Brazil Ham

so ive been listening on HF for a few weeks now and everyone is throwing around all these weird abbreviations and i can only figure out some of them from context. like QSL i get, that means like confirmed or acknowledged right? and QRZ i think is someone asking whos calling? but then theres QRM QRN QSB and a bunch of others that i cant always tell what they mean just from how people use them in a sentence.
also sometimes people just say them out loud on voice like they say the actual letters queue-arr-emm instead of just saying interference or whatever. is that just tradition or is there a practical reason for it. i was on 40m last night and someone said they had a lot of QRM from a neighbor or something and i figured it out from context but im curious if theres like a master list or a way people actually remember all of these without looking them up every time

so i've been wanting to do QRP for a while now and finally pulled the trigger on an Elecraft KX2 kit back in december. took me about two weekends to put it together, mostly because i kept second-guessing myself on the toroids and had to rewind one of them after i lost count of the turns. honestly thought i ruined the whole thing when i first powered it up and got nothing on receive, but turns out i had the volume knob confused with the RF gain which... yeah. anyway.
once i actually got it working i took it out to a state park last saturday with a random wire antenna just strung up in a tree and made 4 contacts on 40m running 5 watts. one of them was a station in texas and im in ohio so that felt pretty good to me. the whole setup including the radio, battery, and antenna stuff fit in a small backpack with room for lunch.
my question for the folks who have been doing portable QRP stuff for a while — how do you deal with the noise floor when youre out in the field? even at the park there was some QRM that made weaker signals hard to pull out. im using the built in filters but wondering if theres something else im missing or if this just gets easier as you get better at cw

ok so ive been listening to HF a lot lately and people throw around all these weird codes like QSL and QRZ and QTH and i kind of figured out a few of them from context but is there like a master list somewhere or does everyone just kind of memorize them over time. also people use other abbreviations that arent Q codes at all like 73 and 88 and DE and stuff like that and i wasnt sure if those were different or part of the same system. my elmer mentioned CW origins but i dont really operate CW so i wasnt sure if that stuff even applies to me on phone. do people actually say these out loud on voice or is that weird

so i was just sitting down with my morning coffee yesterday and figured id spin the dial around 28mhz just for kicks, not really expecting anything since 10m has been so hit or miss lately. well i ended up working like 14 stations in about 45 minutes, a bunch of EU and even heard a couple JA stations coming through pretty solid. i havent had a 10m opening like that in years honestly. the cycle 25 stuff is really starting to show up now in a meaningful way.
also saw something about icom releasing some kind of updated firmware for the 7300 that supposedly tweaks the filtering options a bit? hasnt shown up on my radio yet but curious if anyone else has seen that. and did anyone catch the ARRL announcement about the changes to the field day rules they're floating for next year — not sure how i feel about the remote operating stuff personally but thats a whole other thread i guess.
anyway just wanted to see if others were getting into 10m this week or if i just got lucky with the timing

the two VFO thing sounds scarier than it is tbh. i did my first linear sat QSO without any CAT control at all, just printed out the doppler schedule from heavens-above and kind of manually stepped the frequencies every 30 seconds or so. its clunky but it works well enough to prove the concept before you go down the gpredict rabbit hole. FO-29 might actually be easier to hear than AO-73 depending on where you are, the downlink seems punchier to me but that could just be my setup

The FTM-400 is a great radio for mobile, the waterfall display is actually useful for finding activity on a band you're not super familiar with. I ran one for about three years before I moved to the 500 series.
On the voltage drop thing — good call going to 8 gauge. A lot of people underestimate how much difference that makes especially if you're running any kind of digital mode or even just transmitting at full power for any length of time. I always tell people to run the heaviest wire they can reasonably get through the firewall and not to cheap out on the fuse holder either, the crappy blade fuse holders can add resistance over time especially if they get any corrosion under the hood. ANL fuse right at the battery is the way to go if you haven't already done that.

yeah hamStudy is the move, thats what i used. just do the practice exams over and over until you're consistently hitting like 85-90% and you'll be fine on test day. the real exam is 35 questions and you need 26 right to pass so theres actually more wiggle room than you'd think.
one thing i'd say is dont stress too much about fully understanding every single topic before your test date. you can always dig deeper into the stuff that interests you after you get your ticket. i barely understood anything about antennas when i passed and now its like my whole thing. the license is just the door, the learning kind of happens after

Check your power supply first - I had similar issues that turned out to be a noisy USB hub. Also try different sample rates, some dongles work better at 2.4MHz versus 2.75MHz. The V4's internal upconverter might be conflicting with your Ham It Up.

oh man yes this is so real, i hit the exact same wall around 12-13 and i was ready to give up on CW entirely. what helped me more than anything was just forcing myself to stop writing everything down. like literally put the pencil away. your brain is spending so much energy trying to get the letter on paper before the next one comes that youre already behind before you start. took me a while to trust that i could just listen and let words form in my head instead of on paper. also the farnsworth spacing you mentioned — that 20/13 thing — is actually good practice but at some point you need to bump both numbers closer together, the gap can become a crutch.
keep at it. 20wpm felt impossible to me two years ago and now i actually prefer it to slower speeds because the rhythm is more natural somehow.