As a young DXer, I would spend hours in reverie, imagining the radio setup of my dreams.

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I imagined receivers with knobs, switches and buttons.  I imagined the lights on all of the boxes and under the cabinets that would hold my accumulated radio library.

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I put my very limited artistic skills to use, drawing elaborate designs of what I thought the ULTIMATE shack would look like.

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The problem was, I was 13 years old.  The amount of money I would need was simply too far from my reach.  I vowed that one day, though, if I had the means, I would build a no-compromise shack of my very own.

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Slowly, I started putting the pieces together. A radio here.  An antenna there.  Small pieces on a budget.  All the while, I was practicing the art of DX.  Working to perfect my skills of listening, knowing the band and propagation and learning everything I could about antennas and radios.  The hope was that one day, I would be able to put it all to use.

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Then in 2018, I purchased my first SDR:  the Airspy HF+ Dual.  I paired it with a W6LVP loop antenna and started pushing my DX to dizzying new heights.  I was hearing DX I had only dreamed of hearing before.

 

Soon, I added another SDR (the SDRPlay RSPdx) and then another (Airspy HF+ Discovery), and another (Perseus) and another (Elad FDM-S3).  Next, I started pushing my antenna collection to new heights by incorporating terminated delta loops in the form of multiple KAZ antennas with high-gain amplifiers on them.  I added remote termination controls to obtain the maximum nulls on the back side of the antenna. I was cooking.