Licensed in 1967 at the age of 16, CW has always been my favourite mode (my name is C.W. Tran so no other mode could match that name, hi). During the years of having a young family at home and a busy job I was mostly active on VHF bands (50, 70, 144MHz) then have concentrated on HF DXing and HF Contesting for the last 30 years or so, from my QTH near Inverness in the North of Scotland.
I am a member of the RSGB HF Contest Committee and a founder member of the UK/EI Contest Club (www.ukeicc.com) Until 2017 I was the organiser of our nationwide GR2HQ team for the annual IARU HF Championships. I am not a great fan of QSL cards, so have a very efficient QSL Manager Steve N3SL for all our contest and DXpedition QSOs – we have 582000 QSOs on LoTW with different callsigns. I’ve really enjoyed being the main CW operator on some recent small DXpeditions – ZK2V (x2), A35V, V6Z (x2), VK9CZ (x3).
My station at the moment is an Elecraft K3, a TenTec Orion 565 and several amplifiers, including homebrew ones. Antennas are 5ele monoband Yagis on separate towers for 20/15/10 m and wire antennas/verticals for the lower bands. Except for trying to work a DXpedition, I don’t usually have any antennas installed for these new WARC bands.
I also love repairing and operating older radios, so have an interesting (well I find it interesting) collection which includes a Collins KWM-2A, Hallicrafters SR-150, Drake TR7, etc. and includes a fairly rare Eico 753. With these older radios you can (a) actually see the components and (b) have an idea about what that component does in the circuit!
Looking forward to working other CWops members soon. Long live CW!
Thanks to everyone who sponsored me to join CWops as member.
This biography is what appeared in Solid Copy when the member joined CWops.