Biography

Continuously licensed as VE7BDO since 1972. Advanced Class with CW and active on phone, CW & digital modes on HF and VHF. Quite involved now with SDR I have built several SDR receivers and transceivers, including a 100w all HF band SDR transceiver around the excellent Multus Proficio SDR kit and another Proficio with300W output. Also, bought a Flex 3000 and fit it all into a nice new enclosure with on-demand cooling - much nicer than the original packaging IMO. Have built several PSUs, Linear Amplifiers for HF and VHF and many other projects.

My latest self-contained transceiver is based on Hermes-Lite2: 20W output, built-in keyer, 7" touchscreen and several encoder (MIDI) controls on the front panel - all running on SDR-Console (thank you Simon!). Was a very fun project during all the COVID nonsense.

Have built another HF linear amplifier and several other small projects. 2M 500W amplifier is in the works now but had to wait for the HL2 TRX to be finished. Built the tr(uSDX) and did a fair bit of custominzing on it.

Other hobbies/interests: Designing and 3D printing all manner of things (not necessarily radio-centric), sport shooting at my local Rod n' Gun club;s 2 ranges, sailing, fishing and teaching my grandchildren all the things mommy and daddy won't.

Worked DXCCs:

Equipment

Station consists of:

Kenwood TS-940S/AT transceiver, (with SM-220 & SP-940) Proficio SDR Transceivers (100W and 300W), Flex 3k, and a Mercury IIIs HF/6 LDMOS amplifier - absolute wonderful piece of kit! Also run an Icom IC-7100 which I usually run remote via iPad/iPhone and use it for sending digital, formal traffic and, now my HL2 TRX and (tr)uSDX portable transceivers. Active marine mobile with my RS-918 SDR when on my sailboat.

Antennas:

Homebrew 5 Band, broadband Hex Beam antenna at 17m AGL. Antenna was built in May 2008 from K4KIO's plans (BIG thanks, Leo!) and G3TXQ's design (BIGGER thanks, Steve (SK)!!) Love the Hex...

Collinear Dipole cut for 20m but use on 80m - 20m, at 12m AGL, 2 x 10 element stacked yagis for 2m at 13m AGL, telescopic base-loaded vertical and an EFHW for portable ops. More on the way to be sure...