Nordic Ham

so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now and finally decided to just go for the technician license. got a baofeng sitting in a drawer that a friend gave me like two years ago and figured its time to actually be legal lol. anyway i looked up the question pool and theres like 400+ questions on there and i dont even know which ones actually matter or if i need to memorize all of them. someone at my local radio club said just use hamstudy.org and youll pass in a week but im not sure if thats actually enough or if i should get a book too. does anyone have experience with this, like what actually worked for you when you were studying. im not great at memorizing stuff and some of the electrical theory questions look pretty intimidating honestly

ok so i just upgraded to general last month and im trying to figure out the 40 meter band. i keep seeing different numbers thrown around and im not sure which ones actually matter legally vs just being like... guidelines or whatever. my buddy told me i can operate down to 7.125 but then i read somewhere else that phone starts at 7.175 for generals? and then theres the whole band edge thing which honestly confuses me even more. like how close to 7.300 can i actually get without causing problems. i dont want to step on anyone or worse transmit outside the allocation entirely. running a ts-590 if that matters

so ive been running my IC-7300 stock for about two years now and honestly its a great radio out of the box, no complaints. but ive been reading forever about swapping out the stock roofing filter situation and whether it actually makes a difference on a crowded band. ended up pulling the trigger on the FL-5000 optional filter last month and did the install myself, which took maybe 45 minutes if you count the time i spent second-guessing myself before opening it up.
honestly the difference on 40m during a contest weekend was pretty noticeable, at least to me. adjacent signal rejection felt tighter. hard to say if that's placebo or real but i was pulling calls out of the noise that i was struggling with before. could also be atmospheric conditions that day who knows.
anyway the mod itself is dead simple, just the filter and some care not to strip those tiny screws. wondering if anyone else has done this and whether they went further with any other mods — ive seen some posts about the TX EQ settings and the DSP tweaks but havent messed with that stuff yet. also curious if anyone has done the hardware AGC mod that floats around on the forums, never been fully clear on whether thats actually worth the hassle or if the software DSP handles it fine these days.

so i finally did my first real solo activation last weekend at a state park about 45 minutes from my house. ive been hunting other peoples activations for a few months now and figured it was time to just go do one. threw the KX2 in a bag with my end fed half wave and a collapsible fishing pole and drove out there.
managed to get 12 contacts in about an hour and a half which i know isnt amazing but it counted as a valid activation so im pretty happy. mostly 40m with a couple on 20m. the hardest part honestly wasnt the radio stuff it was figuring out where to set up — the park has a lot of trees but also a lot of people walking by asking what im doing which i actually didnt mind, turned into some nice conversations about ham radio.
my question is about spotting yourself on the POTA app. i was using it but i felt like i was getting spotted and then the pile kind of died down fast, maybe 10-15 minutes after i posted? is that normal or was i doing something wrong. also does anyone have tips for getting more hunters to find you, like is there a better time of day or something. im on HF general class if that matters.

good write-up. one thing to add — the diagram situation on the 706 variants is genuinely confusing because theres at least three slightly different board revisions floating around and the jumper locations moved between them. i spent an embarassing amount of time staring at mine before i just started probing around with a multimeter to figure out what was actually what. old rigs, gotta love em.