The N6NB Page

Welcome to N6NB.com. This site is about amateur radio: it discusses topics such as VHF/UHF weak signal operating, roving, contests, the Quagi antenna design, a VHF/UHF triband cubical quad design, 10-band "toolbox" stations for roving, measuring antenna gain, and RF safety. There's also feature material about building the contest station shown here, the N6NB beacons and the problem of ice storms in the mountains. There are photo albums of 30 years of VHF mountaintopping, several Southern California Contest Club Field Days, a Field Day-style DX contest in Mexico, and the 2012 E51YNB operation. Sadly, now there's a page describing the 2011 fire that destroyed the contest station and almost everything else on the mountain. This page is an ongoing project; new material will appear now and then.

    A personal note: I've been involved in many aspects of amateur radio over the 55 years I've been licensed. I've had some good fun and good fortune along the way. In the 1960s I discovered VHF "mountaintopping" and eventually finished #1 nationally in 12 VHF or UHF contests--while operating fixed but portable in a van or camper on various mountaintops from coast to coast. Later I won a number of contests as a rover and in the single operator portable category. I also did some of the earliest portable e.m.e. (moonbounce) work--in places ranging from Alaska to the Utah-Nevada border. The Tehachapi Mountain antenna farm (shown above) was the realization of a longtime dream: to have a good non-portable station on a mountaintop, with enough space to put up substantial antennas. Building the buildings and putting up the towers was a lot of work, as explained elsewhere in these pages. But when the weather was bad, it was a luxury to operate inside a building, not in a car. Is this a good radio location? Check out the contest results at the Tehachapi property.
    My interest in portable VHF contesting prompted me to look for better and simpler antennas. With the help of Will Anderson, AA6DD, I designed the Quagi antenna on a backyard antenna range in 1972. That led to the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) Technical Excellence Award in 1977 and helped me win the Radio Amateur of the Year award at Dayton in 1980.
    I served four terms as an elected ARRL vice director in the 1980s and early 1990s. Although that was a valuable experience, I'm much more comfortable writing about public policy than trying to make it. I've written a number of articles for QST, CQ and Ham Radio magazines and co-authored a book about amateur radio with Jim Steffen, KC6A: Computer Programs for Amateur Radio (Hayden Book Co., 1984). Now we have the Internet. It's wonderful to be able to publish these pages electronically and have them instantly accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

-Wayne Overbeck, N6NB

woverbeck@fullerton.edu