSB in the evenings it's workable. thinking about adding a simple bandpass filter on the input and maybe a better audio filter stage. anyone done mods to a basic NE602 design worth talking about?

so i've been running an old TS-430S for probably longer than i should have, great radio honestly but the age was starting to show and i was tired of fighting with the IF filters and just the general lack of a decent panadapter situation. anyway finally broke down and got an IC-7300 and i've had it on the bench for about three weeks now.
first impressions — the waterfall display is just ridiculously useful, i know everyone says this but until you've actually used one for real you don't really get it. tuning around 40m in the evening and being able to just see the whole band laid out like that, spot a signal, click on it, that workflow change alone probably made it worth it for me. the built in ATU handles my end-fed pretty well though i do have a separate LDG out there too for when things get weird.
one thing that kind of bugs me is the menu system takes some getting used to. not terrible but not intuitive either, i've been keeping the manual open on the tablet next to the rig which i havent had to do since i was a tech studying for general. receiver seems excellent, did some comparisons against my buddys IC-7610 on a shared antenna and yeah the 7610 is better but not by a huge margin for the price difference. overall really happy with it, just curious if anyone else made a similar jump from an older conventional rig and what the adjustment was like

so ive had this gap titan vertical up for about three years now and honestly im just tired of fighting it. the thing needs a really good ground system to perform well and my yard situation just doesnt allow for a proper radial field, i've got maybe 8 radials buried under the lawn and i know thats not enough but the wife would kill me if i dug up more of the garden. performance on 40 and 80 has always felt mediocre at best, like im always 2-3 S units down compared to what guys in the pileup are hearing from other stations in my general area.
anyway im thinking about just pulling it down and throwing up a simple wire dipole for 40m, maybe sloped or inverted vee since i only have one decent support which is a big oak tree at about 45 feet. i know a proper dipole will smoke the vertical on receive at least, but im wondering about the radiation angle difference for DX. with only one support im probably doing an inverted vee and i've read the angle opens up a bit compared to a flat top dipole which hurts you on DX. how much does that actually matter in the real world, like is it noticeable or just a theoretical concern that doesnt really play out on the air.
also thought about a fan dipole to cover multiple bands but ive never built one and not sure if the interactions between the elements cause problems or if its pretty forgiving. anyone running one of those off a single feedpoint with good results

yeah the band plan trips people up all the time dont feel bad. the FCC frequency allocations for each license class are in part 97.301 and 97.305 if you want to look them up directly but honestly the easiest thing is just to download the ARRL band plan chart and stick it on the wall near your rig. 14.200 is fine for general on 20m, whoever told you to check your privileges was either wrong or maybe thought you were doing something else, hard to say without knowing the full situation.
on the encryption thing, the rule is in 97.113 and basically you cant use codes or ciphers to obscure the meaning of your transmissions. the auxiliary link thing is a narrow exception that applies to certain automated control situations, its not really something that affects most normal operating. if youre just doing voice or digital modes like FT8 or JS8Call youre fine, those arent encrypted even though they look like gibberish to the ear.

hamstudy.org is honestly probably all you need for the tech exam, dont overthink it. just grind through the practice questions every day and pay attention to the ones you keep getting wrong. the way it tracks your weak spots is pretty useful. 3-4 weeks is plenty of time if youre putting in even 30 minutes a day.
the arrl book is fine but most people i know never read the whole thing, they just use it to look up stuff that doesnt make sense from the question pool alone. like if you see a question about antenna polarization and it means nothing to you, maybe flip to that section, but dont feel like you have to read cover to cover before the test.
one thing i'd actually suggest is just learn the answers to the rules and regs questions cold because those dont really require understanding, just memorization. the electrical stuff is easier if you actually get why ohms law works the way it does, but for the FCC part stuff just drill it.

not a dumb question at all, this stuff confused me for years honestly. so the short version: DXCC, WAS, and WAZ are all separate awards from the ARRL and they track different things but they can overlap — a QSO can count toward more than one award at the same time if it meets the criteria. so that Canary Islands contact could count for DXCC (EA8 is a separate entity) and also for WAZ zone 14 i think, you'd want to double check that.
LoTW is the way to go for confirmations, if the other station uploads their log it'll match automatically and you'll get credit. not every DX station uses it though so sometimes you're waiting a while or you end up sending a paper QSL card. dont give up on that canary islands one, plenty of EA8 ops are active on LoTW. i'd say start with DXCC since it kinda naturally pulls you into chasing DX and the others fill in along the way without a ton of extra effort

i went through this exact same thing lol. ended up with the UV-82 mostly because someone on reddit said the dual PTT buttons were nice and honestly i dont even use that feature. works fine though, been hitting W5XYZ (our local linked repeater) every evening no issues. just make sure whatever you get you double check the frequency coverage because some of the cheaper ones have weird gaps or the transmit power isnt what they advertise