Biography

There is nothing wrong with your Ham Radio. Do not attempt to adjust the frequency. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control your noise floor. We will control the propagation. We can multi-path the reception, make it flutter. We can change the tone to a soft muddy bass or sharpen it to irritating duck talk. For the next hour sit quietly and we will control all that you work and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your Ham Radio. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Out of Band Limits.

I was born on the south side of Chicago in 1955, we moved to Calumet City in 1956. In 1960 we moved to Scottsdale, Arizona when my dad and his brother bought a hardware store there. It was called "Frontier Hardware" and if you lived in the area back then you might remember it. Please tell me if you have ever been to my Dad's store, I would love to hear it! I loved Arizona, it's where I was introduced to the night sky. You coudn't see stars like that back in Calumet City because of the Steel Mills even back then. In AZ, the night sky was on fire. I saw the Milky Way for the first time in my life and stared at it for hours almost every night for the next 6 years we lived there laying on my back in our driveway. Because of that I fell in love with Science and Science Fiction. It led to my electronics, computers and programming career. Also, Dad had been an electrician at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company Mill in East Chicago, IN. so that helped a lot too. In 1966 Dad and Uncle Ray gave up on the hardware store, they were going broke trying to keep it running and we all moved back to the Peoples Republic of Illinois. They dragged me back kicking and screaming, I wanted to stay in AZ.

I'm new to Amateur Radio. I passed both the Tech and General classes on 17/Feb/2014 and got my first callsign "KD9ANM" about 8 days later. Twenty eight days later, on 17/Mar/2014 I passed the Extra test.

I need to thank my Elmer's here who have taught me so much (and continue to do so), Bruce (N9BH) and Sandy (W9SBE). Without their help I wouldn't have passed my exam's and went all the way to Extra, learned how to operate my radio or have gotten my antenna working as well as it is.

I had thought about getting into amateur radio off and on most of my life. Now that I'm retired I finally found the time to devote to it. So I picked up a used Kenwood TS-440S/AT and Kenwood PS-50 power supply on eBay just before the snow started to fly and connected it to the old Radio Shack discone scanner antenna on top of my house just so I could listen. Over the winter I collected more equipment like a Kenwood AT-180 manual antenna tuner, the IC-10 RS-232 computer interface kit which I installed in the radio and a Daiwa CN-801 SWR/Power meter.

My "real" career ran from 1977 until 2004 when I was hired into Western Electric as a tester / technician at the manufacturing plant that used to exist in Lisle, IL. I started out testing & repairing thin film digital circuit packs used in the 1A ESS Processor and #4 ESS Toll Switching System. Moved up through the ranks until I was ranked as "Technician" testing, diagnosing and repairing full blown #4 ESS long distance toll switches before they were shipped out the door to the Bell System phone offices. Later was asked to join the engineering universe and spent the rest of my time there working on the 5ESS switch and other cool projects such as MARS - a hypercube designed to simulate 5ESS hardware, Plan 9 from Bell Labs and the Inferno operating system.

Worked DXCCs:

Equipment

Kenwood TS-440S/AT/DSP (BHI NEDSP1061-kbd Digital Signal Processor Installed
Kenwood TM-V71A V2 K Dual Band (2M/70cM)- Base Station
Kenwood TM-V71A V2 K Dual Band (2M/70cM)- Mobile
BaoFeng UV-5R & UV-3R+ HT's (2M & 70cM)
National NC109 Short Wave all tube radio circa 1957
Hustler 5BTV Ground Mounted Vertical Antenna (80,40,20,15,10M)
Diamond X510HDN 2M/70cM Vertical Antenna at 40 feet
Diamond SG-7500A 2M/70cM with Diamond K600 mount for mobile
Signalink USB