I started out in 1971 building my first Heathkit Shortwave receiver (SW-717) when I was 11 years old (in Newton, NJ), and received my WN2QHN novice license on my 13th birthday. I was inactive from 1977 - 2001, and then got into DX-ing at the end of July 2001.

DX Accomplishments (100% from my own back yard):

• I have 337 / 342 confirmed DXCC Entities - so 2 away from Honor Roll #1 (need Bouvet and Glorioso)
• DXCC Honor Roll in 11 years (2001 - 2012). First 300 with 200 watts or less and wire
• DXCC 8BDXCC in 3 years
• 160M DXCC - 88 entities, my most memorable QSO ever was VK0EK on Top Band
• Co-organizer of the 2016 VK0EK Heard Island DX-pedition:
  
  
  
  My all time favorite amateur radio organization and their legendary magazine - QST:
  
  
  
  and the entire January / February 2017 issue of DX Magazine was dedicated to VK0EK:
   

         

        And we ended up on the cover of the ARRL's DXCC 2016 Yearbook:

         

Earning DXCC Honor Roll and then DX-pedition of the Year represented the end of an "Era" for me. Honor Roll is an intensely personal goal and award, and DX-pedition of the Year is an intensely Team effort and award. They were two very big projects that took years and ended up with successes exceeding my expectations and will always be fond memories. Once I've worked the last 2 for Top of Honor Roll and last 13 for 9BDXCC (DXCC on 160M) my DXCC days will be done.

In the 90's I built quite a few QRP kits in an effort to get back into the hobby, but that didn't "stick". Recently I built my first modern "Ham-Maker" project - I took an Elecraft KPOD and hacked the device driver code (written in C and graciously shared with me by the fine folks at Elecraft), and I have the KPOD controlling two stepper motors which can be used with any analog antenna tuner. Here is my test platform:

I call it the "URAT" which stands for Universal Remote Antenna Tuner . . . 

My current Goals, in priority order

1. Continue to explore new technologies, mostly in the "ham-maker" space
2. Complete 160M DXCC (and 9BDXCC)
3. Complete Top of the Honor Roll with Bouvet and Glorioso. Its seems that Glorioso will be my last . . 

As far as antennas go - I have designed and built my own - a three element phased array that is excellent on all bands 160 - 30M, fed with the Palstar BT1500A at the feedpoint:

I also have a 2 element 20M homebrewed yagi up 40' and designed using YW:

And a really superb (commercially made) antenna for the low bands - and AM BCB DXing - the Wellbrook ALA1530LNP:

Here is the shack:

A K-Line with SPE 1.3K is the core station and the KX3, KXPA100 and PX3 as a dedicated FT8 station. I have a Palstar R30 receiver for BCB DX-ing and LF DX-ing below the AM BCB.

I have presented at Pacificon for more than 10 years - and some of my past presentations are posted on the East Bay Amateur Radio Club's web site:

http://ebarc.org/links.htm

I have a blog that concentrates on Low Band DX-ing:

https://topbandchordalhopper.blog/

The VK0EK blog that I ran is here:

http://www.vk0ek.org

I graduated from University of Pennsylvania, Lock Haven, moved to California and became Oracle's 127th employee - Gupta Technologies (SQLBase and SQLWindows) employee #30 and PeopleSoft's 400-something employee, and have worked in the database field for 36 years. I work for Credit Karma in San Francisco as their Staff Data Architect and am designing and building the companies first Data Dictionary. Its probably my favorite place of work since I left college. My LinkedIn profile is here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rholoch/

73,

Rich