Equipment
HF gear
- Kenwood TS-530 - My first HF rig and usually my favorite radio for HF contacts.
- ICOM IC 756 Pro - My second Hf rig. It was a bid I won that I had thought I was too low and had lost. The features are nice but it hasn't lived up to the IC746's my friends had at the early field days in the late 1990's and early 2000's.....yet.
- Kenwood TS-440s -My backup rigs. These units are amazing for the price I paid, the ease of operation, ability to accept inadvertant tuning mismatches and simple layout. Plug it in, ground it, screw on the antenna, tune it and start making contacts with other hams.
- Yaesu FT891 - mobile unit. It is installed and set to be tested on the air It is connected to two whips one on 40M and one on 75M.
computers
- HP Laptop - Inexpensive , with AMD processor and generally a pain to use in any serious operation. The touch screen activates things randomly. It is slightly worse that a poorly shielded regen receiver. But is allows me to program Yamaha electronic pianos quite nicely. Horrible contest logging machine.
- Toshiba Laptop - A windows 7 machine with an Intel 3 chip. It works and has generated many Cycle the Seacoast and Trek Across Maine communication logs.
- micro computers Win10-. I purchased two of the most inexpensive of these from Amazon. One was the ACEPC-was on sale for less than $99USD. The other is a "Fanless Intel Pro and again on sale for less than $100 USD. I went all out an purchased an inexpensive 1TB drive. Surprisingly the one with the added HD does really well running Windows 10 (Far better than even the HP Laptop) Both units have an Intel Atom processor. Both units when operating have either a 128G or 256G card/USB drive plugged in. Both are mountable on the back of a TV set or computer monitor. This frees up space for more radios ;-)
- Raspberry Pi -I have picked up several of these over the last several years. The 2, 2+,and 3 are in various different projects.