Main HF station

• Elecraft K2/100 transceiver [review][website] - Main HF radio is a K2/100 (sn 4627) which drives the IC-2KL to 500W.
  
• Icom IC-2KL solid-state amplifier (500W) [review]
  
• Icom AT-500 auto ATU [review].
  
• Icom PS-30 [review].
  
• OptiBeam 9-5HD [review] erected on 15m tower with Prosistel PST 2051 [review] rotator.
  
• 80m dipole; full-size. Recently erected in attempt to improve 80m QSO tally.
  
• Icom SM-6 desk microphone [review] - No fancy microphone here; can't understand why expensive inserts have become popular for a narrow-band, high compression, high distortion communication medium. Good marketing by Bob Heil!
  
• MixW RigExpert [review][website] for PSK & RTTY. Nice interface that does not hog your PC sound card. Software drivers can be unstable however.
  

• Icom IC-7400 (IC-746PRO) [review] - Very impressed with the IC-7400 although older modesl require a couple of essential mods to improve reliability. [Fix#1] & [Fix#2].
  
• 5-element Tonna for 6m - The 6m Tonna construction has been a disappointment with its crudely punched holes, cheap steel hardware and total lack of any aid to balance the feeder. Compared with their 2m/UHF products; it works but the construction is junk!
  
• 9-element Tonna for 2m
  

Main VHF Station

• Yaesu FT-7800E - MARS enabled to cover Marine VHF band which is essential here.
  
• Diamond discone--not great in the gain department but bandwidth is more important to me than gain.
  

• Icom IC-706 MK2G [review].
  
• High Sierra HS-2700/pro [review] - A BIG antenna but works superbly. First contact was with Japan on 40m, that is 15,800 km. The third contact was a MM5 on 60m (yes 5-MHz), a distance of 7,500 km. I see High Sierra have discontinued this product concentrating on the smaller HS-1800; I am sure it is also a fine antenna.
  
• Yaesu FT-8800E - MARS enabled to cover Marine VHF band which is essential here.
  

• Yaesu FT-817 [review] - A great radio but not without its faults; batteries are yesterdays technology and very small capacity. Microphone is large for a compact portable radio and there is no speech compressor. Frequency coverage stops at 150MHz so cannot listen to Maritime traffic. Amazing what can be achieved with 5W and a simple resonant antenna system.
  
• Offset-fed dipole; 21m long offset-fed dipole; all bands 40-10m
  

• Yaesu FT-60E [review] - Great handheld with lots of features and decent, powerful RX audio but let down by poor battery technology; lets face it 1400mA batteries and a 14-hour charger these days is a joke.
  
• Yaesu VX2E [review] - Brilliant miniature transceiver which does it all. Lithium battery pack with rapid charger but audio is too weak for car use and the standard antenna is hopelessly inefficient.
  
• Yaesu FT51R [review] - Bought this as a portable cross-band repeater and for this role it is fine. Compared to the latest handhelds it is however ergonomically challenged, awkward to programme and the battery connections have caused difficulty on several occasions as the telescoping contacts to the battery terminals stick.
  
• Icom M55 marine band transceiver.
  
• Yaesu FC-902 tuner.
  
• Elecraft KAT100 auto tuner [review]
  
• TinyTrak--APRS encoder.
  

• Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) [review] [website] - Excellent rig control, logging, cluster, satellite track and PSK31 software by Simon Brown and Peter Halpin. It runs my station and is completely free!
  
• IonoProbe & HamCap [review] [website] - Ionospheric monitoring and propagation prediction software that sits on top of VOACAP the tools used by all us professional radio people!
  
• MixW [review] [website] - Encodes/decodes all the digital modes you could possibly need and works well. The macros and logging elements are however not as slick as HRD so I tend to use HRD for PSK31 and MixW for RTTY.