Ham Fan

yeah this trips up a lot of new generals, dont feel bad. the short answer is the arrl band plan is basically a gentlemens agreement, it has no legal standing. what actually matters legally is part 97 which defines your privileges by license class. for general on 40m phone you can operate from 7.175 to 7.300 MHz in the US, not 7.025 — that lower chunk is CW/data territory for generals.
the 7.125 area you heard about is more of a DX window thing, its kind of informally reserved so US stations dont step on DX stations working into other regions where their allocations are different. again not legally binding but if you start calling CQ down there youll probably get some grumpy responses.
as for band edges, the thing is your transmitted signal has a certain bandwidth. SSB is roughly 3 kHz wide, so if you set your dial to 7.175 youre actually putting energy below that. FCC looks at the whole signal not just your carrier frequency so you want to stay a bit inside the edge to make sure your whole signal is within your authorized segment. most people just stay a few kHz inside and dont sweat it too much but its worth understanding why.

congrats on the first one, that germany contact on 5w SSB is no joke especially from a New England summit. those EU chasers are serious about SOTA and they have big antennas pointed this way constantly.
for the logging question — yeah you want to log all your QSOs, not just the four minimum. the database tracks everything and chasers need to see the full log to claim their points. i think technically you can submit with just four but its kind of considered bad form and you'll get emails from people wondering why their contact isnt showing up. just log em all, its not that much extra work in sotadata once you get used to the interface.
on the mode stuff, there used to be CW bonus points back in the day but they got rid of those a while back, so its all the same points now regardless of mode. some people still do CW because the contacts come faster and you can work more summits in a day if youre doing s2s stuff, but for qualifying a summit it doesnt matter at all. sounds like you had a great first outing, whats the next summit?

New General here with an IC-7300. I'm struggling with getting proper mic gain settings for SSB. When I set the gain high enough to see decent power output on my wattmeter (around 80-90W), I'm getting constant ALC indication. Lower the gain and I'm only seeing 30-40W average. How do you balance proper mic gain with ALC limits? Manual says to avoid ALC activation but then my power seems too low.

yeah the general idea is if theres any chance of confusion just go ahead and use phonetics. on a quiet local repeater with a strong signal you can probably get away with just saying the letters but anything with noise, fading, or if youre working someone further out you really want the full phonetic alphabet. the whole point of NATO phonetics is that each word was chosen specifically because it sounds distinct from the others even through heavy interference, like november and mike arent going to get confused for each other the way N and M might.
as for non-standard ones, i hear it occasionally and honestly it bugs me a little. ive heard guys say things like sugar instead of sierra or chicago instead of charlie and half the time the other station just gets confused anyway. the whole reason we standardized on NATO was so everyone worldwide is working from the same list. if youre doing any kind of EmComm or anything serious you really should stick to the standard. casual ragchewing on a local machine, nobody is going to yell at you but its still worth building the habit now while youre new so it just becomes automatic.

Update to latest APRX version as recent releases fixed several messaging problems. Check your filter configuration - using 't/m' filter alone may require area filter to prevent discard. The history timeout logic was adjusted in newer builds.

Update to latest APRX version as recent releases fixed several messaging problems. Check your filter configuration - using 't/m' filter alone may require area filter to prevent discard. The history timeout logic was adjusted in newer builds.