Ham radio - LA4RT

I got my license in my early teens, back in the 70's, but went QRT around 1980. I took it up again in 2004, and am active on HF, mostly CW. The rig is an Elecraft K3, the antenna I use most is my "monster balcony antenna" which I can take down in minute in case of a thunderstorm or if I'm not planning to use it for a while. It's simply a full size vertical for 40 m taped to a Spiderbeam 12 m telescoping pole. I use two radials draped over the roof and drooping along the walls. With a tuner, I get surprisingly good results also on higher bands. I sometimes use the pole for other resonant antennas, but for everyday use, I don't bother. I can get away with this because the coax is very short. To get on 80 m, I can support an inv V from an 18 m Spiderbeam pole. The topmost sections are too flimsy, so the peak ends up at 15 m.

I operate from Vestre Sandøya island, IOTA EU-061, during summer vacations.

Fabian, DJ1YFK, has written a nice program to help you improve your reception speed once you know the morse code: qrq. It's basically a port of the RufzXP program for Windows. The concept is devilish. It sends a callsign. If you are able to copy, it ups the speed by 2 wpm. If not, it lowers it by 2.

I upload my logs to LOTW, but I don't use eQSL.

I investigated the protocol of the Yaesu VX-6 2m/70cm HT. It is different from the VX-7, but the similarities made it easy to get started. Here are the results. I got most of it figured out, although I have to admit that I could write it up better. Anyway, there should be enough information there to write HT programming software for Linux, but I have no immediate plans to do so.

These are the IOTA groups in Norway and the Norwegian Arctic.