About Us

Tony Brock-Fisher, K1KP

Originally licensed in 1967 as WA1IKP, Tony Brock-Fisher upgraded to Extra in 1976, changing his call to K1KP. After a 35 year career in Medical Ultrasound R&D at Hewlett-Packard, Agilent, and Philips Electronics, Tony retired in 2013 and has been working on the Polar Explorer ever since. The idea for the Polar Explorer, born out of a lunchtime conversation with friend Brian Machesney, K1LI, was to build a high-efficiency transmitter for Amateur Radio. They worked together to prototype the concept, and wrote about it in an article published in QEX Magazine (The Polar Explorer, March/April 2017, by Brian Machesney, K1LI and Tony Brock-Fisher, K1KP) Tony worked with Brian for 5 years on the design, at which point Brian chose to pursue other interests, while Tony continues to enhance and develop the original concept.

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Jeff Struven, N1RD

Jeff joined the project in 2016 and added his mastery of software skills to help take the project to the next level. A former coworker with Tony at Hewlett-Packard, Jeff helped bring the coding into the 21st century. Jeff continues to help with the UI and control programming in C++.

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Jeff Bail, NT1K

Jeff just joined the Polar Explorer project in spring of 2019. Jeff brings his mastery of sheet metal fabrication and 3D design CAD programming to the project. He quickly took rough measurements and dimensions of the current prototype and transformed them into a custom designed, low cost, manufacturable enclosure for PolEx.

The Polar Explorer

The Polar Explorer now operates on 9 HF bands from 160 through 10 meters and is capable of 500 watt peak output power on SSB, CW, AM, FM and RTTY. It is a transmitter only, and is intended to be used in conjunction with a transceiver. It obtains required frequency and mode information from the transceiver via a CAT interface. It includes a built-in power supply, and through the contribution of high efficiency, fits in a 14” x 5.5” x 9” cabinet weighing only 13 pounds.