Biography

Grid :- IO93ga

Worked-All-Britain (WAB) :- SK34

Fists Member No. 14829

Licensed in 1989 as G7ENF and then G0ORC in 1990 initially working 2m and 70cm SSB & CW moved to HF in 1992. I am on the air daily on HF using mainly CW on all HF bands.

After using a great number of radios over the years, including a few high end ones I've finally gone back to the one I believe offers the best real world performance, the Yaesu FTdx5000. I have recently bought one of the last few available in stock in the UK as production has now finished, according to the Yaesu website.

The Sherwood figures don't mean much as anyone would have great difficulty in hearing the difference between any of the top 20 radios so its all down - for me anyway - to how it works in daily use on the bands. I have a Yaesu FT-950 and a Kenwood TS-480HX as standby. An Alpin 100 amplifier is available when required.

I have little in the way of antennas. A Carolina Windom (134ft) at 12m used mainly for the low bands, an N6BT rotary dipole at 12m for 14MHz and up, with 60m and 30m covered by a trap dipole fed with Low Z feeder from Spectrum Communications. See their site here http://www.spectrumcomms.co.uk/Aerials.htm

A simple dipole (fixed at SE/NW) at only 7m does a job for me on 6m during the Sporadic E season.

I pride myself on doing the absolute best I can given the small area that I have to work in so the windom and wire dipoles have proved their worth over the years. I managed to work 255 entities in 2014, my best ever but I failed to beat that in 2015, working only 248. I try to prove that very limited antennas are no barrier to working DX and I have a lot of fun entering the various DX marathons as I find my station and operating style better suited to them than contests.

I am very proud to own an N3ZN key - see the picture below. In my opinion they one of the very best on the market. I also use a Morsedirigent (formerly Profi II) key obtained from Vinecom in the UK at a very reasonable price.

I am still an active SWL on the broadcast bands and use the excellent receiver in an elderly Kenwood TS-140S or a Lowe HF-225, Eddystone 840C, Yaesu FRG-7, a Yaesu FRG7700 or an SDR Play with SDR Uno software.

My main interests are in HF and VHF propagation in relation to weather, solar activity and seasonal effects. I spend a good deal of time listening to the NCDXF beacon network, and, in conjunction with data taken from the UK Solar System Data Centre, VE3EN's excellent Solarham site and the Space Weather site I try to work out what is happening in the ionosphere.

Worked DXCCs: