Biography

Just a little history on me... my wife and I moved down to Broward in 1999 from western Palm Beach County, where I had enough QTH to have a pretty decent antenna arrangement, even if I could never afford the big amplifiers. We found that we could not afford that sort of land down here in Broward county so we ended up in antenna restriction hell and the two of us became inactive hams (my wife Shirley is N4SBF, a General class ham herself). I even shipped out my TS 430, a couple of antennas (an AP8 and an R5) and a mess of other stuff to my brother in law in Texas because at the time he wanted to get licensed and I couldn't use the gear anyway.

It turned out that he never got around to getting his license, and the rig was used as a SW receiver on a longwire for a few years until they moved, and the radio, tuner, antennas and all the rest of what I sent him got parked in a storage unit with the rest of the historical stuff they weren't using in the new place and from there was pretty much forgotten.

Last year when Hurricane Irma was bearing down on us, Shirley basically said "I'm not waiting this one out", and we packed ourselves and the cats up and went to my brother in law's to ride out the storm. While we were there he asked if I could help him empty out the storage space. While we were doing this we came across the radio gear. He asked "Do you want this back?" and of course I said "Hell yes!", so we brought it home with us.

During this time I had let my license lapse (just plain forgot to renew it), so after getting my radio back I decided to study up and re-take the tests. I left the hobby as a Technician (yes, my wife had a better license than me - and she kept hers up too!). I knew that I could do better than simply regaining my Tech class license so I started out to see how far I could go. Got my Tech and General on the same day (issued call KN4HGW), and two weeks later sat for and passed my Extra at one of the local club's monthly meetings. I then applied for and regained my old call N4NVD, so at least from the licensing point of view I'm back to where I should have been all along.

We really do live in the antenna Nazi zone here, so the best I've been able to do here is put up a dipole in the attic. 20M fits well in there without getting to close to the metal in the attic so that's what I have. Unfortunately, the rig is on the second floor directly underneath the antenna, so if I go full power I occasionally get some RF in the shack, but I don't really want to invest time in remediating this before our move and don't think I'll have the same problem once we relocate and I can get antennas actually into the air. For now it's best to keep power to 50 watts or below if only for RF exposure concerns anyway. Works fine for digital modes - in 4 months or so of operating I'm 2 states away from WAS on 20M FT8 and have over 60 countries on FT8 as well) - but IMO 50 watts into a dipole is not quite enough oomph to work those big sideband pileups on 20 unless it's a quiet day or the band is wide open.

My venerable TS-430s is frankly antiquated by today's standards but is still one heck of a radio. She's completely decked out with all available optional filters and has the companion PS-430 power supply. The old girl runs solidly and still generates full output when asked. I might well one day replace the 430 as my main rig, I like it so much I'm not sure I could get rid of it. I also have a similar affection for my ancient Yaesu FC-902 manual tuner. It's stupid simple to use and very effective.

Somebody told me that my old Icom IC-3200A was the first dual band mobile rig made (well, not my particular unit, but the model). I was a bit suprised that it fired up immediately after all that time in storage. It is indeed a "stone age" mobile and the display lights are long gone, but it's still making full power and I can hit all the local repeaters that I care about using from my QTH using a dual band j-pole sitting on a camera tripod in the shack on 5 watts, so that is fine for me in our current make-shift temporary digs.

Shirley and I recently bought a couple of the very tiny Baofeng BF-F8HP dual band handhelds. Our rationale for buying them is to have a couple of handie's to use as vehicle-to-vehicle comms for when we make the trek out to Texas with our cats stuffed into the car and all the rest of our stuff crammed into a U-Haul. The fact that they are perfectly usable ham radios and cost us less than a decent dinner out were big motivators in the purchase ("barn door" receiver front-end notwithstanding).

Once we move out to Austin I'm seriously considering getting a Yaesu FT-991a for my main rig. I like the idea of a "shack in a box", and there's a lot to like about that radio. We'll see...

Worked DXCCs:

Equipment

Kenwood TS-430S
20 Meter Attic Dipole