I’m talking these few words since 1989 when I fall in love with the ham radio hobby. On that time, young and without money in my pocket, I didn’t had anything more than a 40-channel AM CB rig (called in Brazil, PX) and a dipole antenna in my mother’s yard where, sometimes, she insist to put the clothes to dry. With this “station” I made the first national contacts with truck drivers crossing the road close of our home and, sometimes when the propagation was good, with some stations in the northeast of Brazil.
One day I was listening to the channels and I heard over the noise someone calling in Spanish… from Mexico. That’s impossible I thought. Never in my head I could imagine to hear someone in AM from Mexico. I tried to call the guy one, twice, three times and the magic happened. I got the contest of a station almost 8 thousand kilometers away. On that day, the “DX bug” got inside of me.
The rest is history. In 1992 I got my first HAM radio callsign (PU2UTC) but soon after when my first kid was born I left the radio. But the bug, the virus, the “disease” called DX was kept in my blood until the day to be “reactivated” by something.
And the reactivation happened! After lived in four different continents, six different countries and years of hibernation, I’m back to the radio now as PU4UNV (ex PU2UNV) in honor of my time as part of the United Nations Volunteers in East Timor (4W), operating ON/PU4UNV until my final return to Brazil in few years. On the same time I still talking at 11-meter band as 16AT326 and, in Brazil, on the same band as PX4J2353.