For the time being, I am living in Haguenau, a small town situated 30km north of Strasbourg (my Locator is JN38VT). I do some packet-radio but also a lot of computer programing, this mainly because the HF traffic in France is not very interesting and quite difficult if you cannot be equipped with a Yagi because the lack of space. My equipment here is a Yaesu FT 900AT in a Cushcraft R7 vertical antenna. In VHF, I work mostly with a DR 510 Alinco and a small  portable dual bander (Alinco DJ-580) . I am not very active on the air and I wait for the moment when I will be able again to call CQ with a DX callsign.

  The photo on the right has been taken in 1983 when I was active in Central African Republic. From left to right you can see TL8DX (my brother Jean-Michel, i.e F6GRY), TL8CK (Charles Jansky), myself TL8ER and my QRP Geoffroy. At that time, my brother was in Africa to visit me and he made a lot of trafic in CW too. Other radioamateurs were very active too (but mainly in SSB) as TL8GE in Bangui and TL8DC in Bouar in the northwestern part of the country. The photo on the top of the screen is more recent. It shows my station in Papeete (French Polynesia) when I was FO5OU between 1993 and 1995. I was a bit less active than in Central African Republic just because the propagation was not so good in the Pacific  and FO5 is not a very rare prefix as TL8 can (or could) be.  Anyway, I managed to contact 198 DXCC countries in 3900 contacts more or less (in TL8, I made and confirmed 254 countries in 17000 QSO). And all this in CW! !

CW.... Try it !  It's great !

  I am completely involved in programming. I spent some time in with TML-Pascal when I had an Apple IIGS�. Then, after Apple� dropped us, I decided to migrate on a PC computer with Turbo-Pascal and now Delphi�. The first version of my program was DXFILE v2.0 under Windows 3.1�. This version was already very advanced and I used it simultaneously to enter my own trafic while programming and improving it. With the arrival of Windows 95� and Delphi�, I decided  to tranfer the application under these two environment mainly because DXFILE v2.0 was not compatible. Today, the version 6.2 of DXFILE is quite complete and allows the radio-amateur to manage his own trafic and all the associated tasks as choosing and printing the QSL cards and editing lists or diploms (DXCC, WAS...) among others. The packet- cluster can be monitored via a specific module. The transceiver can be piloted by the application through a dedicated cable. Other features are also available as the sun clock, the locator computer,  the antenna direction finder etc. DXFILE v6.2 is available since October 2000. Among the features already mentionned, this version implements the IOTA, WAS, DDFM, DIFM and WAZ diploms management. The printing module has been improved and it is now possible to have a complete assessment of your trafic on each band and for each country. Visit the web site to learn more ...