Pictured is my ZeroFive 40m vertical with 16 ground radials. A nice low-angle antenna for dx contacts.

I got my Novice license in late 1964 followed by a General class license in early 1965. In the 80s I graduated to Advanced and, a couple of months before the code requirement dropped from 20 to 5 wpm, I graduated to Extra Class (imagine that).

Much of my enjoyment of amateur radio has come from building things.

My first ever radio project was assembling a Cub Scout galena crystal radio. It was doomed to failure because: (1) the nearest AM station was KSVC 80 miles away in Richfield with tall mountains intervening, (2) the station tranmitted 250 Watts, (3) my old house-top 'aerial' was in-line rather than broadside to KSVC, and (4) the radio had a dynamic headphone instead of the much more efficient crystal earphone. But I kept trying and, a couple of years later I built a 1N34A based crystal radio with ferrite inductor, 365 mmf variable capacitor, better antenna and a crystal earphone that was barely able to receive KSVC in Panguitch. Soon I was building more successful Boy Scout transistor AM receivers. The hottest simple receiver I ever built I made using two 1H4 vacuum tubes. I optimized the circuit until I could hear "KOMA of Oklahoma" blasting through with such power that it could drive a small loud speaker. Not bad with two tubes, a 45 Volt battery with 1 volt filament tap, and a 5 foot whip antenna. Other projects followed: a Lafayette volt-ohm-milliampere meter; a Knight Kit 3 transistor super-regenerative 27 MHz CB walkie-talkie; and a Radio Shack Star Roamer super-regenerative receiver kit.

In my 9th grade our family moved to a bigger town and I soon had a friend, Gerry WA7AOO, who knew a local ham, Jim Bass K7YLT, who was willing to administer the novice exam. Jim became my main ham mentor and parts supplier. I still owned the Star Roamer when I got my novice. It quickly became apparent that it was lacking sensitivity, stability and selectivity as a ham receiver. A neighbor by the name of Larry White, who was a ham, helped me build my first ham antenna. It was a 40m half wave dipole which stretched from the peak of our house near my bedroom window to a nearby tree. I obtained a real ham receiver, an old Hallicrafters SX-11? from a Brigham City ham, Tom K7AHD. I used this with a transmitter I purchased mail order from World Radio Labs, a Globe Scout model 680A and enjoyed operating crystal controlled cw for a few months as a novice. My code speed rose quickly and I was soon wanting a general class ticket. As a General Class operator I built a 40m Inverted Vee that was 54 feet tall at the apex. The mast was constructed of douglas fir 2x4s nailed together in a "T" cross section with seams staggered for strength. That may have been the best performing antenna I've ever had. The Vee was fed by 4.5 inch homebrew ladder-line spaced with 1/4 inch wooden dowels dipped in wax. I built a transmatch so I could use the ladder-line fed Inverted Vee on 80 - 10 meters. My father helped me acquire a 50 foot triangular tower, a rotor, and tri-band yagi beam during my 12th grade. That antenna opened up lots of possibilities.

I made a 2m phased array for an old AM modulated ARC-5 VHF tube transceiver which I'd modified to accept a Heathkit vfo as the frequency source. The array consisted of a pair of 7 element yagis vertically polarized on a horizontal interconnect tube. I was always amazed that I was able to talk from Perry to the hams in Ogden with their super-regenerative Heathkit Lunch Box rigs by pointing my array directly at 10,000 foot Willard Peak standing between me and them.

A friend, Gene WA7BWF, and I bought double side band transmitters which was our first experience with suppressed carrier transmission. That didn't last long as I discoverd that DSB required a receiver with a good crystal filter on the other end in order to receive it without it sounding garbled. For the DSB transmitter I built an AC power supply outputting 800VDC @ 250 mA and a couple of lower voltages. I learned most of my lessons about good bleeder resistor practice from that project. Ouch! Soon I graduated to a Heathkit HX-20 transmitter. I modified the already mentioned power supply only slightly to work with it. I also took the HX-20 mobile with the help of another mentor, Lewis Fish K7EZR, by winding a toroidal core transformer and building a transistor switched power supply around it. It was enclosed in a WWII ammunition box. The transmitter worked ok with a pre-hamstick type antenna on my 1957 Ford Fairlane bumper. My receiver consisted of my car radio as IF amplifier and a Gonset converter (ham bands to AM broadcast band) to which I had added a 12AU7 based bfo which worked but not very satisfactorily.

While in highschool I did much of the assembly of a Heathkit SB300/SB400 rcvr/xmtr pair for our local ham club. My already fair soldering skills benefitted a lot from that. To my list of projects built I added a homebrew grounded-grid HF linear amplifier with input power of1200 Watts PEP based on four 811A tubes. For that I made an 1800 VDC supply with twin 866 mercury vapor rectifier tubes. The 866s emitted a purple glow proportional to the instantaneous current drain of the SSB transmitter creating an impressive ambience during night-time SSB rag chewing. After marrying a wonderful lady and starting our family, ham radio took a back seat to more important things for a few years. I whittled away in the basement at building a 4-1000A based HF linear amplifier with input power of 2000 Watts PEP. I purchased the tube from Bill Davis at Salt Lake Instrument, a Salt Lake City electronic surplus dealer. The amplifier incorporated a vacuum variable for the input of its pi-network and a nice roller inductor. The power supply for the amplifier was built around an 85 pound 3600-0-3600 VAC transformer. The finished supply was capable of outputting 4000 VDC @ 500 mA (scary). The supply was so heavy that its enclosure ended up on casters and supporting the amplifier similar to the Henry 2K style. The supply had ten 500uF at 500VDC computer grade capacitors in series and a rectifier board full of 1000 PIV/2.5A diodes each with its own equalizing resistor and capacitor. When I turned on power to the amplifier, the soft sound of constant corona discharge was unnerving. Thinking of my children and myself, I sold the amplifier a few months later.

In the early '80s, to learn machine language programming, I designed and built a Z80A based auto-patch for use with a 2 meter base transceiver. More recently I assembled a DEMI 2m to 10m transverter kit as part of a subsequently abandoned moon bounce project. Turns out it can be done now on much lower power by employing the new software available to dig data out of the noise.

Electronic building has been satisfying and, at times, humerous. Mid-morning one Saturday, soon after completing the 4-1000A amplifier, I was in the middle of a 40m SSB QSO with a mobile station in Arizona when my wife received a phone call from our next door neighbor. He diplomatically informed her that he and his wife were trying to sleep in but couldn't due to my voice emanating from their electric blanket controller.

I enjoy antenna building, some Collins operation, and Campbell Scientific CRBasic based datalogger projects of all kinds including meteorology. I'm active on the Beehive Utah Net and Farm Net traffic nets, and some local 2 meter emergency preparedness nets.

Thanks for stopping by.

73, Dave - K7TN