Robert Chen

SOTA is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum from CQ WW and i love both for totally different reasons haha. CQ WW is just chaos in the best way, i usually do a few hours here and there rather than the full 48 because my family would never forgive me otherwise. as for field day yeah our club starts the location debate basically every january, last year we almost ended up in a parking lot which would have been rough. good luck in CQ WW, just have fun with it

i ran a vertical on a small lot for two years with only 16 radials and it worked fine tbh, never felt like i was missing huge amounts compared to what i hear from guys with full elevated systems. but the noise thing the other guy mentioned is real — my S-meter was always a couple points higher on the vertical vs my dipole on the same band. for just chatting around and some contesting the dipole is probably less headache overall

yeah the net schedule thing is genuinely kind of a mess to navigate at first. the ARRL has a net directory but honestly the most reliable thing ive found is just asking at your local club because somebody there will know whats actually active versus whats been dead for two years but still listed somewhere. a lot of the old net schedule pages just never get updated. for special event stations, the best place i know is the ARRL special event station page, they list upcoming ones and it gets updated pretty regularly. also W1AW operates on a published schedule if you havent tried working them yet, thats kind of a rite of passage thing. once you check in to a few nets you start hearing about others through the net control operators, they usually announce stuff at the end of the session. just takes a bit to get plugged in but you'll get there.