I’m Justin, NB3A, licensed since 2013 as KK4RUR, the custodian of the current call since February 2018, and operating from Warrenton, out in the Virginia piedmont. FM18cr.
Most of my operating happens away from the house. I do a lot of Summits on the Air, usually stacked with Parks so a single hike counts twice, so that getting the summit is easier, and I run what I’d generously call my own little DXpeditions: Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Maine, Colorado, wherever a trip and an interesting mountain or park line up. The other half of it is mobile. I’ve been an active mobile entrant in the Virginia QSO Party for a few years, along with West Virginia, Maryland/DC, and Pennsylvania. My wife usually drives, which means I get to run a pileup while the world moves past the windows. It is harder than it sounds. Electric fences come and go, passing cars and trucks detune the whole system as they close and pass, and between ignition noise and everything else other road users are radiating, the noise floor is a moving target. Holding a run going down the road takes a kind of attention that a fixed station never asks for.
Station building
The part of the hobby I probably enjoy most has nothing to do with making contacts. I like building stations, and I like optimizing how they feel to operate. Reach, sightlines, where your hands land, how many actions it takes to get from one band to another. Ergonomics is an underrated discipline in this hobby and most stations are laid out by accumulation rather than intent.
The permanent antennas here leave a lot to be desired. The operating positions do not.
The main position is a Flex 6600 with a Tuner Genius XL and a Power Genius XL. Alongside it is a Flex 8600 running into Mercury IIIs. There are a couple of Hermes Lite 2s in the mix as well. One of them used to be the skimmer before that job moved to the RX-888. The other fed a HardRock-50 as a driver into a Mercury III, which is a genuinely absurd signal chain: a two-hundred dollar SDR at one end and a true QRO powerhouse at the other. That arrangement carried the load before the first Flex arrived, after I had pretty much moved on from seriously operating the iCom 7300.
Behind all of it is a transmit chain built around QRO rated bandpass filters and a pair of 8×2 Antenna Genius matrices, which is what makes it possible to have this many radios and this few antennas without spending your life reaching behind things with a flashlight to find whatever let out the smoke.
The UberSDR instance in the basement is the newest addition and the one that has the utility that I’m currently the most obsessed with. Any hour I’m not transmitting or otherwise using the station, it’s listening and writing down what it hears, which turns out to be most hours.
The day job, and the order things happened in
I’m a co-founder and Managing Member of Potomac eCycle, an IT asset disposition and electronics recycling company in Manassas. We’ve been at it since 2009, handling the end of life side of electronics for federal, defense, healthcare, education, and enterprise clients. It’s a business built almost entirely on what other people are finished with. Bootstrapped from its own success. Prior to this I was in the scrap metal industry for a year or two, and another electronics recycler prior to that starting in late 2005.
People assume the recycling company led to the radio hobby, and in a sense it did. Being surrounded by discarded electronics is a reliable way to end up curious about RF, and an extremely reliable way to end up with more test equipment and salvaged parts than any reasonable person needs. That was the gateway drug. But the order of operations runs the other way for the profession itself. I was taking apart and rebuilding computers in high school at the tail end of the Pentium era, back when a machine was something you could understand at every layer if you were patient enough, and that’s what put me on this path. The tinkering came first. The company came out of the tinkering. The radio came out of the company.
Off the air
The other hobby that eats real time is endurance sport. I’ve finished seven marathons since I started running in 2018, which happens to be the same year I upgraded to extra. Running came up roughly as cycling went down, mostly because Fauquier County is actively hostile to bicycles and I got tired of doing risk math on every ride. I row and swim as time permits, which is a phrase doing a lot of work in that sentence hihi.
I read pretty consistently after a longish break following high school, mostly science fiction and speculative fiction, with a strong preference for the kind that does its homework. I’ll forgive one big impossible premise if everything built on top of it is rigorous. I’m particularly drawn to stories set somewhere farther out than Mars, which remains a strangely underused part of the solar system. That’s not entirely accurate, good prose supplants rigor. I switched from Goodreads to Storygraph, my profile here.
Board games are the other reliable time sink. Fish tanks are a third, and are the only hobby on this list that punishes you for neglecting it over a long weekend.
Just kidding, three Australian Cattle Dogs share the house, which means the house is never quiet and I never have an excuse to skip a run, and they do punish you for neglecting them for more than 5 minutes at atim. And my wife, Anna – KN4DWZ, who is a better sport about the antenna situation in the yard and the coax situation in the basement than I have any right to expect, as well as being a much more disciplined athlete than I am.
Getting in touch
Easiest way to reach me is my cell phone, or through the contact info on my QRZ page, you can’t try to find me on air, but I’m not very radio active. My UberSDR instance is public and stays up, so if you want to hear what the Virginia piedmont sounds like at three in the morning, help yourself.