I am a licensed Amateur Radio Operator since 1975. I enjoy all facets of our great hobby. I am an avid DXer (I spend a lot of time on the radio trying to work countries (DX) that I’ve never worked. Right now the American Radio Relay League, which will be celebrating 100 years of operation is having what is called a QSO Party for the year of 2014. There are stations being set up in the 50 states and also American territories. The object of the QSO party is to try and make contacts with these various operations. I’ve worked every one of them so far and look forward to working many more over the upcoming months.

With my station that consists of a Yaesu FTDX5000D and a Henry 2K Desktop amplifier. The purpose of the amplifier is to make your signal loader for the far off stations. It has been a real work horse for me. My antenna as mediocre as it is does let me try and hear those far off stations. The antenna I had up before was so powerful that I could hear and work just about any country I wanted to. I live in a home owners association governed communityOf the 340 possible countries to work I’ve work 225 of them. To make contact there are many modes of operations. My favorite is Morse Code. This mode does not require a lot of power and goes the farthest. Another mode I enjoy is using the microphone connected to the radio. This is where you are going to get to know the radio operator on the other end. Some conversations are very interesting. Some countries that I’ve worked are only allowed to exchange their name, the town/city they live in, and their age and the weather. Another mode of operation I enjoy is the digital modes. These are modes where you use you computer to generate tones for the stations on the other end to copy and the same here. The compute takes and reads the other stations digital signals and shows you what was said. Pretty interesting.

One of my other hobbies is Photography and adjusting the images to my liking. The camera takes the photo, but there are some things to really make the images look even more impressive. The two programs I use for my photograph are Photoshop and Lightroom. Very nice programs for adjusting my images