Member Bio

From about the age of ten, I have been fascinated with amateur radio and all things electronic. Unfortunately, I was unwilling to learn Morse, which was a requirement to get a license at the time. I went on to earn degrees in Electrical Engineering and have been working in communications-related areas most of my life. Finally, I got my amateur license in Febrary, 2022. I used the FastTrack Ham series (thank you Michael Burnett AF7KB) for instruction and really got into it, so I decided to take all 3 tests in one sitting and ended up with my Amateur Extra license with zero experience on the air other than listening. I bought nearly a full system from a local ham who is moving. It included some sections of an antenna tower, an IC-745 HF rig, a Yaesu FT-2900 2-m rig, and a nice MFJ manual antenna tuner with artificial ground. Previously, I had been listening in on HF with an RSPduo SDRplay I got for Christmas and a Hy-Gain AV-18VS. After adding some radials to the antenna (thanks to advice from Dave Casler KE0OG) and a counterpoise to the antenna tuner, I am now using the same antenna for RX and TX with the IC-745.

I don’t really recommend the AV-18VS antenna, but it was super cheap at HRO and tunes nicely if you don’t mind walking outside to move the inductor tap location. It is also helpful to have an antenna analyzer such as the AA-230 Rig Expert my wife got for my birthday!

I recently aquired a Kenwood TS-440s at a nice price and also bought a used Ameritron ALS-1306 on Craigslist (N0KMR). The amp is working great but is hard to use with the Kenwood which puts out a fixed 100W (too much for the ALS). ALC should reduce the power, but the external ALC is not working with the TS-440S. I’m sure I have the connections right, but perhaps there is a switch to enable the external ALC? Anyway, I figured out how to reduce the 440S output power (VR-1 in the filter section), so I’m hoping for some better signal reports soon! By the way, the ALS-1306 works great with the IC-745. I may need to go back to that.

Feel free to message me on this website if you are a new ham looking for someone to help practice radio skills. I’m in need of that as well.

Thanks for taking the time to look me up! 73