You don’t have to have conversations with those people - start your own net on a repeater about gardening or robotics or astronomy, find other local people you’d like to work simplex with, ask POTA or SOTA contacts if you can come along next time.

You can change the hobby for the better, if you actively participate.

Have you tried a 1/4 wave vertical with 4 radials sloping towards the ground? (all wire)? or even a vertical dipole fed halfway up? J-poles show significant coupling to their feedline and mounting arrangements and, as you discovered, are taller than they need to be for their gain.

Probably dedicated vector/tensor coprocessors these days - which don’t have to work with your monitor layout or desktop setup!

Digital modes are usually based on an SSB transceiver, unless you are talking about something with specialized hardware radios like LORA. (In the end, all radio is analog!) So, consider SSB radios even if you will only pass digital signals through them

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personally, I think the limit should’ve been higher, at least 5 kHz, when the AM Phone guys are occupying 10 to 15 kHz with their hi-fi broadcast set ups.

And a hard bandwidth limit really does limit total data rate, the symbol rate limit didn’t - exactly the opposite effect that the loud anti-baudrate-limit people wanted