Whiskey Six Forever Young (First licensed Nov. 1952!)

Update early 2012: Finally got a tower and a beam (SteppIR) up in August, and traded for an Ameritron AL-572 over Thanksgiving, so after a few years away I'm back on the air with a KW and a really fantastic antenna. The tower cranks up to 60+ feet (I usually only do it at night to placate the neighbors here in densely packed Los Angeles), but I'm blocked by the Hollywood Hills to the south, so most of my DX work is in the other directions.

My rig is a TS-590s with the AL-572 amp and SteppIR 3-element beam. It has the center "trombone" element, allowing me to operate on 40 and 30.

Time exposure taken at 10:00pm - we never see this many stars in the middle of LA!

We spent two plus years in Paris, France from 2008 to late 2010 - I was the only station in the 4th Arrondissement (Le Marais, two blocks from the Seine, four from Notre Dame). A very enjoyable period of life, for sure. I joined the "Association des Radioamateurs de Paris," whose president, F6GOX (Dr.) Laurent Beugnet, helped me with all the paperwork necessary to get permission to put up an antenna in this most highly protected section of Paris, and I was able to get acquainted with - and hang out with - many of the great Parisian hams. There's not a lot of activity on the air in Paris because of the difficulty of putting up antennas, but you will find a few signals on the bands from the City of Lights once the sunspot numbers start up again. The club is particularly into EME and 160 meter operation. In fact they just got access to a 33-foot diameter dish and will be up and running on the EME bands in the near future.

Ancient history:

I was raised in a farm town in southern Illinois, and passed the Novice test while I was still age 9 - thanks to Boy Scouts and an Elmer who lived down the street (W9JLL), but the official license didn't arrive from the FCC until just after I turned 10, which made me miss being the only 9-year old ham in the country by a month. Frustrating!

As KN9CNC, I worked 40 and 15 CW in the Novice bands with a straight key, a Johnson Viking Adventurer, two crystals and a couple dipoles, and fought hard to make 13 wpm and pass the "Conditional" license test (remember that?) before my Novice ticket expired 12 months later. By the fall of that year my paper route money paid for QSL cards proudly bearing the call K9CNC.

By my teens the first International Geophysical Year (1957-58) coincided with the highest sunspot numbers in recorded history to open up the world to this Midwestern kid, so I ignored homework for a couple years, choosing to run traffic and phone patches for stations like KC4AAA and KC4USA in the Antarctic. What a rush!

The rig in 1957 was a DX-100 and an old military surplus BC-348H receiver. It took me a summer to build the DX-100, and a month (and a couple good Elmers) to debug it and get it on the air. Dipoles were the only antennas I knew for many years, cut to length and as high as possible. SWR bridge? What was that? I still fondly remember the tedious process of neutralizing the old 6146's (and getting more than one 100 watt RF burn on inquiring fingers during the process).

Soon I was studying engineering in college and working as an engineer and cameraman at a St. Louis television station. Since then my career has taken me to the CBS Television Network in New York and ABC and NBC in Los Angeles, places I'd never have dreamed of working had it not been for the skills learned through Ham Radio. Other calls include W2GGV in New York City during the late '60s and '70s.

Getting on the air now always feels like I'm joining an already-in-progress party where I'm likely to run into someone I know and sure to meet new people and make new friends.

For this kid from a small Midwestern town, Amateur Radio truly opened my ears -- and mind -- to the world.