Suzy and I left the house around 10:00 to head to New Jersey for Christmas with presents for my mother and sister, and a box for my father with 8 feet of 8 ga braided battery wire.

On the way up around 11:00, we stopped at Ham Radio Outlet in New Castle, DE where I picked up a MFJ-945E HF/6 Meter Mobile Antenna Tuner with Wattmeter, 75 feet of coax, and a pair of MFJ-17758 80/40 Meter Dipole Antennas.

When we got off Route 287, I got on the K2ETS 94 repeater and called Dave W2OIL who I had been scheming with for the last week via e-mail. We arrived at his house and after about 30 minutes of chatting I walked out with a Kenwood TS-820S HF rig.

Before getting to the house we stopped off at my grandparents, to fix their Internet and explain to them how to use their holiday Netflix subscription. My grandfather had been on the phone with Comcast all morning, and it turned out to be a dead port on the router. I switched the port the computer was on and 15 seconds later they were back in action.

It was a lot of fun explaining how they could make the best use of their Netflix membership and how to go from movie to movie adding it to the queue. My grandfather picked it up fairly quickly and my grandmother threw in a few suggestions over his shoulder. They should get their first three movies on Friday. I think they're going to like it.

We finally got home with all the packages and immediately set to opening everything up. I had packed all the ham gear except for the radio into one cardboard box for my father and pushed it over to him, handed Cindy a bag with a laptop case from the Apple Store and my mother a Halloween bag filled with coffee, a TV series on DVD that she wanted, and an iTunes Music Store gift certificate.

My father opened the box and started pulling stuff out. First the tuner, then an antenna and grounding wire. He started looking (he told me later) around the bottom of the box for a cheap little QRP rig when I walked to the bedroom, pulled out the TS-820S, and set it down next to him.

My father was licensed at 16 as WN2YIT (later WB2YIT) in 1969, but has been all but off the high frequency bands since I was very young, maybe 5 or 6 on a tube-based Heathkit 20 meter transmitter. We got back into ham radio together in 1996 on VHF and UHF and a year or so later he took the vanity call of his old elmer W2AOF, which he has to this day.

But even with all that history, he tells me this is probably the best radio he's had in his entire life.

Suzy and I had more presents to open (mostly clothes, books, etc) but between bouts of saying "This is too much" my father had completely forgotten that there were other people in the room with him and was figuring out how to put the antenna up in the attic and get the radio working.

We spent the next few hours connecting cables, trimming wires, plugging old brass morse code key into the radio and hanging the antenna along the roof with a cable mounting staple gun. Once we got everything together, the receive was fantastic, but we were having a rough time tuning it up because the needles would peg as we were turning the antenna capacitance dial for no good reason. We double checked the grounding and the antenna connections and everything seemed to be fine.

Then we did a lightbulb test with some old cable and a porcelean fixture to tune up into a known load. That worked fine, and we were still stumped. I kept working with the radio until I switched tuners to my own MFJ-945E and got a solid 1:1 SWR on both 40 and 80 meters. That's when I noticed the odd scraping on the antenna dial on my father's new one.

We opened up the cover of his tuner and powered up the radio and started to tune. A few seconds later the antenna butterfly capacitor let out a nice spark and we realized that the inside of the case was covered in solder blobs. A minute of high pressure air later we had a clean tuner, a solid match, and a clean signal out on 80 meters as W2AOF.

The ETS of NJ social net was that night at 20:30 so my dad and I both checked in on the 2 meter repeater with the handy talky to thank Dave W2OIL and give our best wishes to the club and announce that he was finally back on the air.

Tomorrow I will try to raise my own MFJ-17758 over the backyard and get a full 100 watts out on 80 meters for a Baltimore to South Plainfield contact from my station back to my father's.

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