Hello there to anyone checking up on me! I have always been interested in science and technology. To his great credit my industrial arts teacher in junior high school (VE6AGT) started a radio-electronics club and set up a basic HF ham station at the school. The radio bug bit me bad. I studied the entire summer of 1970 for the radio license exam and passed, but missed out on girls that summer ;-) . So I have now been a ham for over 42 years, mostly enjoying the pleasures of morse code, QRP, some DX hunting, some CW mobile/portable work, minor contesting. I also presently volunteer with the Radio Communications Group of the Esquimalt Emergency Programme (VE7EEP).

Most operating time (perhaps 4-10 hours per week) is spent at the CW end of whatever highest HF band happens to be open. In my youth I could send and receive CW at 40WPM but now, due to lack of operating time I'm now down to around 30WPM. I was fortunate to have an international career so I have lived around the world and have had a number of callsigns over that time (perhaps you worked one of these?):

VE6AGG (1970-1975) G4OBO (1979) VE6OY (1976-1982) VK2EOY (1982-1985) VK2OY (1985-1993) P29/VK2OY (1993) LU/VE6TN (1993-1996) W0/VE6TN (1997) MW0AWC (1997-2000) VE6MK (2000-2003) VE7EA (2003 - present).

My radio station is very modest - tucked into the corner of our laundry room! I use a 24 year old ICOM IC-735 into a homebrew multi-band 42m long doublet antenna up 18m between two Douglas Fir trees and fed with 450 ohm ladder line through an MFJ-941E tuner. My iambic paddles are Bencher, using a K1EL K-40 keyer with a morse keyboard that I rarely use. I also have a Chinese army hand key but it gets only infrequent use. A W9GR DSP-III filter and Kenwood HS-5 headphones complement the IC-735, making it a fantastic CW rig. For the rare occasions I work 2M FM I use an Icom IC-2100H with a 7dB vertical mounted to our roof chimney, or a Wouxun KG-UVD1P dual-band handheld. For tinkering with electronics I play with an HP 1722B oscilloscope, Wavetek 3001 signal generator, Dazheng PS-305D power supply, Aceco FC1003 frequency counter and some homebrew test equipment. Recently, I have been trying to learn how microcontrollers work and to brush up on C++ programming through the use of an Arduino Mega2560 uC board.On the computer I solely use the ArchLinux operating system.

I live only 100 metres from the Juan de Fuca Strait with nice views of the water and thus I get a clear shot out over the Pacific Ocean. So despite the modest antenna I am able to get good signal reports from all over the Pacific Rim and the antenna seems to perform well in almost any direction, especially at higher frequencies.

I have a small blog in which I have an Amateur Radio category if you are interested in a read: http://lggagnon.wordpress.com/category/amateur-radio/

73's Larry VE7EA