Sebastian Wessels

My last name is pronounced Vessels. I live in Longmont, Colorado and I am active in this local club. First licensed in 1991 in South-Africa as ZR6BW and I finally let it expire in 2011. Moved to the US (Colorado) in 1996 and used ZR6BW/WØ as a reciprocal call for about a year. After that took the Novice/Tech license and got the call KCØCQQ. Upgraded to General and Advanced and eventually Extra when the code requirement was lowered to 5 wpm. Changed to vanity call NSØW in Sept of 2000. Some time prior to this Richard Olsen (now K9BWI) held the NSØW call.

Even though I was licensed for HF in 2000, I did not do much HF until spring of 2007 when we moved to a house with enough real estate to be able to put up decent antennas. I am not a big time awards chaser, but I got WAS on 80m with the help of the Geratol net. After the initial thrill of the first few DX contacts was over, I started looking at the DXCC requirements. In doing so I stumbled across "Worked all Continents". In case you are wondering - Antarctica is not needed for that. I took my cards with me to Dayton in 2011 and walked over to the JARL desk and they promptly printed me a WAC certificate after I handed them a check. I did get my phone DXCC no: 40882 (Phone) and 18048 (17m Phone) in 2012.

I like making DX contacts but I do not like contesting. Getting to know the person on the other end and to find out more about his environment is the interesting part to me. You can QSL me direct or via the buro and if you do it direct, I would be happy to reciprocate on my dime.


Last updated: Jan 20, 2013

Shack featured in local Newspaper article.


The business editor of the local newspaper got interested in doing an article on Ham radio due to the fact that RF Concepts are located in Longmont. He ended up doing 2 features, Ham Radio on the front page, and an article on RF Concepts in January of 2013.




Tortoise Hunt featured on ARRL website.


I submitted an arcticle to the ARRL on my Tortoise RDF exploits and they decided to publish it on the ARRL website under the title: "Invisible Fence - Tortoise Style". I do not quite agree with the title that they decided to use - it makes it sound like an electrical dog fence and it was simply a "Fox Hunt" with the "Fox" attached to the tortoise. I plan to have a slightly more extensive article with more technical details out here soon.





Shack featured on the cover of Ham Radio Magazine


My buddy K8CRM loves the now defunct "Ham Radio" magazine and owns the full set on CD. He recently brought my attention to the December 1987 edition that featured my shack on the cover. Rip, NVØM was kind anough to lend me his copy of the magazine so I could do a full color scan of the cover. The CD/DVD set that is generally available, only has black and white images. Ok, I am just kidding about being featured, but if you look at this you will see what I mean. To get a better idea of the actual size of the shack look at this. Just for scale - I am six feet tall.