Kelly Jones, NØVD

DX World

Kelly began his radio career at an early age. He vividly remembers getting his first pair of walkie talkies as a Christmas gift around age 5. During the late seventies and after several sets of walkie talkies and several years later, he hijacked an old CB radio from the family car. While in high school, he spent many evenings talking to the locals and dreaming of working the skip that he‚d hear. Eventually several of his friends decided to take the amateur radio exam and talked Kelly into joining them. Everybody passed and on January 5, 1985 his first license arrived in the mail. That afternoon in a driving snowstorm, a dipole was strung from the roof of the house out to some trees. It was official, KA9SYF was on the air!

DXing has always been Kelly‚s passion. From the early days of hearing those distant signals on 11 meters to present day, there is still magic in being able to talk to somebody half way around the world. During his college years, he found a way to string a wire from his 11th floor dorm room in order to work DX. During that time he worked on improving his country count between studying and chasing the young YLs. Kelly actually achieved DXCC before accomplishing Worked All States.

Over the course of the last 20+ years Kelly has managed to achieve DXCC Honor Roll only needing 3Y0/B, KP1 and a good 7O. He has also been climbing the DXCC Challenge ladder with around 1,300 band countries, Kelly has also been an active DX cluster sysop since the early days, putting his first node on the air in 1994. Today he keeps busy with his DX oriented website, DX Central. Kelly has recently taken up the exciting hobby of traveling to tropical islands and running the pileups from the DX side. Pictured here is Kelly enjoying the pileups on PJ4.

The last frontier for Kelly is 160 meters and he has been aggressively pursuing the 160 meter DXCC endorsement. He‚s active on all bands and you can be sure if there is a good pileup, he‚ll be calling. If you happen to hear him on the air, please say hello