Biography

Hi! My name is Rudi Venter, I have been a licensed Ham since 1996 and a SWL long before that when I was still at school. I still clearly remember my first short wave receiver, it was a Phillips valve set. The magic of the glowing valves in the dark while listening to exotic stations will always be with me, and then there was the smell of hot valves and Bakelite, maybe that is why I still love valve amplifiers!

I build my first (CW) transmitter when I was 10 years old. My previous calls were ZR6VE (restricted to 50 MHz and above only) and later upgraded to ZS6VER before changing to ZS6DX, We have a second "home" that is located in the rural Eastern Cape province of South Africa, these days this is our primary home unless we are travelling. My ZS2M call is now the call I use most of the time. I also hold the call V51VE. I was born in Namibia (Windhoek) but I grew up in Pretoria, South Africa.


I enjoy contesting and DX'ing, mostly on CW but I can also occasionally be found on SSB but I have to admit I find the digital modes like FT8 quite boring. I also love playing with radios, modifying, restoring or improving and home-brew is always fun.

My recently started collection of older radios, mostly HF transceivers, is slowly growing, at the moment I am concentrating on older "flagship" radios from the three mayor players in the field.

I love CW even more than in the past, it still holds all the magic of amateur radio that enticed me to it as a youngster.


Apart from playing with radios and electronics in general I also enjoy nature, traveling, exploring, hiking and nature/landscape photography. Photography is a hobby but it has become a bit of a second career for me (even though I am officially retired!) with prints selling around the world. I mostly sell my work via international agents and fine-art prints direct. I have also recently started a YouTube channel featuring my landscape photography, you can see what I get up to at https://www.youtube.com/user/RudixSA.


For me amateur radio has become a way of life, I take it into account where ever I am or what ever I do, it brings peace to my life and the wonder of far away places..


This page is a short summary of my journey with amateur radio, I hope you enjoy it!


73 Rudi de ZS6DX/ZS2M/V51VE

Worked DXCCs:

Equipment

As a amateur radio equipment collector I have a large collection of equipment. My shack is setup with a contest/DX position and a test/play/rag-chew position.

At the moment the main equipment in the contest position are 2 Yaesu FTdx-5000MP's