Biography

Licensed Amateur since December 1974
when I passed the City & Guilds examination
and gained my Class B Licence Call sign G8JXH
to operate on 2 metre VHF Band and above.
I passed the Morse code test at 12 wpm in April 1978
and gained the full Amateur Radio Certificate
and class A Licence with the call sign G4GZK.

I was treasurer of the Wolverhampton Amateur Radio Society for at least 10 years during the 70' and 80's.

I used to operate phone mainly on VHF and some micro wave on home made equipment many years ago.
I later converted two Creed 444 teleprinters(exBT) and worked both with RTTY on the VHF and HF bands.
Following that episode I used a Dragon computer with G4BMK software and home made interface for the HF Bands with a Yaessu transceiver and HQ1 mini beam.
With the arrival of Windows I upgraded my equipment to operate BPSK on the HF bands, which I a still doing now with many contacts in Europe.
Quite keen on home construction and made a few QRP rigs, Antenna tuners and various interfaces for RTTY and AMTOR. I built two HF Amplifiers using Old TV line output valves which gave me about 400 watts RF out on the HF bands.
For a good many years I worked the HF bands MOBILE from my car,
and some times from portable locations in the UK.
I now listen on the bands more and operate mainly BPSK on HF, occasionally I use the Internet for vhf contacts abroad.

Equipment

My current rig is an Icom IC7300.and my computer is a HP Pavillion Laptop, Windows 10, software FLDIGI v 4.1.13 and FLRIG v 1.3.50 for rig control using a USB cable interface.
I have a homemade opto isolated interface made from the junk box and info gleaned from the internet.
The Antenna is a sloping wire delta loop 44 metres long fed with coax at the lowest
end.