Hamradio

Ham radio is an old and almost forgotten hobby that I restarted in 2014. It's not clear to me what exactly I want with this hobby. I started with the ambition to: communicate on as long a distance (DX) as possible with radio telegraphy (CW) using the least power possible (QRP) with homebrew technology. In short back to the basics of how radio started using a battery as power source. In the meantime I experienced that 'homebrew technology' is too ambitious for me. I'm not good in soldering and building HF equipment requires precision, experience and reliable measuring equipment. Now that we are a few years later, I still don't know what I want with hamradio. Below you can still find the adventures of an apprentice, but I will not continue this series of articles.

After having made roughly a 100 QSO's with my Yaesu FT847 the hobby fell quiet for some years. Lately I sold my QRO equipment and returned to QRP on 20m only, which is good enough for me.

My callsign is PG7H and my shack consists of:

• a Tentec 1320 QRP CW transceiver with max. 3W power,
• a homebrew dipole antenne of 11 meters beaming East-West at about 10 meters above the ground
• 10 meters coax indoor + common shoke + 1:1 balun + 10 meters open feedline (300Ω),
• no antennetuner because the measured SWR is 1.7:1, not excellent, but good enough for mee,
• 3 morsekeys,including the one that my brother built in 1972,
• a homebrew speaker,
• a Linux Mint pc with:
• Kiwisdr for several websdr providers to have a bandwide view on the activity on the band I'm working on,
• CQRLOG software with QSL synchronization with LotW and eQSL, a link to QRZ.com to see the details of my counterstation.

This all works fne, what is missing is the patience to sit behind my set for more than one hour and work all stations available.

After several months of inactivity I decided to stop with the hobby.
I'll add one article with a summary of my log and then it ends.