Brian Clark

so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i mostly just listen on the local repeater and occasionally key up but every time i try to follow along with a QSO or read posts on here people are throwing around all these abbreviations and i can only figure out like half of them from context. like i know QSL means confirmed or like an acknowledgement card and QTH is your location but then someone will say QRM or QSB and i have no clue. and its not just Q codes either, people say 73 and 88 and OM and YL and i kind of pieced together that 73 is like goodbye but is there a full list somewhere or do people just pick these up over time. also is there a difference between when you use them on CW vs voice because i feel like on the repeater people say them out loud which seems weird if they were originally morse code things

omg same experience here last week, i was just scanning around and 10m was absolutely packed. i'm pretty new too and had no idea it could sound like that. ended up working like 8 countries in an hour which is way more than i usually manage in a whole weekend lol
i downloaded the HamSphere app or actually i think it's just called hamclock that someone on here recommended and it shows the sfi and kp index live which has been really useful for knowing when to even bother turning the radio on for dx. still figuring out what all the numbers mean but it's fun to watch

so ive been doing contests for a few years now, mostly single op single radio, and my rates are decent but i keep hitting this ceiling around 120-130 qso/hr on phone and maybe 80-90 on cw during the good runs. been reading a lot about SO2R and honestly it sounds like it could help but also sounds like a massive rabbit hole i might not come back from.
my current setup is a K3 and an Alpha 91b and i do alright with that but adding a second radio and figuring out all the antenna switching and interstation interference stuff feels like a project that could eat a whole winter. my station isnt exactly optimized for it either, i have a pair of 40m wires and a tribander at 55ft, not exactly a SO2R dream.
the thing is i watch the claimed scores from guys at my skill level who run SO2R and the difference is real, like sometimes 30-40% more qsos. but i also wonder how much of that is just them being better operators in general, not the second radio. does anyone actually track this stuff? like did you go SO2R and see a measurable rate improvement that you could clearly attribute to the second radio vs just getting more experience over time?
also whats the minimum viable SO2R setup, like can i get most of the benefit without building a full bandpass filter farm and replacing all my feedlines with hardline or whatever

so ive been on FT8 pretty heavily for the past year or so, mostly just hunting dx and filling in the map squares, but lately ive been feeling like it's kind of... hollow? like yeah i worked a bunch of new entities but the contacts themselves are completely meaningless, just signal reports and grid squares and thats it. a buddy at the club mentioned JS8Call and said its basically FT8 under the hood but lets you actually type messages back and forth, still works at really low signal levels. been poking around at it and it seems interesting but im not sure if theres actually enough activity to make it worth setting up.
also while im at it i still have wsjt-x configured for FT4 which i mostly use during contests and that's been working fine, but i kind of miss the days when i was running PSK31 and actually talking to people, like full sentences and everything. does anybody actively run JS8Call on HF and is there a go-to frequency people hang out on? and does the software handle split and rig control the same way wsjt-x does because i really dont want to reconfigure everything from scratch if i can avoid it

yeah im kind of in the same boat as you, been licensed about a year and finally got LoTW working a few months ago. the certificate thing is weird but if you just follow the tqsl instructions step by step its not that bad. took me maybe an hour including waiting for the email from arrl to confirm my account.
one thing nobody told me that i wish i knew earlier — a lot of the big DX stations upload to LoTW pretty regularly now so your confirmations just kind of show up on their own which is really satisfying. i woke up one morning and had like 30 new confirmed entities i didnt even know were pending