About WK4DS (David)

Hello there!

When I first started down the path of ham radio, I had no idea it would escalate to what I am doing now.

From POTA park activations to writing a blog about my adventures in radio, I do a little of everything.

Here is just a few of the things I am active in currently.

• I help maintain a local repeater on the 1.25m band (It belongs to KG4WBI, but I am in the maintenance department so…)

• I am active on HF and VHF/UHF up to 70cm currently.

• I have a radio for 23cm band but no antenna nor another ham to talk to if I did have an antenna.

• I operate a propagation beacon on 28.221mhz transmitting in CW (morse code) with 1 watt of output power.

• I love using small (QRP) radios in the field as well as in my “shack” at home

• I only send paper QSL cards, I haven’t time to maintain a database online for QSL as well so I opted not to do that at all. Besides, I love getting those cards in the mail!

• I love both field day events and our local club has great events on both.

• I am very active in Parks On The Air and try to activate at least once a week and more if possible. I write a blog and it is on this website here.

• I love to tinker and build things, one of my next projects is to build a multiband HF CW QRP radio from scratch. Just assembling radios isn’t fun anymore, i want to build it Manhattan style, or bread / perf board construction, whatever it takes…

So as you can see, I am quite busy in radio… lol

I love Ten Tec radios and have a few myself. I even have one donated by KG4WBI (who has WAY more) to repair and get back on the air. My main station at home has a Ten Tec Omni 6+ station as well as a Ten Tec Omni 7 and for spice I threw in the Yaesu VHF/UHF all mode rig as well…only because Ten Tec never made one like this.

In the far corner of that stack is also a 400 watt (CW) / 600 watt (SSB) amplifier and supporting power supply that is tied to the Omni 6+ station. I don’t use it much though as it is needing some improvements and I have not had time to implement them due to POTA activities and such… lol.

NA4N Ten Tec Scout 555 Website is a wealth of information on this wonderful little radio!

Below is my 1 watt transmit power, 10 meter propagation beacon setup for auto restart if the power fails. The radio is a President HR2600, 10 meter all mode radio, that I bought at a hamfest. The radio is keyed with a Hamgadgets keyer that I put together from a kit, it is transmitting into a homebrew vertical antenna that I made and tuned with a nanoVNA. All of this is powered by a repurposed computer power supply that I converted to run on a toggle switch and has a fused output at 10 amps. The radio draws a little over 2 (and is fused at 3 amps to protect it from surges) so it is fine for this role.

The way the radio is built, I have a series of things engaged during operation. First of all, the break in on the CW is terrible on this radio so I figured out that I can engage the TX button and this turns on the transmitter circuit, basically switching it to transmit constantly. Even so, as long as there is no modulation (CW side tone) nothing is actually transmitted when in CW mode. So this eliminated the break-in snarl that it has when you first key the transmitter in CW mode. But this radio has another issue, if you power it up with the TX switch engaged, it will disable the transmitter and not transmit anything at all. So to over come this little problem, I simple installed an on-delay timer in place of the TX switch and now, the radio powers up as usual, starts sending code automatically(with the snarl on the first character of each word) and 20 seconds later the timer closes the TX circuit and the snarl disappears.

You are reading that right, the VFO says 28.221.4mhz and not just 28.221mhz. I read the reports on the RBN and found my frequency was low by 400hz so I simply turned the VFO up a little to overcome this and then hit the F LOCK button to lock the VFO in position.

The below photos show my latest build. It is a 5 position antenna switch that I have connected in reverse to switch between my shack rigs so I can play with more radios and not have to fiddle with the manual switch I was using. I designed this little gem myself, but it really isnt that complicated to be fair. I have 4 relays for the 4 possible rigs (currently have 3 connected) and one antenna output. Everything I used came from Amazon, literally all of it. Even the screws and nuts!

The first image shows the remote control pod with the five position drum switch. I have position one reserved as “OFF” and then radios 1 thru 4 after that.

In the below photo, you can see the control cable, fuse block and power cable that supplies the needed 13.8VDC to run the unit.

The relays are your standard run of the mill 12VDC coil relays. I did run the 12VDC control wiring down as close to the bottom as possible, then the inputs from the RF connectors are in the middle layer and the top layer is the output wiring to the antenna connector. I grounded all the relay contacts so that when the relays are off, the radio inputs are grounded to minimize coupling between the radios and it works well. With 400 watts running through one input, the other one next to it is only showing a 1 db increase of signal on the same band. I am confident that there isnt going to be front end damage from this setup now.

In the below photo you can see that I even ran a bond ground between the connectors to make sure that there would not be a problem for a very long time. I plan to make a legend plate in a few days once some material for that comes in and I will screw it to the drum switch and this will be a done project!

That is my current ham radio situation as of March 2024.