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I was given a Kenwood TS-520S in November 2020 that had belonged to a silent key.
This is what is known as a hybrid radio, since it is mostly solid state circuitry with a vacuum tube final amplifier. It powers on and appears to receive well, but I haven’t tried transmitting yet to test out the vacuum tubes. I’ll need to run through the test and tuning procedures before I try that.
Apparently the next big thing in radio is Digital Mobile Radio (DMR), so I decided to give it a try by buying a TYT MD-UV380 from Bridgecom Systems on September 19, 2019 for a whopping $110.00 with free shipping. Quite the deal!
After much banging of head on desk, and reviewing sample codeplugs from the fine folks at PNWDigital.net, I was able to begin to understand the peculiar programming of the DMR world and was further able to create a codeplug of my own for this TYT. We here in the Pacific Northwest are very lucky to have a number of interlinked repeaters, including many DMR repeaters; I have three DMR repeaters that I can hit with a 5-watt handheld from my shack with the J-pole antenna, so I saved a bit of money by not buying my own hotspot.
I have no real complaints about this TYT radio in particular, although I wish DMR in general was a little easier to understand.
Love them or hate them, Baofeng makes radios with a lot of bang for not a lot of bucks, which is why their radios are a very popular choice among new hams for a first radio. I’ll admit it: my first ham radio was a Baofeng BF-F8HP that I bought on October 17, 2017 (the day after I got my first callsign assigned) from Amazon for the staggering price of $62.89.
I have no complaints about mine that can’t be offset by the purchase price. Sure the scanning is slow, the included rubber ducky antenna is almost worthless, and the radio is nearly impossible to program without a computer. However, with CHIRP and a programming cable, they are actually very easy to program, and with an improved antenna like the Nagoya NA-771, it is a decent performing little radio that I still use frequently when I need a handheld.
On May 14, 2018 I decided it was time to upgrade from my cheap Baofeng handheld and ordered my first mobile VHF/UHF radio: an Icom ID-4100 from DX Engineering for $415.95.
I liked the small size of this radio, plus the fact that it was capable of D-STAR and had a GPS receiver built in. While the radio usually spends its time in my shack as a base station, it is small enough that it is easily transferrable to my Jeep for mobile operations.
After much agonizing research, I decided to buy the Icom IC-7300 as my first HF radio and made my purchase on March 27, 2018 from Ham Radio Outlet for $1,299.95 after a $50 mail-in rebate.
This radio has been amazing! As a new ham, the learning curve has been a little steep, but there are many helpful resources both online and in print. The radio has done everything I wanted it to do so far, and I doubt I have even scratched the surface of its capabilities.
I joined the Sky Valley Amateur Radio Club (callsign: W7SKY) in March of 2018, shortly after I first got my license. In 2019 I was elected club VP, and then right before the insanity of COVID-19 broke out in 2020, I was elected club president.
If you’re ever in the area and want to know more about our club or ham radio in general, please feel free to ask!
When choosing a vanity callsign, it is usually desirable to have shorter callsigns or a callsign that resembles a meaningful word, or maybe you want it to be your name or contain your initials. So why did I choose the seemingly random callsign KA7BVS as my vanity call?
To be honest, KA7BVS is a random callsign; it was randomly assigned to my great-uncle Arthur David Almgren when he first got his amateur radio license sometime on or before March 15, 1985. He peacefully passed away at his home on April 22, 2013, and it is my honor to now hold his former callsign.
Uncle David, as he was known to his many nephews, nieces, grand-nieces, and grand-nephews, was a life-long bachelor and always the “cool” uncle. He was the man with the toys, a seemingly limitless capacity for new hobbies, and an equally limitless capacity for teaching others with compassion. He had a juke box loaded with 45s and a pool table in his family room. Woodworking, metalworking, boating, sailing, motorcycles, airplanes, classic cars, electronics, steam engines, and BB guns – Just to name a few, not to mention amateur radio!
Here’s a link to his obituary on the National Silent Key Register if you’re interested:
http://www.silentkeyhq.com/main.php?p=bin/NSKALookup.php&dlnk=&call=KA7BVS&uid=0031524630383021
Sadly I wasn’t very interested in amateur radio until after he had passed away, so I never got to discuss that particular topic with him in any detail. While I inherited a number of his books and woodworking tools, I’m not entirely sure what became of his radios. He may have sold them some time before he died, so I am not likely to ever know what kind they were – my childhood memory has them as being large and grey, which doesn’t really narrow it down much.
The one radio-related thing I inherited (which got me started with this hobby) was his Vibroplex Bug, serial number 384469. After some tuning, it works very well and my goal is to one day learn Morse Code well enough to be able to use the Vibroplex to have on-air QSOs.
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