Repeater King

not sure about the CI-V specifics but for the relay timing issue have you looked at using a hardware interrupt instead of polling? might get you tighter response times. also the raspberry pi 4 has way more headroom if the mega starts feeling cramped, ive been running a whole logging and digital mode pipeline on one and its barely breaking a sweat. though for something this timing-sensitive maybe stick with the arduino since you dont have an OS in the way messing with latency.

yeah thats pretty much just what a dipole does, 40m is a wide band and a resonant half wave dipole isnt going to cover all of 7.0 to 7.3 with flat SWR unless you're running something like a fan dipole or a trap setup. 1.4 at your resonant point is honestly really good for a first build especially with stranded wire and a field expedient center insulator. the slope probably shifts resonance a little and changes the pattern somewhat but nothing to worry about. your tuner should handle the band edges just fine if your radio has one, and even without a tuner most rigs wont care about 2.8:1 as long as its consistent and not bouncing around.
the Ontario contact kind of proves it works, 40m wire antennas punch above their weight especially at night. if you want to flatten it out eventually you could try a 1:1 choke balun at the feedpoint, sometimes with coax you get common mode current issues that mess with the readings a bit.

dont sleep on just getting a good upconverter for the RTL-SDR before spending more money — i ran an Ham It Up for like 6 months and it actually helped a lot on HF. but yeah if you already tried direct sampling and youre not happy then the RSP1A is probably the right move, the HackRF for receive-only use is kind of silly unless you specifically need to go above 6 GHz or whatever it tops out at.

this is actually making me want to get more involved with my local ARES, ive been licensed for two years and mostly just do casual HF stuff but disaster prep is kind of why I got my license in the first place if im honest. do most groups welcome people who are still pretty green or is there a baseline skill level expected before you show up to a drill

not sure about the CI-V specifics but for the relay timing issue have you looked at using a hardware interrupt instead of polling? might get you tighter response times. also the raspberry pi 4 has way more headroom if the mega starts feeling cramped, ive been running a whole logging and digital mode pipeline on one and its barely breaking a sweat. though for something this timing-sensitive maybe stick with the arduino since you dont have an OS in the way messing with latency.

im kind of in the same boat as you actually, been at it since january and just cracked 13wpm on LCWO last week which felt huge. what helped me recently was switching from copying letters to copying whole words and just accepting that im going to miss stuff. theres a site called morse.kjwenger.com or something like that with common word lists and i just run those over and over. also started just tuning around 40m in the evenings and copying whatever i can, even if its just call signs and signal reports, just to hear real operators and not a computer. feels more real somehow

so ive been studying for about 3 weeks now and my exam is scheduled for next saturday. mostly been using hamstudy.org and going through the question pool over and over but i still feel like im not totally confident on some of the electrical stuff, like the math formulas and ohms law type questions. i understand the concepts mostly but when they put it in a question format it throws me off sometimes.
also not really sure what to expect at the actual exam session, like do i need to bring anything specific? i looked it up and saw something about 2 forms of ID but one post said something different so now im not sure. and is it multiple choice the whole way through or are there other kinds of questions mixed in
anyway if anyone has tips that would be great, especially for the electrical stuff since thats where i keep getting tripped up on the practice tests

so ive been running N1MM for contests for probably 4 or 5 years now and honestly its fine, does what it needs to do, but ive been messing around with Log4OM for general shack logging and i actually really like it for day to day stuff — the QSL management and the way it handles LoTW sync is way cleaner than anything ive tried before
my problem is WSJT-X integration. right now i have WSJT-X talking to Log4OM no problem for FT8 and FT4 and that all works, but when i fire up N1MM for a contest weekend the whole UDP port situation turns into a mess. i think i had it set up at some point where both were kinda-sorta getting the log data but i honestly dont remember what i did and now its just not working right
so the question is — does anyone actually run both N1MM and Log4OM simultaneously and have WSJT-X piping into both or do you just pick one and deal with it during contest weekends. also wondering if anyone has fully switched to Log4OM for contesting or if thats kind of a dead end, i know it has contest modes but i've heard mixed things

im in almost the exact same situation lol, around 13-14 and been there since like spring. one thing someone told me at my club was to set the character speed higher than the overall speed, like run characters at 20wpm but words spaced out so you have time to think. farnsworth spacing i think its called. the idea being your brain learns to hear the characters at speed even if you have extra time between them and then you gradually close the gap. havent been at it long enough to say if it really works but it seems to be helping a little bit so far.