If you are looking at the picture, I was at the Colorado River, where I had a jet ski boat and vacation house trailer for 25 years. That's a Motorola HT-100 450 MHz Handy-Talkie in my left hand and a Coors beer in my right hand.

I've been licenced since 1958. For many years I was K6MQG and spent most of my time DXing on 20 meters. In 1967, I married Elaine WB6KVG and moved away from my monoband Yagi. Over the years, we put up little tribanders in various QTHs and kept chasing DX. Just before the big Laguna Beach fire in 1993, I took down my last HF Yagi and went virtually inactive on HF and just used 450 MHz on the Cactus Radio System.

In 2008 I had some spare time on a business trip to Rome, so I put a wire out my hotel window and listened to the CQ WW 160 CW contest on a little shortwave radio. That made the juices start to flow again. Soon after that, two Cactus Radio friends landed on Ducie Island with a big DXpedition team (VP6DX). I pulled my radio out of the closet, threw up a little inverted Vee and worked them on 10 through 80.

I am now very active, but only using a vertical on 10 through 80. When I went off the DX hunt, I only needed one country (ZA). When I got back on, I needed 17 "entities" and now that number is four. If you count deleted countries, my current DXCC total is 372 and DXCC Challenge is 1920 (none deleted). I hope to get an antenna on 160 and get some F2 openings on 6 meters to get that Challenge number higher.

Currently, the setup here is a K3, Tokyo Hy-Power HL-1.5KFX and a SteppIR BigIR vertical on the roof. I recently put up a 3 element 6 meter M2 Yagi about 8 feet up off the roof and have been having a lot of fun with Es propagation and some F2/TEP. Last winter I was able to get in on some nice openings into South America and the South Pacific. I'm glad to see the Spring TEP/F2 season approaching, Last summer's Es season was not very good for me. I have a large hill to my east, so the openings into the East Coast and Caribbean are few and far between on 6 meters.

Here is my shot to the Pacific and long path into Europe and the Middle East. The antenna is effectively 725 feet up in that direction as well as to the north.