The installer lifted the GXP 17-4 antenna to 110 ft and could not get it any higher. Partly because his gin pole was unstable. He arranged for a younger installer, who was waiting for a good weather on a weekend. Read more
I decided to add an extra 120′ (36m) tower to have a better signal in contesting. My signal from the current 100′ (30m) tower is not competitive on 20m and 40m so I decided to upgrade a 2 el 40m Read more
Austria is 80% mountainous. Wherever you are in the mountains, they are zillions of ski lifts or gondolas. Many of them are open in summer for tourists. Gondolas go up from downtown Innsbruck way up. A restaurant there is perfect Read more
In July 2025 I went to Australia and New Zealand. Of course, Elecraft KX2 radio went with me. Since QRP is not much power and nearly all contacts for Australia are DX, QTH selection is important, at best over salt Read more
For many years my family travels to St George Island for the end-of-year vacation. I always take a radio and at times try to make an effort to participate in the Stew Perry contest. This time it was too much Read more
To my surprise I scored #1 USA in CQ 160 contest in the SO Assisted category. See an official article. The last time a station in GA scored as #1 was W8JI in 2008 with his tremendous station. The contest Read more
I figured out why my EME setup was not working. After fixing the antennas, by mistake I fed them out of phase. Instead of getting 1+1=2 I got 1-1=0. I still made one EME QSO when the antenna was off, Read more
I like to operate as assisted to maximize QSO count.This does not always work well with spots from public clusters because 1) many spots have wrong calls, 2) some spots are outside of local propagation, and 3) attractive spots create Read more
I did a few SSB contests using TenTec 715 external speech processor. With the processor, stations were giving me about 2S better report, an improvement of about 6 db or 4 times. My signal is finally competitive. In CQ 160 Read more
I own Flex since Sept 2019. The goal was to have SO2R capability onsite, and possibility of a remote operation. First years were painful. Remote connection was iffy; sometimes I could not connect in half an hour. Crashes. New firmware Read more