DX chaser, DXpeditioner, technologist.

I'm KD9TAW. Licensed in 2021 and active since 2022, I quickly found my calling in chasing DX, antenna building, and building out my shack. I'm a technologist at heart and love tinkering and improving things.

In April 2023 my first DXpedition took me to KP2 (St. John) and VP2V (British Virgin Islands), combining vacation with a semi-serious operating schedule. From an oceanfront QTH in VP2V, I logged over 6,000 QSOs in a few days — including bringing 6m SSB back on-air for the first time in years.

My shack ran the way most do: one program decoding, another mapping, another alerting, a logger keeping the log, and a panadapter app on the side — every one of them with its own settings, fighting over the same COM port. I'm a technologist at heart, and rebuilding that stack as one program became the project that would not let go: Nexus, free and open source, and the software I operate with every time I'm on the air. The TempoFast and TempoDeep weak-signal waveforms — two original protocols — came out of the same push, along with the tools across this site.

Portable operating stuck with me too. I'm actively seeking the chance to join a broader range of DXpeditions in the coming years, bringing my technical skills, operating focus, and field experience to the team.