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Just a little history on me... my wife and I  moved down to Broward County (South Florida) in 1999 from western Palm Beach County, where I had enough QTH to have a pretty decent antenna arrangement, even if I could never afford the big amplifiers.  We found that we could not afford that sort of land down in Broward county so we ended up in antenna restriction hell and the two of us became inactive hams (my wife Shirley is N4SBF, a General class ham herself).  I even shipped out my TS 430, a couple of antennas (an AP8 and an R5) and a mess of other stuff to my brother in law in Texas because at the time he wanted to get licensed and I couldn't use the gear anyway.

 

It turned out that he never got around to getting his license, and the rig was used as a SW receiver on a longwire for a few years until they moved, and the radio, tuner, antennas and all the rest of what I sent him got parked in a storage unit with the rest of the historical stuff they weren't using in the new place and from there was pretty much forgotten by all.

 

In 2017 when Hurricane Irma was bearing down on us, Shirley basically said "I'm not waiting this one out", and we packed ourselves and the cats up and went to my brother in law's to ride out the storm.  While we were there he asked if I could help him empty out the storage space.  While we were doing this we came across the radio gear.  He asked "Do you want this back?" and of course I said "Hell yes!", so we brought it home with us.  

 

During this time I had let my license lapse (just plain forgot to renew it), so after getting my radio back I decided to study up and re-take the tests.  I left the hobby as a Technician (yes, my wife had a better license than me - and she kept hers up too!).  I knew that I could do better than simply regaining my Tech class license so I started out to see how far I could go.  Got my Tech and General on the same day (issued call KN4HGW), and two weeks later sat for and passed my Extra at one of the local club's monthly meetings.  I then applied for and regained my old call N4NVD, so at least from the licensing point of view I'm back to where I should have been all along.

 

In 2018 we relocated to Round Rock, Texas in a house with no HOA and a big enough yard for a modest antenna farm and a garden.  My brother in law Tom and his wife Becky bought in with us on the house, and we became "roomies".  Tom finally got himself studied up and is now W5TJL, also an Extra Class licensee.  The three hams in the family shared a converted "Tuff Shed" as the family shack.  It was insulated, wired for power, climate control and radio, and was fully operational on a nearly daily basis up until the time Shirley and I moved to a larger property (more on that later).  We ran three antennas on HF - a ZeroFive 43' vertical ground mounted in the back yard, a vintage Cushcraft R5 on a pushup pole at about 20 feet, and a six-band Hex Beam.  Two Yaesu FT-991A's in the shack fed RF to the antennas.  All HF antennas were available to either operating position.  For VHF and UHF there was a dual band J-Pole, a home-brewed 'double crossed dipole' for two meters and a 70cm version for satellite work, and a magnet mount on the air conditioner "just in case".   I also ran a BPQ Packet switch node on a Tram 1480 collinear at about 30 feet above grade.

 

All of us have been really careful about keeping our contacts on HF logged and available on LOTW, eQSL, Clublog and other logging services as quickly as possible.  Generally speaking, we make sure we are up to date at the end of every session on the radio.  Don't hesitate to contact us if you're looking for confirmation of a QSO and you haven't seen it yet, we'll fix that or explain why you didn't make it into the log ASAP. 

 

73 de N4NVD