About WK4DS (David)

My current station (with an extra little radio for the fun of it.)

 
 

Hello there!

When I first started down the path of ham radio, I had no idea it would escalate to what I am doing now.

From POTA park activations to writing a blog about my adventures in radio, I do a little of everything.

Here is just a few of the things I am active in currently.

  • I help maintain a local repeater on the 1.25m band (It belongs to KG4WBI, but I am in the maintenance department so…)

  • I am active on HF and VHF/UHF up to 70cm currently.

  • I have a radio for 23cm band but no antenna nor another ham to talk to if I did have an antenna.

  • I operate a propagation beacon on 28.221mhz transmitting in CW (morse code) with 1 watt of output power.

  • I love using small (QRP) radios in the field as well as in my “shack” at home

  • I only send paper QSL cards, I haven’t time to maintain a database online for QSL as well so I opted not to do that at all. Besides, I love getting those cards in the mail!

  • I love both field day events and our local club has great events on both.

  • I am a life member of LICW Club: #4321

  • I have an SKCC number: #10558

  • I am very active in Parks On The Air and try to activate at least once a week and more if possible. I write a blog and it is on our Ham Radio Today website here.

  • I love to tinker and build things, one of my next projects is to build a multiband HF CW QRP radio from scratch. Just assembling radios isn’t fun anymore, i want to build it Manhattan style, or bread / perf board construction, whatever it takes…

So as you can see, I am quite busy in radio… lol

I love Ten Tec radios and have a few myself. I even have one donated by KG4WBI (who has WAY more) to repair and get back on the air. My main station at home has a Ten Tec Omni 6+ station as well as a Ten Tec Omni 7 and for spice I threw in the Yaesu VHF/UHF all mode rig as well…only because Ten Tec never made one like this.

In the far corner of that stack is also a 400 watt (CW) / 600 watt (SSB) amplifier and supporting power supply that is tied to the Omni 6+ station. I don’t use it much though as it is needing some improvements and I have not had time to implement them due to POTA activities and such… lol.

NA4N Ten Tec Scout 555 Website is a wealth of information on this wonderful little radio!

Below is my 1 watt transmit power, 10 meter propagation beacon setup for auto restart if the power fails. The radio is a TenTec Argo 556, with a 10 meter band module, that I bought recently. The radio is keyed with a Hamgadgets keyer that I put together from a kit, it is transmitting into a homebrew vertical antenna that I made and tuned with a nanoVNA. All of this is powered by a re-purposed computer power supply that I converted to run on a toggle switch and has a fused output at 10 amps. The TenTec Argo 556 is somewhat of a rarity as well since it is the sister to the popular TenTec Scout 555 without the Scout’s 50 watt amplifier module installed. That is the only difference in these two radios, one is transmitting with the driver circuit for the 50 watt amplifier and one actually has the 50 watt amplifier module in it. But since you could turn the Scout down to 5 watts with a simple screwdriver, most people opted for the Scout instead. You basically get both radios in one if you got the Scout, hence Argo 556 sales were thin. I found this one while hunting band modules for my Scouts and picked it up for the novelty of it and it worked out that I was able to put it to good use anyway.

You are reading that right, the VFO says 28.220.3mhz and not just 28.221mhz. The Scout 555 and the Argo 556 both are SSB radios first and foremost, but CW is built in since..TenTec… and you have to push the VFO off by the sidetone frequency to get it where you want.

The following radios are my primary POTA radios to date. The Penntek TR-35, Ten Tec Scout 555, and the HF Signals sBitx V3…

Each one has something special it brings to the table that the others doesn’t. I will travel with 2 or three of them almost all the time so I can activate in multiple modes if possible. These are the radios I use the most as well. Even over the ones in the shack… it is almost comical.


The below photos show my latest build. It is a 5 position antenna switch that I have connected in reverse to switch between my shack rigs so I can play with more radios and not have to fiddle with the manual switch I was using. I designed this little gem myself, but it really isnt that complicated to be fair. I have 4 relays for the 4 possible rigs (currently have 3 connected) and one antenna output. Everything I used came from Amazon, literally all of it. Even the screws and nuts!

The first image shows the remote control pod with the five position drum switch. I have position one reserved as “OFF” and then radios 1 thru 4 after that.

In the below photo, you can see the control cable, fuse block and power cable that supplies the needed 13.8VDC to run the unit.

The relays are your standard run of the mill 12VDC coil relays. I did run the 12VDC control wiring down as close to the bottom as possible, then the inputs from the RF connectors are in the middle layer and the top layer is the output wiring to the antenna connector. I grounded all the relay contacts so that when the relays are off, the radio inputs are grounded to minimize coupling between the radios and it works well. With 400 watts running through one input, the other one next to it is only showing a 1 db increase of signal on the same band. I am confident that there isnt going to be front end damage from this setup now.

In the below photo you can see that I even ran a bond ground between the connectors to make sure that there would not be a problem for a very long time. I plan to make a legend plate in a few days once some material for that comes in and I will screw it to the drum switch and this will be a done project!

That is my current ham radio situation as of December 2025.