David Kim

so ive been wanting to learn CW for a while now, like probably a year of just thinking about it and never starting. finally sat down last week and tried a few things and honestly im more confused than before about the best way to go about it. i downloaded like three different apps, tried just memorizing the dit-dah patterns from a chart, watched some youtube stuff, and nothing really clicked. feels like theres too many methods and everyone swears by their own thing.
my goal isnt even to get super fast, maybe just enough to make a few contacts someday and not completely embarass myself. do most people start with the alphabet first or just jump into words? also is koch method actually worth sticking with or is that just something old timers push because its what they learned on? any advice appreciated, im starting totally from scratch here

ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now (tech, studying for general) and i keep hearing people on the air and in forums use stuff like QSL, QTH, QRM and a bunch of others and i kind of piece together what they mean from context but i dont actually know most of them. like QSL i think means like... confirmed? and QTH is location? but then theres QSB and QRN and QRZ and honestly i have no idea where to even start. is there like a standard list somewhere or do people just memorize them over time. also are there other abbreviations that arent Q codes that i should know, because people say things like 73 and i figured out that means goodbye basically but then someone said 88 to someone else and i have no idea what that one is. and whats the deal with using these on digital modes vs voice, do people actually say the letters out loud on SSB or is it more of a CW thing

so i've been wanting to get my tech license for a while now and i finally downloaded the question pool pdf from the arrl website but honestly i'm just kind of staring at it and dont know where to start. there's like 400+ questions and some of the electrical stuff i haven't thought about since high school which was... a long time ago lol. a friend told me to just memorize the answers without really understanding them but that feels wrong? like i want to actually know what im doing when i get on the air eventually. is there a study guide that actually explains the why behind things or should i just grind through hamstudy or whatever. also how long did it take most of you to feel ready, i dont want to schedule the exam and embarrass myself

yeah what he said about the gateway being offline is real, i wasted like two hours one evening thinking my setup was broken and it was just the local gateway had been down since that morning. the winlink.org map shows a last-activity timestamp, definitely worth checking that first before you go down a rabbit hole reconfiguring things.
one thing i'll add — if you have access to HF at all, sometimes its actually easier to get your first successful Winlink session going on HF using VARA HF or even Winmor just because theres way more gateway coverage and if one frequency isnt working you can just try another. not saying VHF is wrong for what you want to do with ARES, thats totally the right call for local emcomm, but for just proving out your setup and understanding how the message flow works it can be less frustrating to start on HF.

yeah the simultaneous activations are totally doable, i did one last fall where the summit was inside a state forest that qualifies for POTA. just make sure you upload to both programs separately, the logs dont cross over automatically or anything like that. congrats on the first one btw, 22 contacts is solid especially if conditions werent great

honestly i gave up trying to do it manually after like three passes of chasing my own tail. got gpredict connected to the radio over CAT and it was like a completely different experience. the doppler tracking isnt perfect but its close enough that you can actually have a qso instead of just tuning around the whole time. the arrow handheld setup is totally workable btw, ive made plenty of contacts with one, just gotta nail the elevation angles and not block yourself with your own body which sounds obvious but yeah.

QRM is interference from other stations, like someone transmitting on your frequency or adjacent to it, basically man-made noise. QRN is natural static and atmospheric noise, like lightning crashes and that kind of thing. so yeah pretty different once you know. QSB is signal fading, you're right on that one. and 73 just means best regards, everyone uses it as a goodbye. OM is old man which sounds rude but its just what hams call other male operators, YL is young lady and thats for female operators regardless of age. there used to be XYL for a married woman but you hear that less now. honestly the ARRL has a Q code reference sheet somewhere on their site and theres a few laminated cards you can buy that have the common ones. after a while you just absorb them without thinking about it, especially if you hang around on HF and watch the clusters or read other peoples logs

the NR770H is a decent antenna, nothing wrong with it, but yeah vertical collinears are all kind of fighting the same battle — you get gain on the horizon but its omnidirectional so youre spreading it around. if the guys sounding stronger on the net are running something like a 5/8 over 5/8 or a longer collinear up higher thats probably where the difference is coming from, not some magic antenna just good height and maybe a bit more gain.
for the hilltop idea though a yagi makes a lot of sense if you know roughly where the people you want to work are. even a 3 element beam on 2m will give you maybe 7 or 8 dBd and you can feel that difference instantly compared to a whip. i built a cheap PVC tape measure yagi years ago off the ARRL design and honestly for portable ops its hard to beat, weighs almost nothing and you can tune it pretty easily. if youre doing SSB weak signal stuff thats a whole different conversation but for FM simplex into town it would absolutely get the job done from a hilltop.

yeah i was the same way when i started, kept second guessing myself. one thing that helped me was just memorizing the whole NATO list before i ever keyed up so it was automatic. there are a few guys on our local repeater who use their own made up phonetics which always confused me more than anything lol, like why would you say "washington" for W when whiskey is right there. stick with the standard ones and youll be fine. band doesnt really matter as much as signal conditions do i think

Libration fading is caused by the libration movement, with the receiver experiencing fading distributed about a median value. On 70cm I've measured libration fading typically 3-6dB peak-to-peak. Your larger swings suggest Faraday rotation is dominant. Consider switching to linear horizontal polarization for testing.

Welcome to DX-ing! Yes, DXCC requires 100 confirmed contacts with different DXCC entities (countries/territories) - currently there are 340 total entities. And absolutely, ARRL accepts LoTW for DXCC applications - it's much cheaper than mailing QSL cards worldwide. Keep working that 20m with your G5RV!

so ive been trying to work some of the pacific stations that have been coming through lately but man these pileups are just crazy. im running 100w to a dipole and i can hear the dx fine but they never seem to hear me back. tried calling on their frequency and also split but no luck. any tricks you guys use? maybe im just not being patient enough but after 45 minutes of calling the same station i start to wonder if im doing something wrong

nice work. i did my first one earlier this year and yeah the hunters find you SO fast once youre spotted. kind of wild actually. i was nervous about the pileup too but you just settle into a rhythm pretty quick. what park was it if you dont mind me asking