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A new DX and contesting club

October 22, 2010

The new Orca DX and Contest Club serves BC and the northern part of Washington State. I’m the webmaster, so my part has been developing the web site.

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A cheap 40M DX machine: the twin half-square array

August 19, 2010

This may be the cheapest, lowest, no-radials-required, no fancy networks, way to get great gain on 40M. If you have some rope, trees, junkbox wire, a couple of DPDT relays, and some coax laying around, you have all it takes to build this antenna.

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Phased 40M Wire Verticals

August 15, 2010

Here’s a two-element array of wire verticals for 40M — read about using passive phasing, then Christman phasing. Includes a handy online calculator for phasing line lengths, and audio clips of the array in action.

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Analyzing my terrain for HF gain

July 11, 2010

Sometimes when my antenna is at 25′, I do quite well into Canada and the U.S — perhaps even better than with the antenna at 45′. Terrain analysis helped end the mystery of height vs. performance at this ridge-top QTH.

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QSL cards

May 20, 2010

Are you waiting for a QSL from VA7ST? All contacts in my log receive a confirmation using the ARRL’s Logbook of the World.

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End of an Era: Kon-Tiki

January 20, 2010

On Christmas Day 2009, Knut Haugland, the last surviving crew member of the Kon-Tiki voyage, passed away at the age of 92.

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Building a Beverage receive antenna

November 16, 2009

If you have room to run a short 270′-long Beverage antenna, you’ll improve your reception on the low bands (160M and 80M). Here’s how I built the antenna and just-too-easy transformer.

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SteppIR 3-element yagi

May 15, 2009

Choosing the SteppIR 3-element was not a difficult decision. Those who have used this antenna swear by it. Read my notes as I purchased, installed and put one on the air at VA7ST.

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FT-2000 — Thoughts and Observations

January 1, 2009

Observations about owning the Yaesu FT-2000 — with a few tips and tricks for happy owners.

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A linear-loaded 40M rotatable dipole

August 27, 2006

The “crappie pole” is a short, linearly loaded 40M rotatable dipole you can build for $50 or less. And it works!

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