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I think a confluence of several things got me to dust off my radio equipment and return to the air in February of 2011 after a decade of inactivity.  First off, I was pretty depressed now that my son was away at college.  Our life as a family had revolved around his life in sports, music and school.  Thankfully it wasn’t entirely cold-turkey as his younger sister was now active in sports, music and school as well.  But I was still missing him big time.

Additionally, I never liked the winters in New England.  Despite the beauty of the fall, when all the leaves change, and the promise of rebirth that spring brings, winter was something that I dreaded at best.  As I crept into my 50’s, dread was turning into something worse — outright depression (it is called SAD — how appropriate).  Thankfully my job keeps me pretty busy and I try to work non-stop during the winter just to make it pass by quickly.

The winter of 2010/2011 was a doozy.  I can remember bragging to my sister-in-law in Alabama that we were having a green Christmas, with no snow expected (and only a single small storm that left a dusting sometime in November, I think).  I believe it might have been 60 degrees Christmas day.  I should have known better.  We got hammered with snow on December 27th, and never saw the ground again until early March.  Despite the fact that we only had about twice as much snow as usual, we got it all in six major storms (so did the entire east coast) as opposed to our usual dozen or more smaller storms.  At one point, our mailbox was just a black dot that appeared half-way up the side of a huge pile of snow that was more than eight feet tall.

So being snow bound and lonely had something to do with my checking out the AMSAT web site late January.  I discovered that a new satellite was going to launch in a few days from the International Space Station.  This was an opportunity too good to pass up.

I wasn’t too sure that the Kenwood TS-790 would still work after sitting unused for more than a decade (My HF gear was even older), but I did have a more recent Yaesu FT-817ND QRP radio that covered VHF and UHF.  (Ever since my exposure to the TenTec Argonaut in 1973, I had a fascination with low power radios).  So I decided to fire that up, check out the antennas, and see if I could work some QRP.  My first QSO in a decade was across Narragansett Bay, on February 10th, using the 817 on 2-meter SSB (thank you N2ULF).

I hadn’t had a HF antenna at my home since the late 90’s (my wife had called it an ugly mess, so I took it down).  So I decided to brave the winter and the 3+ feet of snow to run about 150 feet of wire to several trees in our backyard and use it as a long wire.  My old home-brew tuner was long gone by then, but there were several inexpensive tuners purpose built for the 817.  So I purchased one from LDG and parked it on top of my 817.

Yaesu FT-817ND wtih LDG Z817 Tunder

Nine 1/4 wave counterpoises (80, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12, 10 and 6-meters) were attached to the other side of a 4:1 balun so that I would minimize the RF coming back into the shack via the coax.  With the exception of 17-meters the tuner has provided a 1:1 match on all bands, including 160-meters.  By February 12th I was back on HF, and happened to start with the RTTY contest going on that weekend.   At this point I’ve made QSOs on all of the HF bands except the secondary status channelized 5.3 MHz USB-only band.