Short post for now... I rejoined the ARRL yesterday and the redeeming thing IMHO with all of the hotly contested stuff like no paper magazines unless you pay is that now, you can see all 4 magazines with a base membership. If you care enough to read them then the membership isn't a horrible deal. Just a little expensive compared to other national hobby organizations. QST and QEX are back to decent quality articles again, too. It was getting pretty sparse when I let the ARRL Membership go 15 years ago.
I rejoined so I could get WAS wallpaper. I am not too far off of Mixed DXCC because of half my contacts being from Iowa. It was a bucket list item, so I pretended to be as excited about it as I was at 16 when I got my license. I finally have some activity since my last LoTW entry before I started back up again in 2011. I haven't seriously operated for 15 years!
How did I make mixed/digital WAS in 3.5 weeks (started over AGAIN because I moved to AZ 8.5 years ago)? FT-4/FT-8.
I was able to do this and get 6 awards on QRZ and 4 on POTA as a hunter. I had a 43' tower and a Cushcraft A3 in Iowa and I did more US and almost the same amount of DX as I did in about 5 years there.
I get why the old timers hate it. New the antennas I gave away in Iowa would be probably $7500 to replace plus labor and yet for DXing bad hidden wires too close to the ground in HOA hell outperformed the traditional analog modes. 20dB of processing gain will do that.
If I still had the Iowa station I would use that to my advantage instead of complaining about it.
