Greetings fellow QRP ops from the beautiful foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina! I am age 52 and a ham since 1996, but my interest in QRP operation is only about 2 years old. I first tried QRP when I decided to participate in a NAQCC (
http://www.naqcc.info ) sprint one night and I only worked 1 hour of the sprint and was very surprised to work 23 stations in 17 different U.S. states running only 5 watts! After that I was pretty well convinced of QRP's abilities. Also, I wanted to be able to operate portable or "QRP In the Field" from parks and up in the higher mountains of North Carolina. I had been talking about it a lot on the radio to some of my friends on 3.895 SSB, but didn't own a portable QRP radio.
Well, not long after that I received a package via the UPS and opened it up and it contained a brand new Ten-Tec R4020 two band rig (20 and 40 meters) that had a invoice in the box with "A gift from your friends on 3895 Khz" printed on it! I was tickled half to death! Those guys had gotten together and bought me a QRP rig! I soon received a 2nd QRP rig, not the way I wanted to! I had been working a weekly CW sked with W4CUX Bill Worley in Alpharetta, GA on 80 meters for almost 3 years after Bill had seen my call on the SKCC (
http://www.skccgroup.com ) Elmer's list and had contacted me. We became great friends over the next 3 years and in November 2012, right around Thanksgiving, during our weekly schedule Bill informed me that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and would probably not be able to make our sked anymore and only a few weeks later I learned that Bill had passed away on December 28, 2012. I was shocked at how fast the cancer had taken my friend away. A couple weeks after Bill's passing I received a email from W4CJV Wayne Rand, also in Alpharetta, GA who was a great personal friend of Bills that said he had some things he wanted to send to me at Bill's request before he died. About 2 weeks later I received a package from Wayne and inside it was Bill's Vibroplex Chrome Deluxe Vibrokeyer single lever paddle and a Hendricks PFR-3A three band QRP rig (20, 30, amd 40 meters) that Bill had constructed from a kit. The Hendricks radio had a set of W5JH Baby Black Widow paddles attached to the front of the radio and a 5 watt SMT resistive dummy load attached to the BNC coax jack on the back. Now I own 2 QRP radios although I've never bought one myself and I love being able to get in the great outdoors during warm weather and set up and operate QRP CW using either a 66 feet (20 meters) long end-fed wire antenna or a 44 feet (13.4 meters) long dipole fed with 450 ohm ladder line. The PFR-3A has a built in manual antenna tuner and I bought a kit for a Emtech ZM-2 Z-match tuner and constructed it to use with the Ten-Tec R4020 radio. I will forever be grateful to W4CUX Bill for his gift and will always think of him each time I use the Hendricks PFR-3A and I am also very grateful for the Ten-Tec R4020 radio from my friends on 3895 Khz. I can hardly wait for warmer weather so I can get outdoors and have some fun! So that's my story on how I became involved in the QRP aspect of amateur radio. There is a story on page 2 of the June 2013 issue of the SKCC Ragchew Newsletter about Bill and I with photos if you would like to read it at this link:
http://www.skccgroup.com/member_services/newsletter/201306_Rag_Chew.pdf I hope to work some of you on the air this spring!
Very 72 de KU4GW Cliff
NAQCC#1491, Flying Pigs QRP Int.#1183, Club72#46, FISTS#16001, SKCC#652
