After a long hiatus from the radio, I've decided that the time away from the hobby was too long. I surely do miss working DX stations and tinkering with the station.
It is a huge regret that I stepped away from the radio for years, but I'm glad that most everything still works.
Just after the new year began I dusted off the equipment and took inventory of what I still had ready to work.
The base station is still comprised of an Elecraft K3 (an older model that is no longer in production) and a basic tuner (Palstar AT-AUTO, the version before the split-up of the Palstar company) and finally the home-brew linear amplifier that I re-designed from parts from a fellow I used to talk to regularly, Jim Fish (K7NCG).
The antenna situation is another matter.
I used to have a very long horizontal loop antenna that was about 100 feet up off the ground and had a circumference of about 500-550 feet. This made it ideal for the low bands, especially 40 meters. I used it primarily for 20m through 80m. It might have been a wee bit too short for 160m. But, on 40m it was ideal and I loved working DX and W's on that antenna for a long time.
Since the antenna was held up by guy lines looped over very tall tree branches, the antenna was eventually brought down in heavy storms that we get time to time. Some years, it was fine, and then all at once a very terrible winter storm would knock it all down. There's not much I can do to avoid it.
At present time Janurary 2023, I don't have the loop installed, so I am waiting for the weather to clear a bit before replacing it.
The other bits are still in the shack - the Bencher BY-1 paddle which I enjoy using. I also seem to have collected a fair number of smaller base-station radios and some mobile antennas that I should re-mount and re-install.
My original HF radio, the FT-897D (long since out of production) is still here too and I look forward to using it when I resume a full station operation.
The other part of the shack that I intend to deal with is the satellite operations. I used to have a IC-910H with the 1.2Ghz module, but I sold it to a friend. I've replaced the IC-910 with an older model, but it's still not the same. I have my eye on the new IC-9700. It has all the things I used to have in the IC-910H with the 1.2 Ghz module and includes some more useful features and display.
But, that needs to be put behind other tasks at the moment -- the big loop and also repairing the rotators that are part of the satellite antenna rig. The elevation rotator seems to be stuck in position.
Finally, a few more notes to relay -- to all of the hams that I used to regularly talk to on the HF bands, I regret leaving the hobby and missing out on the news and activities.
The other item to relay is that I'm intending to work a lot more CW than SSB than I did before. The strange thing is that I can send much faster than I can copy, so it will take some time getting up to speed again, literally.
Take care, good DX and I look forward to hearing your station. You can reach me via e-mail quite easily. jdw at my callsign dot com.
73's
Jeff, W7BRS
