KR8L

Home page of Amateur Radio Station KR8L

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Amateur Radio Station KR8L is located in the Ninth Call District in Grid EM57pe, just a few miles north of the Hometown of Superman.

My fascination with radio began when I bought my first receiver, a Zenith Royal 100, an avocado-green AM Broadcast Band transistor radio. Hearing distant stations on that radio (Atlanta! Chicago!) got me interested in BCB DXing. Sometime later I acquired a used Hallicrafters S-40A, which was purchased from W9AQY. I did a lot of SWLing and DXing on that receiver, and I had the "callsign" WPE9FON in the Popular Electronics Shortwave Monitor program.

I was first licensed as WN9PEQ. My S-40A was my Novice receiver and my transmitter was a Knight Kit T-60. I had a few 80 meter crystals and a low dipole strung between a couple of trees. That was the era of the one-year Novice license. I didn't upgrade and the license was not renewable, so I was out of Amateur Radio. I became interested again about ten years later and was licensed as a new Novice as KA8GMJ (Novice licenses had become renewable by that time) and purchased a pair of used Heathkit "twins" (SB-301 and SB-401), which I operated for almost 20 years. Over the next couple of years I upgraded to General, then Advanced, then Amateur Extra, and eventually I applied for a callsign change to match my license class and was assigned KR8L.

I've always preferred simple, modest stations and antennas, but that hasn't kept me from getting on every band from 160 meters to 70 cm. I've worked 160 meter QRP with a homebrew CW transmitter and a random wire, done weak signal SSB and CW on 50, 144, 222, and 432 MHz, operated SSB, CW, and FM on many different amateur satellites, done meteor scatter work using both SSB and WSJT, and operated CW, SSB, and digital on all the HF bands. I've never done EME but by using my satellite antennas I have copied a few stations off the moon. QRP has been a continuing interest for me and at one time I was quite active in HFpack.

I've done some writing about my Ham Radio projects and operating activities in the past. You can read some of my articles here in portable document format (pdf). Most of them are from club newsletters or from postings to on-line discussion groups or club web pages. I've also had a few things published in QST and other ARRL publications, but you'll have to go to those publications to read those.

I also have a section called legacy pages, which describes some of my projects from many years ago, many of them related to HFpacking.

Content updated 2021 May 17