After doing a lot of BCL and SWL from mid eighties, I obtained a first license at the beginning of 1993.
Immediately after I passed also the CW examination and obtained a full licence at the end of November 1993. A few days after I bought a
Kenwood TS-45OS-AT and began transmitting on the HF bands. This radio was used until April 2013 and has been displaced then
to a secondary location. After using it for years, during summer months, now it will need a repair.
Over the years I experimented mainly building wire antennas (never bought a single antenna, for fixed HF work, nor a beam),
good enough to let me get the WAC Phone and several DXCC awards (mixed, phone, cw, digital, 7 HF bands, 5band award (now 7) and challenge).
I got also the WAC, WAZ and WAS awards, all in mixed mode.
I also like very much the digital modes: when I got the limited license the first QSO was on 2m band, in packet mode (with a
portable, a wire dipole on the balcony and an AEA TNC). I am currently active mainly in FT8 and FT4, but also, rarely, in RTTY, PSK31, JT65A
and many other "old" digital modes, if I meet someone using them...
About CW, I used it carefully for some years, but I was never so fast, no more that about 20 wpm. Currently I am out of exercise,
but it is not so difficult to contact the DX stations, where you need to simply decode your call and transmit very few data. I always
transmit with by Bencher paddle and in the TS-450 age I used a PIC-based keyer designed and built by myself.
SSB was the more frequently used mode for many years and I like the dx contact as well as chatting in Italian, French and English (languages
I know quite well) or even in Spanish or Portuguese (that I know tentatively only). Nowadays it is quite common to see a totally
dead band in SSB, while you find a lot of statios in FT8...
Current setup for HF is: Kenwood TS-590S, SPE Expert 1.3K FA, an OCFD about 40 m long and an inverted L for the 160 m band,
which is set too low to work well for dx.
For 6m band I use the same rig and antenna, although sometimes I used a vertical antenna or a 2 elements quad, both self built.
For 2m and 70cm bands I have a vertical antenna at the moment, used with an Icom 7100.
I also use the QO-100 satellite, transmitting at very low power on the 2m band with the IC-7100. The signal is up-converted on the roof
to the 12 cm band, at about 200 mW, then amplified to about 4 W buy a cheap WiFi booster and fed to a 4 turns LHCP helical, on an
80 cm offset dish. This results in an RHCP signal directed to the satellite. For reception I use a third LNB put on my tvsat 90 cm dish,
resulting in a downlink at 739 MHz. Using a standard sat/terrestial tv separator, the tv signal goes to my tv, while the 739 MHz signal
to an HackRF SDR receiver, connected to my Linux PC, where the decoded audio is rooted to the speaker (for SSB and CW) or to the WSJT-X program,
for the digital modes.
For /P operation I use the Icom rig, with a vertical wire antenna (about 9 m long) on a tripod, an automatic tuner and a car battery
to supply power.
I also like very much the handheld rigs, so I have some for FM, DSTAR, DMR and C4FM. Using a SharkRF OpenSpot 1, I can skip local
repeaters and connect to several nets worldwide.