Christmas day is always a good ham radio recollection for me.  I was living
in Omaha, Nebraska and I would have been about 15 years old.  I was WA0ORO
at that time.  I had turned on the radio and started working DX first thing
that morning with my Drake TR4 but I only had wire antennas at the time.
Later that next fall, I would finally get a tri bander up on the roof but
this particular Christmas morning, I snagged country number 100 using my 80
and 40 meter dipoles, on the same feed line, on 15 meters, and my antennas
were only up about 30 feet.  I worked a YO2 for number 100 and just as I
signed, my mom called down the basement steps and said it was time to open
presents.  I felt pretty proud that day as I walked upstairs to open the
gifts.  That should have been 1967 and I worked country number 300 on 20
side band in 1981 which was an OJ0.  I went back over my logs for that year
and I had worked 295 countries in one year on 20 meters with a mono band 4
element 20 meter beam.  I finally got up to 312 but haven't done hardly any
DX work since about 10 years ago.  Upon reaching 300 countries, I then
started building up my country counts on 160, 80, and 40 meters.

Phil.
K0NX
Denver, Colorado