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Click for more detail... Mein Hund und ich
CALL ME LIND SKCC: 2858 First licensed in 1962, with a Viking Challenger and one crystal that happened to be zero-beat with Radio Moscow on 40 meters (The first order of business was more crystals) and a Hallicrafters SX-24 Sky Rider Defiant general coverage receiver, life was, well, a challenge. The antenna was a fan dipole for 80, 40 and 20. The key back then was a navy flameproof, that came from a little hole in the wall store on radio row in New York City, just up the street from the firehouse that would lose so many brave men in the abomination of 9/11. Eventually the receiver was replaced by a Drake 2B, which was a really sweet receiver. The Challenger-2B combination resulted in many enjoyable QSOs, but the call of SSB was strong and some time in the early '70s everything except the flameproof was sold off and replaced with a Heathkit SB-102 that worked ok into the fan dipole. However, the need for a better antenna on the higher bands was obvious. A Heathkit electronic keyer and a Vibroplex Vibro-Keyer paddle were also acquired at about the same time. Eventually a sweet deal on a 50 ft tower, a rotor and a tri-band beam came along and things started to get really interesting. After the tower and beam, a very useful little accessory was added - a matching Heathkit spectrum display (SB-620 Scanalyzer). That added quite a bit to operating ease of the station. All good things must eventually come to an end. Moved to an apartment. Life in apartments doesn't lend itself well to ham radio the way the bungalow on a 10 acre piece of property did. A few half hearted attempts were made to use makeshift antennas such as rain gutters, but after the experience of hamming from a 10 acre property, disappointment resulted in all activity being confined to 2m FM mobile. The HF gear remained silent for many years and finally all except the flameproof and the Vibroplex paddle was given to a ham who did a lot of donation work donating gear to hams who needed it. Fast forward to 2006, several apartments, three marriages, one child and a college degree later, the home QTH was relocated to a house in northern Virginia. But it suffered from C&R problems. Some time during the silent years, an Icom 730 had been acquired in an attempt to work HF mobile, but that didn't work out any better than rain gutters. At the new QTH, the 730 was set up with a pair of Hamstick whips configured as a dipole in the attic. But the rig used as a comparison was an Icom 756 Pro III. Late in November of '07, it occurred to me that if I really wanted to call myself a ham I should know how to use a bug, so a Vibroplex Blue Racer Deluxe was added. Along with a lot of weights. That was a real eye-opener. Hmmm. The letter V came out as three dits, a toll-booth and a dah and the number 4 sounded like a sentence ending in H and another beginning with T. But gradually one gets the hang of these things. About 7 months after the arrival of the Blue Racer, an opportunity for a new house with about a third of an acre presented itself and after a frustrating summer of trying to sell one house and buy another, the QTH was moved. Finally! Trees to hang dipoles! But there were a lot of things that had to be handled that had priority over ham radio, so the station was QRT. In order to just get on the air with something cheap and dirty, a pair of Radio Shack 10 ft tv masts were C-clamped to the rear deck and the Hamstick dipoles (actually 2 of them - 40 and 80) were flying again. But... Trees enable dipoles, and then there is always a tower and beam, but the house is too pretty to spoil it with a tower and beam (yeah, I know, a real ham would be more concerned about the house spoiling the view of the tower) and I kept visualizing a big wind blowing a tree down on the house and the insurance company claiming it was the fault of the antenna and refusing to cover the damage. The DX-Engineering website provided the answer. A Hustler 6BTV Vertical (just love sending that description on my Vibroplex Blue Racer) with 20 radials that was erected in the wooded portion of the lot solved the problem. Another 20 will be added in the spring of '09 (A graph of number of radials vs. effectiveness was asymptotic after about 40 radials) These days, I'm doing CW with an occasional foray into SSB. Weekend mornings the region between 3.535 and 3.569 is usually where I'll be although 40 and 30 sing a siren song. UPDATE 2/28/2009 - Just picked up a Tokyo Hy-Power HL1.2KFX. Plan to have it on the air for the upcoming DX-SSB activities UPDATE 6/28/2009 - Well, after being licensed all these years, I finally participated in my first field day.
73 (Yeah, I know the records say Colin, but I never use it except when I have to deal with a database designed back in the day when memory and storage were about a gazillion dollars a kilobyte or a modern one designed by someone who doesn't think to set it up to handle first initial-middle name situations.)
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