My first connection with ham radio was back in 1986 …or so. I was part of a public club YO9KPP. Because I didn’t like CW at all I was not able to get my license and I’ve abandoned the whole thing.
Then life happened – I left my home town to attend university and graduated with a degree in computer science, got married and had my first son. After that I’ve decided to give it one more try and I’ve taken the exam in 2021 (it was full blown pandemic time and I had to wait quite some time to be able to attend).
And that was it… I was forever hooked. My initial setup was ICOM 7300 and a Hustler 4BTV vertical antenna with which I’ve managed to perform my first DXCC in SSB. Took me one night to decide that I was going to give CW one more try and I’ve started from scratch. Took me 6 months to go from 0 to 35 wpm by having at least a total of 3 hours training divided in couple of smaller session – I was on the bus, my headphones were on, I was on the plain, well headphones one – anyway you get the idea and I was forever sold to CW and continued my training in the same manner until today. And so I was able to reach 55-60 wpm in contest mode (yes I know that is useless but for me was a personal challenge).
Now because of my sudden love for CW I was able to earn DXCC for SSB, MIX, CW and single bands for 20m and 15m (at the moment working on my 10m and 40m DXCC) – more than that I’ve started to participate in almost every medium / big contest and I was able to get some decent results for a low power station. But the story does not stop here – I’ve started to document myself about SO2R and later about SO3R and using my modest antennas (only verticals because of my QTH limitations) I’ve designed and built myself a low power SO2R station (yes the SO2R controller is designed and built by yours truly) with which I was able to boost my scores quite a lot in CW competitions. For more than one year now I’ve been operating almost exclusively CW (there are some local nets on which I’m attending on SSB during evenings on 80m band).
Right now I’m running my station from our flat that is composed of: 2 x Icom 7300, 2 x Filtermax III bandpass filters , 1 x SO2R interface (YO3HEX personal design), 1 x VA6AM Low power triplexer (20 15 10), 1 x Antenna Genius 2×8 from 4O3A, 2 x RSP1A SDRs which are used for CW Skimmers to populate my bandmaps during contests, 1 x 12m multiband vertical antenna, 1 x Hustler 4BTV and 1 x Hexbeam with Yaesu G450CDC rotor.
As for my personal life I’m married and I have two sons 5 years and 8 months, my wife is also an electrical engineer graduate. I’m working as a Biometric System Architect at THALES designing various biometric identification systems.
Other than my radio hobby… Well there are quite some other things like rock climbing, dirt bikes and generally speaking anything that involves adrenaline and risky situations (I call it calculated risks).
See you all on CWT and on the bands!
This biography is what appeared in Solid Copy when the member joined CWops.