I have owned Kenwood, Icom, and Yaesu rigs, currently I have worked
333 countries and confirmed 317. So I know my way around the HF spectrum pretty well. This advice was given based on my experience.
I've got myself a Kenwood TS-520 rig with the matching AT-200 tuner and the VFO-520 remote VFO. Works well in my corner of the hobby which is electrical experimentation and a better understanding of the theory. Most of the newer rigs (with the possible exception of the Elecraft K2) are too much computer
and not enough radio for my tastes.
Not needing a power supply was a big plus as well. Puttering around with wire antennas and adjusting/fixing my rig makes the occasional Russia and Spain contact that much more rewarding to me.
I picked up a pair of Radio Shack HTX handhelds (202 and 404) and fiddled with them for a bit. Antenna building is absolutely easier for them, but I got bored with the local repeaters pretty quickly and now I use them mostly to monitor the more interesting nets (a swap net and a tech net). Once you can hit all the local repeaters, there's not much to drive antenna
experimentation.
I think the lighthouse weekend last weekend was the most fun I've had so
far... we were having a BBQ at the time though, so I only made contact with three of the stations. The contest QRM really made the first day tough going... I don't really have an opinion on contesting yet (possibly because my station isn't competitive).
I built a computer interface and played with PSK31 which was fun for a week or two, but it got old pretty quickly... it seems like a good way to build up a QSL collection, but there was no real challenge for me operating there. The surreal world of SSTV is something I peer into from time to time though I haven't yet transmitted anything or seriously looked into it. There is a lot more challenges with it though (at least using the software I've got - QSSTV) so I may get into that at some point.
Now that I've completed my initial "want" list for my station, I'll start
doing more antenna work... I've got a 10m vertical dipole up the side of my house and a homebrew trapped 10/15/20/40 dipole across my yard. I used to
have an 80m segment on it, but that band turned me off pretty quickly and
since I don't really have enough room for it, removing it didn't hurt my feelings.
I've tried a Windom cut for 80m with and had great success with it despite its low height, so cutting one at 40m may be in the cards. I also want to try out a simple doublet of the same length and compare them. The extra two knobs for tuning up won't kill me. My HOA CC&R explicitly bans ham antennas, so I can't do anything permanent or complex, so at some point I may need to develop some quantitative evaluation and comparison method to help me settle on a specific antenna.
The other thing I'm working on is a central accessory switching/control
system.
Right now I have the mic/speaker/PTT control to my right with a splitter from the headphone jack and a separate mic connection I need to manually fiddle. Putting that all on a switch and adding a mixer so I can monitor multiple radios through the same headphones is on the drawing board. Running the CW jack to it as well seems like a good idea.
Which brings me to another bit I'll be working on... code. Don't have a straight key yet, but I plan on acquiring one (likely a cheap MFJ) and forcing myself to learn. There's always something happening on CW and using a
computer to copy seems like cheater.
Anyway, that went longer than I expected.
72 de Stephen K6BSD
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