Upgraded to General

Nice!
Learn code even though it’s not required.
You’ll never regret it. It’s good to know.

I always encourage people to share their call signs.

AE1Y
 
Congratulations. I do love my icom 7300, and was just enjoying using it tonight as a matter of fact.

Fwiw, there are some good deals out there on used icom 7600's (since the 7610's came out and many owners upgraded)
 
Nice!
Learn code even though it’s not required.
You’ll never regret it. It’s good to know.

I always encourage people to share their call signs.

AE1Y

I plan learning CW. It looking to DX yet, probably down the road. The problem I have now is trying to figure out what band to start with and what kind of antenna setup. Looking to do NVIS first. Baby steps.

KC1KJQ
 
I plan learning CW. It looking to DX yet, probably down the road. The problem I have now is trying to figure out what band to start with and what kind of antenna setup. Looking to do NVIS first. Baby steps.

KC1KJQ

I did a lot of listening before I started with HF.
See what bands you can tune the best with your new set up.
You’ll quickly develop a favorite. A lot of people like 20M
The Fudd’s are not as bad as they once were.
When I first started every fudd out there commented
if you did something wrong. Not so bad now.
People are more forgiving these days.

AE1Y
 
I plan learning CW. It looking to DX yet, probably down the road. The problem I have now is trying to figure out what band to start with and what kind of antenna setup. Looking to do NVIS first. Baby steps.

KC1KJQ

I took an 8 week class/course on CW about 2 years ago (local ham club). We used a practice program, as home work.

If you can find a local club doing something like that, you will learn a lot from the experienced ones.

The "key" point of learning CW is practice-practice-practice (and yes, you might have seen what I did there).

There are also phone apps that you can download, to practice with, when you have free time just sitting around...
 
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Congratulations on your recent upgrade to General class. I don't know how old you are but learning the code at a young age is easier than at an "old" age.

I learned as a 13 year old Boy Scout and here I am still a cw guy 55 years later.
 
Congratulations on your upgrade a whole new world of radio has just opened up to you. Enjoy! 20 meters is a good band and is almost always open to DX. The band that have the cranky old men are 80 and 160.
 
20 and 40 meters are the most fruitful bands. 20m closes within a few hours of sunset for us here in the NorthEast, so consider an option for night time on 40m.

Digital modes and CW avoid the FUDDs on 80m and 40m phone. FT8 and JS8 are newer modes and are very popular and extremely active.

Congrats on your upgrade! Please, consider continuing for the Amateur Extra class while you are in the ham-radio-testing-mode, once you get it you never have to again, and once you get a radio, the distraction is there. It took me 20 years to get extra from Advance Class.

For CW, please check the CWOps/CW Operators club, they have the CWA or CW Academy where you are assigned a mentor to learn things. It is an excellent organization, with some great guys, and they hold weekly on-air CW events. Once a month we QRS (Slow down) for the CWA students.

uj
 
Congratulations! As satisfied as you feel with General, you’ll feel 1000x better with Extra. Don’t forget to look into becoming a VE now. It may have changed since the early 1990s, but back then you needed to be at least a General to become a VE.
 
The "key" point of learning CW is practice-practice-practice ...
If you have HF in your car,
and W1AW is transmitting code practice during your commute,
you can get a lot of practice under your belt by monitoring that.
ETA:
The end-goal is for a sequence of sounds to cause letters and entire words
to spring magically into your head.

W1AW only transmits a few minutes at each speed.
After you have been studying for a little while,
there are some fascinating aspects to that:

If they are progressing from slower to faster
over the course of the hour-long session,
then it will reach a point where you are sweating
and it all falls apart.
But it will turn out to be faster than the speed where you
lost it the week before.
(It helps that every portion at a certain speed has a fixed
prologue with just the speed number changed. You will
quickly be able to recognize that even when everything else
is a hopeless blur).

And if they are sliding down from faster to slower,
each time you will first hear an incomprehensible hash of beeps
that are far too fast to understand.
But eventually during the hour it will slow down to a rate
where you start hearing comprehensible snatches of letters, words, sentences.
And once it gets slow enough for it to all click in your head,
you will discover that you are copying at a faster speed than
scant weeks earlier.
At the end of the session, the slowest speed will seem glacial.

(Don't tune away just because it's too fast to copy. Your brain is
getting rewired to recognize the sounds even when you
have no idea what is being sent).
 
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Congrats! after 25 or so years i upgraded to General last year, picked up an Icom 751A on fleabay. planned to turn around and upgrade to extra, but my (now ex) wife had other plans for me this year... so i've been busy with other crap...

i'm planning on buying myself a 7300 when i pass the extra exam.

N1NJI
 
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