About W9RB

This page is an introduction to the remainder of pages at this site. I hope that you find them interesting. I recently retired from Honeywell after a 37.5 year career as an engineer. My professional education includes a B. E. E. and a M. S. E. E. from the University of Minnesota, the home of the Golden Gophers. I have published over 30 technical papers, contributed chapters to three books on sensors and have been awarded 5 U. S. patents.

73, Robert E. Bicking.

My interests in ham radio are working DX, being DX , exploring the long wave part of the spectrum and collecting Bugs (semi-automatic keys). Although my experience as a ham spans 45 years, I have only been on the air for two short periods, the first starting in 1954 and again since November 1996. I mainly operate CW (using Morse code to communicate) since I enjoy improving my code sending and receiving skills and because it is about as close as I'll get to speaking a foreign language. I have worked over 280 countries (all bands) in the last three years since getting back on the air.

My current station consists of a Yaesu FT-1000 transceiver, a QRO 2000 amplifier and a Mosley Pro 67-C beam up 55 feet. The beam covers 10M through 40M. On 80M and 160M I shunt feed the tower as a vertical with the beam acting as a big capacitive top hat. One of the pages below discusses using a tower as a lowband antenna.

Return to Table of Contents