The original station equipment was comprised of:
In addition there are various amplifiers:
- A 160 meter, 4-1000 home-brew amplifier
- A multiband 8877 home-brew amplifier
- A 10 meter, pair of 4-400s home-brew amplifier (being built)
This equipment was able to accommodate the single op or multi op/single transmitter. However, as more operators came to contest at the station we tried to use the Drake twins for the second station. The receiver is great, but it did not all computer control, which is so essential to multi-station contesting.
We used the excellent K8CC NA contest logging program and with serial port link between the two stations. In 1999 I added a
The Omni VI performed so well that a second Omni VI transceiver was made an addition to the station ensemble.
Another multi-band amplifier was added to give us more stability during the contests. After much research I purchased a
This amplifier performed flawlessly during the 2000 CQ WPX CW contest.
As we added stations we had trouble with the serial connections used to link the logging computers with the NA contest logging program.
In early 2000, I decided to switch to the Windows based Writelog contest logging program. This program uses network interface cards with the TCP/IP protocol. Since this switch there have been no computer crashes during the contests.
