Author: Kz7k


  • HF Radios

    This is the most expensive post that Iโ€™ve made so far lol.. my HF journey has been fast and furious, but let me break it down and give some feedback on what Iโ€™ve owned/used so far Yaesu FTX1 w/ Optima SPA-1 Amplifier This has grown on me. When I initially got it, the firmware was…

  • Masts โ€ฆ.

    Iโ€™ve gone through a variety of masts since I have gotten into ham radio, specifically on the HF side so I wanted to try to provide a brief overview of what I have purchased and used and what I thought about each of them. POTA33 – this was the first mast that I bought. It…

  • So my first โ€œreal antennaโ€ I grabbed was the Chameleon MPAS 2.0 setup. Prior to that I had a few home brew antennas and a few Amazon purchases, but nothing โ€œamazingโ€. At that time I was struggling to tune an antenna and heard about this magical broadband vertical antenna from chameleon and decided to give…

  • I picked this antenna up a few months ago and played with it at the house in a dipole form as well as a verticle. Both times I was using chameleon 17โ€™ and 25โ€™ whips. It was easy to deploy and performed so well. But nothing made me like it more than when I went…

  • Buddihex

    So I snagged the Buddihex antenna just before the 2026 field day. Initially I didnโ€™t want to get their tripod/mast system (I have since gotten it as well), but when I initially snagged the antenna I wanted to use it on my existing 25โ€™ porta mast. For those that donโ€™t know, the Port Mast has…

  • What a cool radio. Itโ€™s easy to mars mod/unlock for GMRS. It runs dmr and aprs with ease. It supports AES256 bit encryption and it has a relatively small overall profile (for a 50watt full featured radio) Pair this with the BT-01 wireless remote and a Digirig for digital ops and you have everything you…

  • Xiegu G90 Manpack

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    20 watts of HF that’s highly portable This is my G90 build. This is a Xiegu G90 in an Armoloq cage that has the Armoloq rf relocation adapters as well as the Digirig adapter for digital ops. This radio has probably the best integrated tuner that I have ever used.

  • 100 Watts of portable HF power .. This to the left is my Yaesu FT891 radio in an armoloq cage with the armoloq battery box attached to the bottom. For this day I was not using the attached battery and was powering it all off of the 100ah battery box (FDE pelican style box in…

  • It’s a very simple build that took about 30 minutes from start to finish. These are older pics that were taken while I was building it. Building one of these is way cheaper than buying a pre built battery box and itโ€™s also a great learning experience for those that havenโ€™t done one before. Below…