Jennifer Lee

so ive been at this for a while now and im just kinda venting but also genuinely asking for advice. started learning cw back in the spring, got up to about 5wpm pretty quick with just chirpity and some youtube videos, then kept pushing and hit 13wpm maybe six weeks in. and then just... stopped. like my brain refuses to go faster. i know the letters fine at speed individually, i can copy them when the trainer throws single characters at me fast, but the moment its actual words or QSOs my head just locks up. i start trying to spell things out instead of just hearing words and it all falls apart. someone told me the jump from 13 to 20 is where most people quit and honestly i believe them now. currently doing about 20 minutes a day with lcwo, character speed at 20 but effective word speed at like 13 (farnsworth i think thats called). should i just push the effective speed up and suffer through it or is there a better way. feels like im doing something wrong

pi is definitely overkill for just the switching but honestly once you go down that road you end up adding stuff anyway so maybe not a bad idea to start there. i built a whole shack automation thing on a pi 3b+ — remote PTT, rotor control, band switching, and a little flask web app so i can see whats happening from my phone. took way longer than expected but its really nice now. that said if all you want is the relay switching an arduino is way simpler to get running fast and you dont have to deal with linux and SD card corruption and all that pi headache. had a pi zero kill itself mid-contest once because the filesystem got corrupted and that was not fun. arduino just runs the loop forever and doesnt care.

the internet linking dependency bothered me too at first but honestly after running it for a while its not really different from depending on your ISP in general — if the pipe goes down youre down regardless. the RemoteHams servers have been more reliable for me than my home internet which says something i guess. one thing nobody really talks about is the RF monitoring side when you go SDR remote. you can actually have a pretty wide panadapter view which is kind of nice for spotting activity before you tune in, feels more like sitting at a real station than the old way of just streaming a single frequency. prob not answering your exact question but its a thing i appreciate

welcome to the hobby, those first contacts are always a little nerve wracking right? i remember my hands were actually shaking the first time i keyed up on a repeater. gets way easier fast though. if you havent already try to find a local club or just hang out on the repeater during a net, people around here are generally pretty helpful to new hams. also dont worry too much about not understanding the antenna stuff yet, that rabbit hole goes pretty deep and youll pick it up as you go

yeah the inverted-v thing is definitely part of it. when you drop those legs down you're compressing the angle between them and the feedpoint impedance falls, sometimes into the 30-35 ohm range depending on how steep your angle is. so even a perfectly resonant antenna is gonna show higher SWR into 50 ohm coax just because of the mismatch. 75 ohm coax actually works pretty well for inverted-v centers for exactly that reason, brings the SWR down noticeably. the frequency shift — if the resonant point moved up after you trimmed it you definitely went too short, but the original shift upward from calculated is common with inverted-v too. the formula assumes horizontal and free space basically, real world with ground reflections and the angle of the legs means you usually need to add a little length, not cut. i'd add 6 inches or so back to each leg and see where you land. also 25 feet center height on 40m is pretty low, ground losses are probably eating into things a bit but thats a separate conversation

Popular HF/6m radios in the $1k to $1.5k range include the Icom IC-7300, Yaesu FT-710, and Yaesu FT-DX10. I'm setting up my first serious HF base station and getting conflicting advice on receiver performance versus published specs. Some operators report the FT-991A digs weak signals out of noise better than the 7300 in high-signal environments, while the 7300 gets overwhelmed and needs RF gain reduction. Sherwood Engineering rates the IC-7300 receiver higher than the FT-991, but some experienced operators can't tell the difference in real-world conditions. What's your actual operating experience with these rigs?