Rachel Adams

congrats on the ticket. honestly the UV-5R debate never ends and both sides have valid points but here's how i think about it — if you're the kind of person who likes to tinker and figure stuff out you'll probably have fun with it, the price is low enough that if you brick it programming the thing it's not a big deal. but if you want something that just works out of the box without fighting the menus, the FT-65 is genuinely a nice little radio, good audio, decent receive, and Yaesu's build quality on that one is solid.
for your budget i'd probably lean toward the FT-65 or maybe look at the Wouxun KG-UV9D if you can find one on sale, that thing has great audio and the dual band coverage is nice. APRS on a budget gets more complicated — you'd either need a separate TNC setup or save up for something like a TH-D74 or even the Kenwood TH-D72 used which you can sometimes find for reasonable money. don't worry about APRS right away though, get comfortable with local repeaters first and see what pulls you in.

yeah 10m has been absolutely on fire, i worked something like 40 countries last month just on that band alone. cycle 25 is shaping up to be better than the predictions honestly, some folks thought it would be a modest peak but the solar flux has been staying up pretty consistently. if you havent already grab some propagation software or just check dxmaps.com regularly, helps a lot for catching openings before they fade. and yes there have been some really solid 6m sporadic E openings too, missed a few myself but caught one in late afternoon that got me a few new grid squares for my rover log.

so our ARES group has a county-wide exercise coming up and im trying to figure out the best way to power everything for a 12-hour deployment. we'll be running two HF stations (one for NTS traffic, one for liaison with the EOC) plus a VHF/UHF packet node and a couple handhelds on a charging hub. last exercise we had a Honda eu2200i running everything and it worked fine but man that thing is loud and we burned through about 3 gallons of gas which felt like a lot for what we were actually running.
ive been looking at doing a hybrid setup this time — maybe run the generator for a couple hours to charge a big LiFePO4 bank and then go quiet on the generator for a while. the IC-7300s pull maybe 20-22 amps at full power but were mostly running 50-60 watts so probably averaging more like 8-10 amps? been trying to do the math and i keep second-guessing myself on how big the battery needs to be.
also the antenna situation is always a mess at this site. the county EOC parking lot has zero good trees and they dont want us driving stakes into the pavement so last time we ended up with a couple of buddipoles on camera tripods which honestly performed worse than i expected, especially on 40m. thinking about bringing a spiderbeam pole this time for a simple inverted-V but not sure how to secure the base without stakes. anyone dealt with similar site restrictions?

our club just started doing a weekly breakfast thing on saturday mornings which has been way more fun than i expected honestly, just a few guys at a diner talking radio and whatever. way more casual than the formal meetings. if your club is kinda dead it might be worth just suggesting something low key like that, sometimes people just dont want to sit through a meeting agenda

I was in the same spot last year, felt totally lost. I ended up using the Gordon West technician study book along with the HamStudy app and that combo worked really well for me. the book actually explains the why behind things which helped it stick better than just memorizing questions. took me about a month of casual studying. one thing nobody told me before my test session was that you can actually take the general exam the same day if you pass the tech, theres no extra fee usually, so i would maybe at least skim some general material just in case you feel confident after the first one. i didnt do that and kind of wish i had because then i had to go back a few months later. but yeah dont stress too much about it, the VEs are all volunteers and theyre pretty relaxed about the whole thing in my experience.

I've been running a similar setup for two years now. Started with 16 radials, added 16 more and saw noticeable improvement on 40M and 80M. The elevated configuration gives you about 2-3 dB gain over ground radials. Remote tuner is worth it - less RFI in the shack too.

not a dumb question at all, this trips up a lot of newly upgraded generals. so the short answer is the ARRL band plan is NOT law, its a gentlemans agreement basically. the actual rules are in part 97 and those define the subbands by license class. for general on 40m phone you get 7.175 to 7.300 MHz. now here's the thing about band edges that your buddy was getting at -- the rule is actually that your signal has to stay within the allocation, not just your carrier frequency. so if youre running SSB, the transmitted bandwidth can be like 3kHz wide, which means if you park your dial at 7.300 you might have sideband energy going above that. thats a real violation not just a courtesy issue. most people stay at least 3-5 kHz inside the edge to be safe, so 7.295 or lower for upper sideband. the ITU regions also complicate 40m because the band goes to 7.200 in some parts of the world, which is why you sometimes hear stuff that seems out of place

honestly im kind of in the same boat as you so take this with a grain of salt but one thing i started doing that seems to help is just listening to actual QSOs on 40m in the evenings, like around the cw portions below 7100. even if i can only copy maybe every third word its starting to train my ear to real operators instead of the computer generated stuff. some of those elmers on 40m CW are incredibly patient and send really clean code too.
also someone on here told me about a app called Morse Mania that i've been messing with on my phone during lunch breaks, its not perfect but its better than nothing when im away from the radio

I took mine a few months ago and was super nervous too lol. Honestly the hardest part for me was just finding parking at the place haha. The test itself was way less stressful than I expected. Bring a photo ID and the fee, I think ours was like $15 cash only so double check that with whoever is running the session because apparently it varies.
One thing nobody told me beforehand — when you finish they grade it right there on the spot and tell you if you passed before you even leave the room. I didn't know that so I was kind of caught off guard when they just handed me a CSCE like two minutes after I turned it in. Good luck saturday