Early Life

I grew up in a very rural part of east Tennessee. I have always had a fascination with electronics, technology, and learning how things work. As a small boy I would play with my grandfather’s shortwave radio. The glow of the tubes and being able to listen to foreign languages seemed like magic to me.

My father had an electronics “laboratory” in our basement. He never really got into working on radios, but I did get to play with transistors, a radio shack TRS-80 Color Computer 2, and oscilloscopes early in life. I learned how to write basic programs on the TRS-80 and modified some of the games that were included in the programming manual. One of my fondest memories of growing up was dumpster diving for broken electronics with my father. We would bring home VCRs, TVs, microwaves, whatever we could get ahold of. I enjoyed taking things apart to see how they worked.

Getting Started in Ham Radio

Inevitably, I wound up going to college for Electrical Engineering at Tennessee Tech University. My signals and systems class spurred my interest in ham radio, having studied all of modulation techniques and information encoding. After graduating I got my General license and bought a Drake TR4. I enjoyed the rig but constantly had problems due to bad caps. After about a year of playing with it and a bad windstorm that destroyed the antenna, I sat it on a shelf and moved on to other interests.

Now

Fast forward to Feb 2023, (Wife and three kids later) my wife and I have been watching “The Last of Us” and “Sweet Tooth.” Something about watching people using ham radios in post-apocalyptic movies always leaves me feeling like I needed one. I bought my first new rig, an ICOM 7300 and an MFJ auto tuner. I built my own antenna, an end fed random wire, 84ft 1:9 balun and strung it up in a tree in the backyard. The first contacts on this radio were amazing. Simply being able to turn on the radio, tune, and start talking without having to tinker was incredible to me.

I am continuously learning and making contacts with digital modes such as FT8, JS8Call, VarAC, and WINLINK. I try to make at least 1 or 2 phone contacts on HF every day. At lunch break I will tune in to a local net call the Lunch Bunch (lunchbunch.net) and enjoy the conversations and radio Q&A.
My current shack is an ICOM-7300 with an MFJ autotuner and MFJ SDR switch. The antenna is normally attached to both the radio and SDR receiver. When transmitting, the SDR switch shorts to ground to protect the SDR. I leave the SDR running 24/7 and only turn it off during an electrical storm. I also have an Icom 9700 VHF/UHF radio on a Diamond X300. My ambition is to eventually to operate a fulltime Winlink RMS HF and VHF station.

Astrophotography

In 2016 Dan, a coworker and friend, was selling a telescope and asked me if I was interested. He was already in the hobby, and we had been talking for a while about it, so I purchased it for curiosity’s sake. It was an Orion 150mm Rumak Cassegrain. I did not have a mount for it, so I purchased a Celestron AVX mount from Cloudlynights.com.

My first views through a “real” telescope were underwhelming at first. Mostly what the human eye can see are stars and sometimes faint smudges for the larger objects. However, what got me hooked was seeing my first Globular Cluster. I had never seen one before. Seeing the concentration of hundreds of thousands of stars in the Hercules Cluster was amazing. Jupiter and Mars were visible at the time, Mars was not particularly impressive because there was a dust storm, but Jupiter was fascinating. The bands in the clouds and the moons crossing in front and casting a shadow on the clouds made the planet seem like more than another planet in the solar system but a dynamic, real object that exists in front of your eyes.

I quickly learned about telescopes and the difference that high-quality eyepieces can make. However, looking at something in the telescope is nice but it is mostly a personal experience. Not everyone will experience the viewing the same and any little bump or wiggle while trying to look through an eyepiece spoils the image. I realized that being able to take long exposures and being able to share them with others is what I really wanted to do.

Astrophotography is an endless rabbit hole of trial and error, upgrading to new equipment, and tweaking. Very soon in my journey I realized that the AVX was simply not cut out to track accurately enough with the larger scope that I had, and I was forced to upgrade to a CGX-L. At this point I bought a Celestron Edge HD 8. This scope was a good upgrade to the Mak but I was still stuck at an f/7 f-stop (with a focal reducer). This was good for small patches of the sky such as galaxies and clusters but limited the types of targets that I could capture.
During this period of time I started to fully comprehend all the things that could go wrong when trying to take a picture of the sky. Any misalignment with the pole, mirror flop, flexure in the hardware, breeze, or even a cable brushing the side of the mount will cause a blurry frame. During an entire night, at best, I was only getting about 50% useable frames pictures. By adjusting every single moving part in the drive train of the mount, practicing polar alignments, disassembling the scope, and fixing the loose mirror, and reducing exposure times, I was able finally to get about 80% usable pictures. This was a long and tedious process, but by doing so I gained a lot of experience and felt comfortable upgrading to my final scope.

At this point I was “trading up” on Cloudynights, Astromart, and Facebook marketplace. By buying old equipment, cleaning, and selling what I did not want I was able to fund my hobby and was able to learn even more about the equipment. I became very apt at disassembling scopes, cleaning mirrors, and working on the focus mechanisms. In the process, a few scopes were damaged, but I was able to still sell them for parts. Patience, cleanliness, and careful handling are key when dealing with optics.