Maria Chen

yeah im planning on going, our club is actually setting up a table this year to recruit new members so ill be there pretty early. last year wasnt great for deals your right about that but i did find a almost perfect hf transceiver for way under market which made the whole trip worth it. just gotta dig through the junk sometimes. two hours should be enough if you know what your looking for ahead of time

yeah the compression thing is something i had to learn the hard way too, ran way too much on my old 746 and people kept saying i sounded like i was underwater on DX contacts. turns out i had the TX monitor off so i couldnt even hear what i was putting out. one thing nobody really talks about is room acoustics and mic technique, like how far you are from the mic and what angle you're at. i moved my mic like 6 inches further away and aimed it slightly off axis and my audio cleaned up noticeably even with the same exact settings. the 7300 manual actually has a little section on this that i totally ignored for the first year i owned the radio, go figure. also if you havent already, get someone on the air you trust to give you honest feedback while you're actually adjusting things in real time. the websdr thing works in a pinch but it's not quite the same as a real contact telling you you sound thin or boomy or whatever.

the antenna question is the real one, yeah. you technically can run SO2R on the same band with proper filtering but its a nightmare and most people dont bother unless theyre serious about it. the easier approach especially starting out is to just run on one band and S&P on a different band — like you said you have 20/15/10 covered with the yagi and 40/80 on the vertical, that actually works pretty well for SO2R because theyre completely separate antenna systems already. the key thing is you need some kind of station switching setup so you arent manually swapping coax connectors mid-contest, that'll kill your rate faster than anything. for audio, most people go left ear radio 1 right ear radio 2. sounds simple but you have to train your brain to filter it out and focus on what matters. took me probably 3 or 4 serious contest weekends before it stopped feeling like torture. theres also stuff like the microHAM station master or SO2R boxes that handle a lot of the switching logic automatically and integrate with logging software like N1MM. if you can swing one of those it makes the whole thing way less painful. dont try to go full manual SO2R for your first attempt, you'll just frustrate yourself and miss contacts

yeah the antenna placement thing is the eternal SOTA struggle lol. ive done probably 30 activations now and i still spend too long fussing with that part. one thing that helped me was just committing to the linked dipole instead of the end fed, a bit more to set up but the pattern is more predictable when youre doing a sloper situation. also get a foam pad or wrap for the KX2 if youre not already, mine lives in a piece of cut foam inside a dry bag and it survives some pretty rough handling. that radio is tough but still

so we finally got our local ARES group to do a proper tabletop exercise after talking about it for like two years. had maybe 14 people show up which was better than expected honestly. the scenario was a major flooding event cutting off three towns from normal comms infrastructure — cell towers down, roads washed out, the whole deal. what surprised me the most was how fast things fell apart on paper even before we simulated anything going wrong with our own gear. like we spent the first 20 minutes just figuring out who was supposed to call who and nobody had a current phone list that matched who was actually in the room. thats something i never would have thought to test beforehand. we also discovered that two of our guys had never actually set up their go-kits under any kind of time pressure and one of them realized mid-exercise that he didnt know his HT's memory channels were all wrong for our county repeaters. been meaning to post about this for a while because i think a lot of groups skip this stuff and just assume everyone knows what they're doing when they show up. anyway has anyone else done tabletop stuff recently and found things that surprised them? especially curious if other groups have figured out a good way to simulate realistic message traffic without it feeling too fake