Sarah Mitchell

honestly the extra portions of the bands are genuinely less crowded, that part is real. on 40m especially during the evenings the general portion gets wall to wall signals and if you can drop down a bit it does make a difference. that said if you're mostly ragchewing you might not care that much.
the exam itself is not as bad as it looks. the math questions are harder if you actually try to understand the theory but a lot of people just memorize the pool and pass. i'm not saying that's the right way to do it but it works and the pool isn't going to change for a while. took me maybe six weeks of studying on and off using hamstudy.org and i passed first try. the actual operating privileges felt worth it to me after about a year of having the ticket but your mileage may vary depending on what you're into

yeah the IF filter thing youre probably thinking of is the roofing filter upgrade, some guys have been swapping in narrower roofing filters on the 7300 to help with close-in dynamic range. icom used a 3kHz roofing filter stock and there were some aftermarket options floating around although i think availability has been spotty. the actual improvement kind of depends on your operating conditions, if youre in a crowded contest environment it matters more than casual rag chewing.
your preamp mod sounds like what a few guys on the icom reflector were discussing a while back. the 7300's front end is decent but not exceptional and those lower bands can get messy especially at night when the noise floor changes. glad it worked out, i might try the same thing on mine this winter when im not using it as much

so ive been listening to a lot of HF lately and everyone is throwing around all these codes and abbreviations and i can barely keep up. like i get QSO is a contact and QTH is location but then someone will say something like QRM or QSB or TNX es 73 and i kinda piece it together from context but i dont really know if im right
is there like an actual list somewhere that people use or do you just kind of absorb it over time? also some of the CW guys seem to use even more shorthand like GE and GM and stuff, are those separate from Q codes or is it all mixed in together. just trying not to sound like a complete idiot when i finally get on the air

this is really cool to read, ive been thinking about getting into QRP too but wasnt sure if the QCX or something else would be better for a start. did you find the instructions pretty clear or did you have to look stuff up a lot? im decent at soldering but not super experienced reading schematics yet so kinda nervous about jumping into a kit build

so ive been running a remote station setup for about 8 months now using RemoteHams with an SDR on the rx side and a separate TX chain controlled through their client software and the connection just absolutely refuses to stay stable once im actually in a QSO. like it'll sit there perfectly fine while im tuning around, waterfall looks great, audio is clean, and then the second someone comes back to my CQ it just tanks. latency spikes, audio breaks up, sometimes the whole client just drops me back to the login screen.
my upload at the remote site is solid, running about 35 up through a cable connection, ping to the server is like 18ms which seems fine to me. ive tried messing with the audio buffer settings in the client and bumped it up from 200ms to 400ms which helped a tiny bit but didnt really fix anything. the TX control side actually stays connected fine its just the SDR audio path that goes sideways.
im wondering if this is a RemoteHams server routing issue or if theres something specific about how they handle the SDR stream during periods of higher activity on their end. has anyone done any packet captures on the audio stream to see whats actually happening. i feel like im missing something obvious here but ive been staring at this for weeks and dont have a fresh set of eyes on it anymore.

first thing id check is whether your symbol and path are actually being decoded correctly at the first digi. sometimes what looks like a relay is actually just aprs-is injecting your packet back in from an igate somewhere and it only looks like it went through the digi. pull up the raw packets on aprs.fi and look at the path trace, youll see if WIDE1-1 actually got decremented to WIDE1* which would show it was actually digipeated vs just seen directly by an igate.
also 50 watts with a mag mount honestly might not be as good as you think depending on your ground plane situation. mag mounts on a truck cab can be pretty decent but if the antenna isnt centered or the cab geometry is weird youll lose a few db you didnt expect to lose. not saying thats it but worth ruling out. whats your packet rate set to, are you beaconing smart or fixed interval

yeah ive done something close to this. not with an RTL-SDR though, i was using an SDRplay RSP1A and that changes things a bit. the RemoteHams SDR server is kind of finicky about initialization order — you basically have to have the SDR server started and the device open before the main RRC client tries to connect or it just gives up. no real error, just hangs like you said. try launching the SDR server piece first and letting it sit for like 30 seconds before you do anything else. also make sure the sample rate is set conservatively, i had mine trying to push 2 MHz wide and that was just killing the stream. dropped it to 900k and things got way more stable. on 25 up you should be ok for the audio plus a narrow SDR slice but dont expect to run a wide panadapter remotely, it just doesnt work that well unless youre on fiber both ends.

oh man i remember that feeling, dont sweat it too much honestly. most nets especially local club ones are used to new folks stumbling a bit and net control has usually seen it all. the general thing with most nets ive been on is you just give your callsign when they call for check-ins, then wait for them to come back to you before you say anything else. some nets specifically ask for callsign and name together from the start but they'll usually announce that before calling for check-ins.
the "please stand by" thing — yeah that was probably for you but it's not a big deal, you learn the timing by feel after a while. trying to find the gap on a net with lots of stations and varying signal levels is genuinely tricky especially on a new repeater you're not used to.
and checking in with nothing further is completely fine, like totally normal. a lot of people do exactly that. some nets are just a roll call with a bit of chit chat after and nobody expects you to have a traffic message or some big announcement. just being there and saying hi is the point half the time.

pretty classic symptom of one of the final transistors letting go, the RD70HVF1s in that rig have a reputation for going soft before they fail completely rather than just dying outright. the fact that receive is fine and it shows full power on the meter internally but nothing's actually getting out really points that direction. the internal power reading on those is measured before the finals so you can have the driver stage working perfectly and the finals half dead and the radio has no idea.
before you pull it apart though, check the ALC voltage with a scope or even just a DC voltmeter on the ALC line while you key it up, if something upstream is going haywire with ALC it can throttle the output way down. had that happen on a buddys 897 once and it looked exactly like a final failure but ended up being a leaky cap on the ALC circuit. saved him like 80 bucks in parts. that said in my experience with the 857 specifically, its usually the transistors. Yaesu used to sell them direct but check RF Parts, they usually have them in stock.

the ridge is probably your real problem more than the antenna choice honestly. a higher collinear might help a bit if you can get it above the terrain obstruction but if the ridge is actually in the first fresnel zone youre just going to keep fighting it. a yagi with even modest gain pointed that direction would likely make a bigger difference than going from a x50 to something taller. i know you dont want to give up the omni but you could always put both up and use a switch, lot of guys do that. keep the collinear for general use and flip to the yagi when you want those specific repeaters. a 5 element for 2m is not that big a deal to mount and aim.

yeah im planning on it, my buddy from the repeater club said they moved it to the fairgrounds which should help with the space issue. not sure about the special event station but the last two years they had someone doing fox hunting in the parking lot which was a blast. i'll probably get there early to hit the fleamarket tables before everything good gets snagged

the timing/rhythm thing is real and i think its massively underrated. ive noticed the same thing on a lot of the big dxpeditions, the ops get into a groove and if you can sync to it youre basically halving the randomness. some of the well-run operations like the recent ones out of the central pacific, their ops are incredibly consistent and once you find the pattern its almost mechanical.
the split listening window thing is also spot on. that 5 up designation is almost meaningless in a huge pileup, everyone piles into the bottom khz of the range and the smart move is to find the quieter water higher in the split. ive had good luck going maybe 7-8 up when listed 5-10, theres way less competition up there even though its clearly in range. you do risk the op not hearing you as well depending on their antenna situation but its a tradeoff worth making when the bottom is just a wall of noise.
one thing i'd add is antenna polarization matters more than people admit. had a buddy running similar power to me on the same path to a carribbean entity, he had a vertical i had a yagi, his vertical was actually outperforming me into that specific path that day. sometimes you just gotta accept propagation is doing weird stuff and the 100w guy with a vertical at the right angle is beating your 1kw beam.