A longtime environmental executive, I am now retired (for good) and am an amateur maker of Baroque keyboard instruments, a racing member of the San Francisco Model Yacht Club sailing an ODOM yacht, a student of classical Italian fencing and of Chanoyu (the Japanese tea ceremony.) My wife, Jane, and I enjoy concerts, reading, sauntering, bicycling, and our important business of being with the families of our son and daughter--four grandkids, all within an hour or two. Our daughter, Chris, is KI6TDG.

As a ham, I am an Amateur Extra-class radio operator, hoping to augment my ability to serve as a leader in the Mill Valley CERT (Community Emergency Response Team,) and as a member of the Marin County Sheriff's RACES. I help to organize community service projects for the Marin Amateur Radio Society, and am also an active member of the USS Pampanito SS383 amateur radio club, operating in the radio room of this WWII historic submarine, moored at San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. The call is NJ6VT, and we are on or about 7.260 the second and fourth Saturdays of each month. Contesting, traffic nets, public service, emergency comms, and learning code--all of that is enjoyable to me.

As a kid, I was delighted to hang out in the shacks of neighborhood ham radio operators while growing up on the Mississipi Gulf Coast in the 1940s and in San Antonio in the 1950s, and I have finally joined their ranks, decades later. The smell of the ozone and the flickering of the oscilloscopes lingers in my memory.

My station is small: IC-735 barefoot, with the ICOM AH-2 tuner and a 132' longwire. My main radio these days is a Kenwood TS-850 SAT with a G5RV antenna up in a tree 55', mounted as an inverted vee. My QTH is quite compromised: tucked in the back of a small, steep-sided, redwood-forested, SE-opening box canyon at 200' elevation,six miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.