Hello and thanks for the lookup. These are my best buddies, Brooke and Halle. Both are female beagles. Brooke, on the left, was adoted in Jan 2004 from a local beagle rescue league and is about ten years old. Halle, on the right, was adopted in July 2004 from the National Detector Dog Training Center (aka The Beagle Brigade) in Orlando, Florida and is about nine years old. Those who have looked me up previously may recall seeing me with my previous beagle, Kelsey. Sad to report she passed away in Dec 2003 after fourteen happy and wonderful years.

I'm 64 years old and have been a ham since 1993. I upgraded to General in April 2000 after the license restructuring and upgraded again to Amateur Extra in Feb 2012 and replaced my previous callsign of N3PZT with WI3J. My QTH is about 20 miles north of Washington, D.C. I've worked for Sun Microsystems (now merged into Oracle Corp) for about 20 years and my position was a Senior Financial Manager. I'm now retired and have more time to enjoy amateur radio.

My shack consists of a Yaesu FT-847 connected to three different antennas; a Comet GP-15 2m/6m/70cm triband vertical for FM work, a Carolina Windom 160 Special OCF inverted vertical dipole, with an LDG AT-600Pro ATU, for HF work and a PAR OA-50 6m horizontal omni angle dipole for 6m SSB work. Recently, I added the FLEX-3000 Software Defined Radio to the shack and the Elecraft KPA500 amp. Also, I enjoy working the LEO satellites, such as AO-27 and UO-14, with a RS HTX-202 for the 2m uplink and a Yaesu FT-530 for the 70cm downlink into an Arrow handheld yagi antenna. Since the beginning of 2001 I've been active in the digital modes, especially PSK-31 and MFSK. These modes have provided many QSO's using QRP power of 20 watts or less and are very effective for weak signal work. For QRP work I have the Yaesu FT-817 rig and that has added a whole new dimension to hamming. It's a lot of fun to make a contact on 5 watts or less using just a small whip antenna or some wire thrown up in a tree. I added the LDG Z-11 ATU to it and the DF4ZS Clipper board to the MH-31 "potatoe head" stock mic. EchoLink is another mode that I've come to enjoy very much. I use the WB2REM interface board and my 2m simplex link node number is 22659. Also, I'm active on AllStar Link, node number 28433, and D-STAR with my IC-2200H and IC-80AD as well as the Moencomm StarBoard hotspot and DVAP dongle.

For mobile I use the Yaesu FT-857 with the ATAS-120 screwdriver antenna in my "mobile shack". I never knew how enjoyable HF mobiling could be until I installed this package. The ability to auto tune the ATAS-120 for all bands from 6-40m plus 2m and 70cm (with the Comet F-530 duplexer) has been a real pleasure. Plus, using the Yaesu MH-59 remote mic, I virtually don't have to touch the rig at all. Check out my installation pictures on the Yahoo FT-857 users group. Click on Photos and on the ATAS-120 album. I'll never go back to ham sticks again ! Recently, I replaced my Yaesu FT-5200 dual band mobile rig with the Icom ID-880H dual band rig that now allows me to work both FM analog and D-Star repeaters and stations.

If we've recently made a contact I upload all my QSOs to HRDlog.net and LoTW.

73 Stu WI3J