WAS on 9 BANDS: 160, 80, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12, 10 and
CW, SSB, PSK31, RTTY, Hell, JT65, JT9, FT4, FT8 MODES
plus...
275 DXCC and counting
All on homebrew antennas
I've been a ham radio operator since 1972, when my "Elmer," Roy (WA2SLO), nursed me through the Novice exam and the Morse Code test of five words per minute. Whew! Two years later my buddy Mike (WA2DLN) and I went down to Varick Street in lower Manhattan (near where the Twin Towers once stood) and passed our General Class exams. That was just about one of the best days of my life; what a feeling of accomplishment. In 1978 (the week after I passed the test for my Commercial First Class ticket which began my dozen years in broadcasting) I went back to Varick Street and passed the Advanced Class exam. I was VERY active for the next few years but then, as the schoolyard poem goes "first came love, then came marriage, then the baby carriage." In 2007, after pretty much being QRT for a number of years things settled down enough so I could get back into the hobby. And I found that while ham radio has changed in many ways - I had a ball with these digital modes - the basic idea hasn't; it still comes down to meeting great people who share a passion for communicating with RF.
Over the years I have experimented with a number of antennas, including a ground-based vertical (for which I installed 32 radials) ultimately finding the 160m vertical (in red) & 10m dipole (in green) to be the best combination.
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