I am now 54 and married with Ellen, no children. I started with ham radio around age of 15 as operator of a school station. Worked SSB then and learned CW with making QSO’s. Liked CW from that moment on.
During study and work in the years after that I worked mostly from the club station of PI4Z of which is was the co-founder. In 2014 we moved to a house with antenna space so I started building my own station. This year we will do garden upgrade and I will grow my own antennas. Planned are: 4 SQ for 40M, vertical for 80M, invL for 160M, vertical for 30M, tower for the higher bands including 6M and 2M.
Equipment is K3, OpenHPSDR TRX, Alpha 374A, SGC500 and all kind connecting equipment to make SO2R contesting easy.
Doing a lot of contesting but spending most of the time on 160M as I am a enthusiastic topband operator.
Now at the age of 54, working for Cargill INC as an IT consultant specialized in Manufacturing IT.
Other hobbies: playing carom billiards, playing church organ, listen to classic music, touristic cycling, enjoy nature, like having a drink in a bar and do a nice dinner in a good restaurant.
Reason to become a ham radio operator was the thrill for contacts with people in other countries, but biggest interest is technology. Still like to build equipment even if it is cheaper to buy ready-made. Latest projects: amplifier and filter for OpenHPSDR, TX bandpass filter, building a midi encoder for an old wooden church organ keyboard with Arduino microcontroller. Not really ham radio but learning the Arduino which will help in making my own station controller, which will be a future project.
I became member of CWops because I want to improve my CW skills. I can easy copy calls in a contest at high speed, but making a QSO is still difficult. I expect membership of CWops will help me with this.
This biography is what appeared in Solid Copy when the member joined CWops.