The Summer of 82 I was 10 years young then, I did not even start Ham radio till 2009. got my Extra in 2012. Still wanting to learn code. But finding the time with work, family and my garden. I am lucky to have just enough ground to put just about any antenna I would want. My hf antenna is a full wave loop for 80 meters about 30 ft off the ground. Fed with 300 ohm line, All the way to the MFJ 969 versa tuner. I have a vertical for 10,12,15 meters. I have a home made 4 element 6 meter beam, And a 13 element 2 meter ssb antenna. Soon I will be replacing that with a 17 element. Need to get my tower up.As a pre/early teen, my frends and I were into SWL'ing and CB. We would listen to DX on the SWL bands and spot what we were listening to on CB. We also "shot DX" in CH 16 SSB lol...
Back then I built my first Ham Rig, a HW-16 and HG-10b VFO. As my teen years advanced, radio fell to the wayside due to Girls. It wasn't til I got married in my early 20's that I finally got my Novice and finally got on the air. We lived in a ground floor apartment that backed up to woods so I snuck a length of RG-58 out the window and put a fan dipole up in the woods for 40/15 meters lol. That was the summer of '82.
Made General shortly after when we bought a house and I could have real antennas. Didn't do much with radio until I joined our local DX club in '94 and went from General to Advanced, then Extra in about 2 months time. Became active on our VE Team and made many a new ham
Now I'm divorced and back in an apartment since 2001. In 2007 I got tired of not being on the air and figured out how to have an effective indoor antenna. I put up an indoor folded wire loop of about 80 feet of #14 THHN fed with an SGC-230 auto coupler at it's base. Have about 3500 contacts logged here chasing DX and contesting and finally worked the remaining 75 countries for my first DXCC.
So that's my story and I'm sticking to it
There we go with the time thing again.
