K4CDZ and W4HG Photos
Page Updated - 15.Nov.07

At the left is the earliest picture of the "shack" of KN4CDZ that I could find.  The photographs, made in October and December 1955 show an old table in a small bedroom, shared by my first Hallicrafters S-38D receiver and in the second picture a mighty 6AG7-6L6 homebrew transmitter..."compactly built" on an old military surplus chassis of some sort. 

The antenna was a 40M doublet with insulators made from breaking the tops off soft-drink bottles and a feedline made from your normal everyday lamp cord.  It managed to get out on both 40 and 15.

It was amazing when you had no idea of SWR and what would or would not work that you could still make contacts.

The novice license was upgraded to a general class in March 1956 and the rig upgraded to a S-40B with another home brew transmitter.  My first "store bought" transmitter was a Heathkit DX-35.  I wish I still had either of the rigs, or even a photo of the DX-35, but old boxes of pictures have not been very forthcoming so far in the search.

It was always a challenge to find a way to operate in a barracks room.  The S-38D and a modified Johnson Viking Adventurer were the station components during both tours at three bases.  Luckily at Fort Fisher my roommate was also a ham.  Jim Dandeneau was and still is K1CBF.

A long wire was thrown up over the barracks and was end fed through a makeshift tuner.  When time permitted 40M CW was a favourite place to hang out. 

Sometimes the sweep noise generated by several powerful search radars on the site made reception a bit difficult, but most of the time Europeans were a pretty easy catch as the QTH was about a quarter mile from the Atlantic.

K4CDZ with the dream station of 1960, a Collins Kilowatt, KWS-1 and 75A-4.  Zone 2 was popular even then.  This was a year of operating K4CDZ/VE8 from Resolution Island NWT in the Eastern Arctic.  The rig worked great, but keeping up antennae up in blizzards of -40F and 100+ mph winds was always a challenge. Even relatively simple tasks such as soldering a PL-259 to a piece of coax would be an event.  Solder them inside and the centre conductor would retract back into the coax when you got it outside.  Try to solder it outside and your iron (no torch then) would not get hot enough to melt butter, much less solder.  The second TA-33 that year was put together and then wrapped with fibreglass tape and epoxied in place.  It died as did number one.  The third TA-33 was epoxied as number 2 and then 110v heater wire was run inside the elements.  The routine was to turn on the heater wire for ten minutes each hour and shut down for the antenna to "defrost." Number three lasted until I departed VE8 in January 1961.  

The W4HG shack in June of 1977 in Lewisville, North Carolina.  At this time the rig was a Heath SB-104 with SB-220 amplifier and a 5 element tri-band yagi at 50 feet. Two mikes and one key in the picture.  How can that be?

This was a time of a  lot of RTTY operation with the Model 15 (later replaced by a more modern Model 28) occupying a space to the left of the operating desk.  The very small shack was actually a storage room in the garage.

In 1980 W4HG relocated to Mount Airy NC and the initial station, still the Heathkit SB-104 and SB-220, was installed in a loft over the garage.  This shack, while temporary, did enable operation for about a year until the station was moved into a vacant bedroom inside the house.

The final station before the current Orion and K2 was a venerable Kenwood TS-430S which was used for about 12 years until 2006.  The rig never failed and with the TL-922A worked almost everything I could hear. For QRP operation the Ten-Tec Argonaut 509 has performed long and well.  It too was due for replacement and updating.

A huge drawback to the rig in later years was that it had no computer interface so logging and many other functions now taken almost for granted in ham gear had to be done manually.

After retirement I promised myself a new rig and the Orion was, for my mostly CW operating, the best rig on the market as far as I could tell.  Now...bring on the sunspots.