Amateur Radio Station VA2NW

Amateur Radio Autobiography

I was first licensed in the United States in November 1999 as a Technician Plus with the callsign KB1EPR. In December 2008 I upgraded to General. In February 2009 I upgraded to Amateur Extra. Not too much longer after that I moved to Canada. In February 2010 I passed the Canadian Basic exam with Honours and was issued the callsign VA2EPR. In September 2015 I passed the Canadian 5WPM Morse exam. In December 2022 I was issued the 2x2 callsign VA2NW.

QSL Policy

Electronic QSL cards
I upload logs to the following services once every month or two: Logbook of the World (LoTW) eQSL, QRZ, ClubLog, HamQTH, HRDLOG.

Paper QSL Cards
Direct mail only:

• Had a contact with me and want a card? Just send me yours and I'll send you mine. No SASE required.
• Don't have a card or can't afford to send it? Just e-mail me (linuxgeek@gmail.com) and I'll send you mine.
• Got a card from me and don't have one to send back or can't afford to send one back? No worries.

Ham Shack

Checkout the Ham Shack page for details about my rigs, keys, and antennas.

Youtube Channel

I post video clips to my amateur radio channel @va2nw. The video I'm most proud of is VE2/OU-014 SOTA Activation 8/6/2011.

CW Practice

Checkout the CW Practice page for some public domain poems and speeches in morse code. They were generated with some software I developed called cw2wav which accepts TXT files and outputs the equivalent morse code audio in WAV files.

Microsoft Mouse to CW Key Conversion

For fun, I turned an ordinary computer mouse into a CW key. I've written an article titled Transforming a Computer Mouse into a CW Key where you can read more about it and see pictures of the process. There is also a youtube video demo: Demo: Microsoft Mouse converted into a CW Key.

VA2EPR-TNC - 1200 Baud AFSK NZRI Modem (Bell 202)

My capstone project while persuing my Electronics diploma was the design and fabrication of a hardware modem along with firmware and software. All project files and source code are posted on Github: https://github.com/tcort/va2epr-tnc