I was always that kid — the one who had all their Christmas presents taken apart before noon just to figure out how they worked. I was probably 11 or 12 when my buddy Don, who lived just down the street, and I each got ourselves a Lafayette KT-195 AM transmitter. We’d string up ridiculously long wires, hop on our bikes, and ride all over town just to see how far our little signals would reach. It was pure magic.

One year, my uncle handed down a Hallicrafters S-107 receiver, and man, that was it for me. I’d stay up half the night DXing AM radio stations and eavesdropping on hams chatting away. Somewhere around 1974, I finally got my license — and there was no looking back.

Early on, I got deep into VHF and UHF long haul, running a GE Prog Line kilowatt base station and a stacked array of four 22-element beams. Back then, it was all about stuffing a 100-watt GE Mastr into the trunk and working 52 simplex like a boss.

After a few years, I got the itch to try something new and jumped into ATV (Amateur Television) for a while. Eventually, I upgraded my license, and that move really reignited my love for HF — taking me right back to those late nights as a kid with the S-107 humming away.

These days, I’ve been running a 440 repeater (443.000+) here in Northern Virginia — it’s been on the air for over 32 years now. I still get a kick out of working EME (Earth-Moon-Earth), meteor scatter, and the occasional satellite pass.

Lately, RTTY contesting has become a new obsession. It’s wild thinking back to the days when my whole shack would rattle and shake from the clatter of a Model 28 teletype machine — and now everything is sleek, fast, and (thankfully) a lot quieter.

And to give back a little, I help support the EmComm community by operating a 24/7 Winlink gateway across multiple HF frequencies and VHF. Always good to be ready — and besides, it’s just plain fun to keep the airwaves alive.