KE9V is my amateur radio call sign that also serves as a short, unique, domain name. Licensed and continuously active since 1977, I've explored many of the amazing facets of personal radio afforded by this century-old hobby.
I use MacLoggerDX for my primary station logging along with N1MM+ for contesting.
Backup gear includes an IC-7610 transceiver, a Mercury IIIs amplifier and the MercuryAT auto tuner.
An engineer, more than forty winters at the coalface, I retired in 2022. Married 46 years, my wife and I have four adult children, six grandchildren, and we share our home with a furry friend named Marshall Tucker. We live in a small town in East-Central Indiana. EN70. Born and raised in this area, we left long ago in search of fortune and glory. A decade or so later we came back. Turns out, we like flat-land, corn fields, farms, and simple living.
I've spent most of my ham radio life at HF using low-power, never more than 100 watts. Never owned an amplifier, never wanted one. Probably because I fell in with a gang of hard-core QRPers during the last great wave of that movement near the end of the 20th century. Ripples from that tsunami continue to influence my ham radio experience.
Kicking off my third act forced me to acknowledge the limits of my remaining time and to focus on unfinished business. Despite having said, "wallpaper is unimportant", I did want a DXCC certificate on the wall. Though I have worked hundreds of unique DX entities through the years, my logging was spotty at best, I never kept QSL cards, and never applied for anything. I literally started over in the chase for DXCC in May 2022.
Using LoTW exclusively, I've collected DXCC Mixed, CW, Digital, 20M, 15M, 12M, and 10M. I'm currently over 700 in the DXCC Challenge. Along the way I completed the Triple Play WAS award (#2610).
I don't really know what comes next. I've always thought an idyllic retirement would include me running a solar-powered QRP CW station while crafting timeless works of radio fiction. Ham radio has been a lifelong affliction with little chance I would ever exit the hobby, assuming continued good health. George Burns once said, "I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life". Agreed!
I'm a Life Member of AMSAT, ARRL, QCWA, and the Long Island CW Club.
The site is powered by Linode running a recent version of Ubuntu. If the pages here look like something from the early days of the web, thanks for noticing! That was the goal. When it comes to web design, I prefer simple. White backgrounds with plain text. No animated flags, muzak, bubblegum, or pelf. Open web with validated HTML. Viewable with any browser. More than twenty years experience administering personal web sites has convinced me that the advantages of simple are legion.
