Steven Taylor

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for like two years now and i finally decided to just go for it and take the technician exam. problem is i dont really know where to start with studying. i looked at the question pool on the arrl website and theres like 400 something questions and i kind of panicked a little. do people actually memorize all of them or is there some smarter way to go about it. a buddy at work said just use hamexam.org and grind through it but i dont know if thats enough or if i should also get a book. i have about 3 weeks before the next local VE session so im not totally rushing but i also dont want to waste time going in the wrong way

honestly i flip between ft8 and psk31 more than js8call but i did spend a few weeks on it last winter. the conversations you can have are nice, feels more like actual ham radio than ft8 does. but i got frustrated with how slow it is, even in the faster speed modes its not exactly snappy. if you're patient it's rewarding, if you want quick contacts not so much. RTTY still gets more activity on contest weekends than js8call does in my experience which kind of says something about where the hobby is at right now.

yeah the elevation thing bites us every single time and yet somehow we're always surprised by it lol. we did a similar exercise about two months ago and one of our guys who checks into the net from home every week with a HT couldn't even key up the repeater from the shelter location we'd picked. same radio, same antenna, just not at his house anymore. ended up being a good lesson about not assuming your go-kit will perform the same as your shack setup.
the forms thing is real too. we actually started laminating a quick reference card for the net control position just to have something to glance at under pressure. nothing fancy, just the basics of how to handle a piece of traffic and the phonetic alphabet because you'd be shocked how many people go blank on G and P specifically for some reason. might be worth suggesting to your group if you dont already have something like that.
honestly the exercises that go a little wrong are way more valuable than the ones where everything works perfectly. if it all goes smooth you dont really find out where your weak spots are.

I did my first activation about a year ago and was nervous too, it ended up being way more fun than I expected. One thing I wish someone had told me — bring more food than you think you need, I got so caught up trying to work stations that I forgot to eat lunch and the hike back was rough lol. Also pre-spotting is smart but also just post again when you're actually set up and ready, sometimes the pre-spot gets buried by the time you're actually on the air and a fresh spot gets the pile going faster.

honestly dont stress too much about the tuning being perfect at first. i worked my first sat QSO with like very rough manual doppler correction, you can usually find the other station even if youre a bit off because the passband is wide enough. what got me was forgetting to invert my thinking on the uplink — when you tune your downlink up you gotta tune your uplink down, that catches a lot of people off guard. gpredict handles this automatically if you link it to the radio via CAT but its worth understanding why