[TowerTalk] Remote Ham Radio

[Jim Brown]

On 8/4/2013 8:30 AM, Jorge Diez - CX6VM wrote:
> Hi Jim
>
> "Yep, the best DXCC and contest scores that money can buy!"  Are you talking
> about the big and expensive contest stations around the world, included in
> USA?

Yes, and also those at various DX destinations.  There's a really dumb 
DXCC rule that you can count QSOs you made from any station using your 
callsign within the same DXCC country. That allows someone in the US to 
work EU and AF from a QTH in the northern Atlantic states, South America 
from a QTH in FL or along the Gulf Coast, and the Pacific Basin from a 
QTH anywhere from CA to WA, locations that are more than 2,500 miles 
apart!  When I moved 2,000 miles from Chicago to near San Francisco, I 
started over on all of my awards.

> How much cost your station?.

Good question. I haven't "done the sums,"  but I'd guess less than $30K, 
including equipment, towers, tree climbers, and the only antenna I 
bought, the small 3-el SteppIR. Except for the Elecraft gear, I bought 
everything used (and built the 5B4AGN bandpass filter sets).

> This is how much you paid for your DXCC. I
> don´t want to think how much cost my station!, this is what I pay for my
> DXCC and contest scores!

Is that for the scores, or for the pleasure of having a nice station to 
operate, or for the personal satisfaction of having built it? For me, 
it's all three.

> Everyone "pay" for DXCC, I don´t know anyone that didn´t spend money, even
> to build their own radio and antenna, you always need to buy parts,

Yes, but it costs a LOT less when you live around the Atlantic basin, 
where it's possible to work DXCC in a weekend contest with 100W and 
modest antennas!

> so this comment makes little sense.

It does when you put dollar numbers into it.  Some of these stations 
have cost more than $200K in today's dollars, and I suspect W7RN cost 
more than twice that.

> where the population is very small, we do wells by hand with a shovel, we
> raise the antennas and towers with ropes and manpower, not with bulldozers
> and cranes that make the job quite very easy :-)

My friends dug both tower bases by hand, we mixed the concrete with a 
small portable mixer that took about ten batches to fill the base. My 
neighbor, K6XX, built the tower using ropes and pulleys and did all the 
climbing, assisted on the ground by a half dozen or so NCCC members (not 
all the same day).  I know that K6XX personally designed and built 
everything in his station except the rigs, including nearly a dozen 
towers. He also cleared the land by hand, which was very densely covered 
with nasty brush. Bob is REAL cheap, and scrounges a lot of stuff used.  
And he DID build some of the rigs -- he's the primary manufacturing 
engineer for Elecraft, and he's also built a lot of control circuitry 
and switching.

73, Jim K9YC