HL9KQ

John was a Regular Army Captain in the JAG Corps and was assigned as Deputy Staff Judge Advocate of the Second Infantry Division.  He took a Drake TR4 with separate VFO, RV4, keyer, paddle, headphones and wire dipole antennas and bought a 4BTV Hustler ground-plane mounted on the roof of his BOQ from a departing ham (K6QIP/HL9KD).  John later purchased (and with the assistance of Garry Cobb, WA4QHN, from Phenix City, AL who was stationed at Camp Casey) erected a small triband beam.  John says he can't remember but it was a TH3JR or a TH2 or something like that.  He made about 13,000 QSOs with his own call, mostly on CW but some SSB.  John worked every contest that came along, but was substantially QRT in October and November of 1969, due to a fire in his BOQ that dislocated him for several months.  He did go into Seoul and teamed up with three other hams to operate multi-single in both CQ WW DX Contests as HL9US.

John still has the HL9KQ logs and the logs for the contests as HL9US.  He says, "Although we were near the peak of a sunspot cycle then, band conditions seemed to be pretty poor.  The hardest places in the world to work from Korea were the southeastern USA, the Caribbean, and northern South America."  John recalls working K4TJL, K4EZ, W4CFD, and K4ADU from Georgia and W4CYC and K4TAG from Phoenix City, AL.  He even heard his dad (K4VGI) calling him once but his dad couldn't hear him.

John eventually sent QSLs to every station worked from HL9KQ and still has the reply QSLs in shoeboxes to this day.