Karen Brown

the split thing is huge and most people never figure it out. i spent years just adding to the noise before i started really listening to where the dx was actually coming back. these days i spend the first few minutes just watching the pattern — where is he fishing, how wide is his listening window, is he moving up or down through the pile. once you get a feel for it you can make a pretty decent guess. i run a modest station too, 100w and a hex beam at 30ft, not exactly a big gun setup, and i still manage to work most things i need with patience.
the short call thing is a bit more situational in my experience. if the band is really degraded and the dx is clearly struggling to copy full calls then yeah just throwing the suffix can work. but if conditions are decent and the op is asking for full calls you're just annoying everyone including the dx. read the situation basically.

so ive been licensed for about 4 months now and i notice some guys on the local repeater use phonetics every single time they say their callsign and others never use them at all. like one guy says his call completely normally and everyone seems to understand fine but then another guy spells out every single letter with NATO phonetics even when conditions are totally clear. is there some rule about this or is it just personal preference? i dont want to sound dumb on air by doing it wrong either way

yeah this is basically the exact setup i landed on after messing around with it for way too long. N1MM for contests, full stop, nothing else really comes close for that use case, the SO2R support alone if you ever go down that road is worth it. and Log4OM or even just TQSL for the day to day stuff.
the sync issue is real though. what i do is after every contest i export the Cabrillo from N1MM, submit it, then export an ADIF and import into my main log. i turn off duplicate checking on the import because contest QSOs are valid even if you already worked the guy on a different band last week. havent had major problems with it in about 3 years of doing it that way. the exchange field weirdness you mentioned is usually because Log4OM doesnt know what to do with contest-specific fields like serial numbers or section codes, just map them to a comment field and move on.
as for WSJT-X into N1MM, ive seen people do it but honestly i wouldnt bother unless you're doing a VHF contest where FT8 actually matters for the multipliers. for HF contests its kind of a distraction anyway

yeah that pattern — one band low, everything else fine — usually points to the LPF relay or the filter switching itself rather than the finals. on the 7300 the low pass filters are switched by relays and if one of those relays has a dodgy contact it'll pass signal but with extra loss, and that loss shows up as reduced output. 20m shares a filter with... i want to say 17m if i remember right, might be worth checking whether 17m is also slightly low or if its just 20.
if 17 is also affected that kinda confirms it. the fix isnt too bad if youre handy with a soldering iron, the relay can be reflowed or replaced, but honestly given the 7300s price point id be on the phone to Icom service first to see if this is covered under anything. theyve been decent about stuff like this in my experience.

the stock mic on the 7300 isnt terrible but its not great either, and yeah the default EQ settings are kind of optimized for whatever Icom thought sounded good which doesnt necessarily match your voice. first thing id do is actually record yourself — just use the monitor function or plug a recorder into your audio chain and listen back, most people are shocked how different they sound compared to what they think.
for the parametric EQ on the 7300 a lot of guys find that boosting slightly around 2-3kHz and rolling off some of the low end below maybe 200Hz cleans up the audio a lot for SSB. the bandwidth on SSB is limited anyway so having too much bass just eats into your modulation without adding intelligibility. compression is worth setting properly too — the 7300's built in ALC meter is your friend there, you want peaks hitting maybe 2/3 of the way up, not slamming all the way.
the Heil will make a noticeable difference though, especially that PR-40, it has a tighter pattern so it's more forgiving about room noise and it just has a better midrange presence for voice.

yeah i went through the same thing with my first dipole, spent way too long worrying about the feedpoint and it just worked anyway lol. i never put a balun on mine and it's been up two years, works fine. i know thats probably not the right answer but sometimes its just good to know it'll at least function.
one thing i would do different is use some kind of strain relief so the coax weight isnt pulling directly on your wire connections, had one come apart on me after a wind storm and it was annoying to fix up on a ladder.

yeah i went through the same thing with my first dipole, spent way too long worrying about the feedpoint and it just worked anyway lol. i never put a balun on mine and it's been up two years, works fine. i know thats probably not the right answer but sometimes its just good to know it'll at least function.
one thing i would do different is use some kind of strain relief so the coax weight isnt pulling directly on your wire connections, had one come apart on me after a wind storm and it was annoying to fix up on a ladder.

so ive been licensed for about 6 years now and mostly do HF stuff, some 2m weak signal when conditions are good but ive always been fascinated by EME. watched a few videos and read some stuff but the equipment requirements seem kind of all over the place depending on who you ask.
my current setup is a yaesu ft-991a and i have a 5 element yagi for 2m that i built last summer. i know thats almost certainly not gonna cut it for moonbounce but i dont really know what the minimum viable setup looks like. i see people talking about running 4 yagi arrays and kilowatt amplifiers and then other guys claiming they worked the moon on like a single long yagi with 100w which honestly sounds made up to me.
also the software side confuses me a bit, i know WSJT-X is involved but i see references to JT65A specifically for EME vs other modes and im not sure what the current consensus is on that. any pointers would be appreciated, dont need to be hand-held just point me in a direction

honestly same boat as you not that long ago. what finally clicked for me was just accepting that youre gonna miss a lot of spots at first and thats fine. the cluster is kind of like a river, you cant drink all of it, you just grab what you can.
one small tip though — DXwatch lets you set up some basic filters if you poke around in the settings, i had no idea for the first few months. you can filter by your continent or by band and it makes the noise a lot more manageable. with a 7300 and a dipole youre actually in pretty decent shape for a lot of the more common DX, dont undersell your setup too much