Biography

I am a retired system's engineer from the aerospace industry. I started out at Boeing in Seattle and then moved to the Washington DC area where I worked on radars for roughly 5 years. Then my family and I moved to northern New England (Vermont) where I worked on various avionics products. Most of my background was in fuel system design and certification. I have worked on most of the commercial types of airplanes that you and I would fly on, although some have now been retired.

I have three grown children all of whom are married as well as 7 wonderful grandchildren. One lives in Broken Arrow, OK, another in southern Indiana and the third in the Salt Lake valley here in Utah.

I have enjoyed this hobby since I was young. My father was in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) as a radio operator during World War II. He was instrumental in getting me started, although he personally never did get his license. He figured he had had enough in the military, but he saw that I had an interest. My father and I built my first shortwave receiver (circa 1964 if I remember correctly) on a piece of wood in the traditional "breadboard" fashion using a couple of tubes. I fell in love with all types of radio equipment and shortwave listening and then joined the ham radio community where I could not only listen but talk to people. My how time flies ... I upgraded to extra about 45 years ago.


In the middle of 2013 my wife and I moved from Vermont to Heber City in north central Utah. It is a small town approximately 50 miles east and a bit south of Salt Lake City in the mountains at an elevation of ~6,000 feet (~1830 meters). It has been quite a change for us. We also decided to downsize from our older place in the Vermont countryside with several acres to a new home on a much smaller lot. I was spending far too much time and effort keeping our old house in Vermont in good condition, maintaining a barn, mowing the yard and generally keeping the property in good shape. There I had two towers with a monoband 3 element 17m yagi, a TH6DXX triband yagi and other wire/vertical antennas to play with. Here in Heber on a small 1/4 acre corner lot there is no space for a tower and beams like I had in Vermont. However I do have a Hexbeam on a pipe mast which puts the thing up at about 30 ft next to the house. I also have an inverted vee 40m wire dipole in the backyard.

My shack consists of a variety of equipment I have collected over the years. I still enjoy the older equipment more that the newer stuff - mainly because I can work on them and fix them.

Worked DXCCs:

Equipment

Main radio: Kenwood TS-590SG
Kenwood TS-570D
Drake C Line
Elecraft KPA500
Elecraft KAT500

Hexbeam antenna for 6m through 20m
Inverted Vee antenna for 40m