My father had become interested in radio technology when he was a young Navy Lieutenant JG and commanded a radio direction finding station in Belem, Brazil, during World War II. Most of his officers and men had some training in radio and electronics technology.
I remember going to some kind of used book show in Gainesville in 1950 and being fascinated by some books on crystal radios. I bought one, and with encouragement from my parents, saved up from my allowance to buy a very primitive Heathkit crystal radio. I assembled it, but not knowing anything about soldering, used acid-core solder, which corroded all the connections and made the radio unworkable. I wrote a letter to Heathkit complaining bitterly, and Heath sent me a new kit, instructing me firmly to use rosin-core solder.
This time, the radio worked. It had a stiff wire that rested against a galena crystal which was the detector, a hand-wound coil, and a variable capacitor. It did not require any electrical power—no batteries, no wall connection. By moving the wire around you could find a sensitive spot on the crystal and then adjust the tuning coil to find the frequency of a local station. With the radio, I actually could hear Gainesville radio stations, albeit very faintly, in headphones.
I was reading all I could about radio and it didn't take me long to learn about amateur radio licenses. At the time, one started with a novice license, which required successful completion of a written test on theory and demonstration of one's proficiency to send and receive Morse code at five words per minute. I wandered around the Hibiscus Park neighborhood reciting the letters of the alphabet and their Morse code equivalents, making up little songs to help me do so. “L: di-dah-di-dit; R: di-dah-dit; J: di-dah-dah-dah, and so on. We moved to Tuscaloosa before I took the test, but soon thereafter Mother took me to the home of an amateur radio operator on the grounds of Bryce Mental Hospital (He was a physician or staff member there). and I passed the written test and the code test. I was 12 years old.
Then, it was a matter of getting some equipment. Money was a problem, as usual, but I eventually saved up enough from my allowance to buy a used Heathkit DX 20 and a Heathkit receiver kit. The DX 20 transmitter was crystal controlled, which meant that one could transmit on only one frequency until one changed the crystal. I couldn’t afford but one or two crystals. The output power, as the name of the radio suggested, was 20 watts. It was pure CW; no voice. I put up a long wire antenna, strong from my second-floor bedroom window to a tree between the back of the house and the lake and started trying to work somebody. Because of the frequency limitation, one called CQ at great length on the transmit frequency and then tuned across the entire CW band to see if anyone was responding. My first contact was with a another novice ham in Metairie Louisiana.
I continued to be very active in ham radio. When we moved to Birmingham, and I got my first real job and Molton, Allen, & Williams, I was able to save up for a used DX 100 transmitter, which had AM voice capability. I kept the same receiver and bought a variable frequency oscillator (VFO) to go with the DX 100, which eliminated the need for, and the restrictions associated with, crystals.
I strung an antenna from the chimney of our house on 22nd St. in Birmingham to a tree on the back of the lot, and dived into AM voice. I regularly participated in the Alabama Emergency Teenage Net (AENT) and the Alabama Emergency Net B (AENB) both with Morse code and with voice. The Morse Code patterns for both nets is still stuck in my head.
Sending radiograms was a great part of a hobby for me, and my cousins around the country regularly got radiograms and sent radiograms back. Likewise, creating telephone patches, so that one party was on the radio, and another was on a local phone call was a regular activity.
I also tapped into our telephone line and rigged it up so I could dial a telephone call by using the Morse code key. All a rotary dial does is to interrupt the circuit. One easily can do the same thing with any kind of switch like a Morse code key: one pulse is a 1; 8 pulses is an 8, and so on
None of my high school buddies were particularly interested in ham radio, although they thought it was cool that I did it. So ham radio took more and more of a backseat to debate, football, and high school social activities. By the time I went off to MIT, I took a low-cost two-meter rig with me and made a few calls from the SAE fraternity house, but I don't think I ever established a contact at MIT. When my license expired during my undergraduate years, I let it lapse.
In the fall of 2015 I decided to get back into amateur radio. I had considered it, from time to time, before but always got distracted by something else. I ordered study materials for the technician class exam, now the entry-level license, and found them pretty easy. I did a few days’ review and then reached out to find an amateur radio organization that was administering the exam. Without much difficulty or delay, I scheduled the technician exam with the Evanston club. I went in, took the test, passed it with a score of 100% or something close to it.
The presiding volunteer examiner (“VE”) asked me if I wanted to go ahead and take the general class exam while I was there. “Oh no!” I said. “I haven't studied for it. I’ll come back and do that one after I study.
I was gathering up my things, preparing to leave, and she persisted. “There’s no risk,” she said. “If you don’t pass it, just study and take it again. Why don't you do it?”
“Well, all right,” I said, somewhat skeptically. She got out the exam, and I took it, somewhat less certain of some of my answers than on the technician test. But I passed that one also, with a score well into the 80s or 90s.
“You’re on a roll,” she said. “Why don't you take the extra exam?
That one did not go so well. I found myself guessing on about half the questions, and I guessed wrong on too many of them. So I went home with my general class license awaiting approval by the FCC and begin to study the extra class exam.
The general class exam was somewhat more difficult than the technician exam, and the extra class exam was a lot more difficult than the general class exam. It was much more challenging on antenna theory, propagation, semiconductor circuits, and modulation modes. I was interested in the subject matter, and enjoyed studying for it. It was clear that I needed to take this one seriously. By mid-November, I felt like I was ready, and so I scheduled my second extra class exam with the Glenview club. I passed that one with a score of 91%, so the studying paid off.
The FCC had assigned me a call sign, but I applied for a vanity call, based on my call when I was a teenager in Alabama. Then, by call was K4KDF. The “4” signified location in the southeastern United States. Now I was in Illinois, in zone 9. So I applied for K9KDF and was granted it.
Meanwhile, I had bought a handheld transceiver (“HT”) for the VHF and UHF bands and was able to work the nearby repeaters with some success. I also bought mobile equipment and had a local audio shop install rigs in both my Jeep Wrangler and my Jeep Cherokee.
With those rigs, I worked all the Chicagoland repeaters easily. Eliot helped me put up a 30 foot pole in my backyard, on top of which I installed a discone VHF/UHF antenna. I bought Icom 7300 and Kenwood T590 transceivers for the HF bands. Each put out 100 watts. I bought a linear amplifier to boost my signal to 600 watts. I also strong wires for 40, 15 and 10 meter dipoles, and, someone later, put up separate 80 meter and 20 meter dipoles. I had some success working other hams on 80 and 40; less success on 20. I played with CW little bit. While I was pleased that I remembered it well enough to send and receive somewhere around 10 words per minute. I really did not stick with it enough to improve my proficiency much.
Everyone in the North Shore amateur radio club was talking about then new digital modes: DStar, DMR, and C4FM Fusion. Each of these modes uses the radiolink into a transceiver that is connected to the Internet, and through the Internet to other amateur radio stations around the world. I got started with DStar and made fairly regular contacts with hams in the US, Australia and New Zealand through the local repeater linked to DStar.
The next step was the DMR mode. That one was a bear, because conceptually, DMR was designed for law enforcement, other public safety, and commercial applications like railroads and taxicabs and other public utilities. Understanding how it had been adapted to amateur radio needs and terminology was quite challenging. But I eventually got DMR to work through a couple of the local repeaters.
That left Fusion. At the time none of the local repeaters had full Fusion capability, so I began to investigate hotspots, such as DVMini and RF Shark’s Openspot. I bought several of these (at least one for each mode) and, without too much difficulty, programmed them to connect to the Internet and to accept radio transmissions from my HT's. The hardware was specific to the mode, so one had to have a different piece of hardware for each mode. By the time I moved from Chicago, I had about eight digital HT's, working all three modes. I also signed up and got my credentials as a volunteer examiner and helped to administer technician-, general-, and extra class exams at least twice through the Glenview club
As I equipped myself to get back on the air, it was really nice to be able to afford whatever I wanted. As a teenaged ham, I could afford almost nothing that I wanted.
After the move to Charlottesville, one of the first things I did was to find my Openspots, and set them up with connection through my home Wi-Fi and Internet connections (I have two, for redundancy purposes). Nine months after the move, I still haven't found my digital HTs, but I had a mobile transceiver for each digital mode, which I used as my base stations in Glencoe, and I did find them. I connected them and within a couple of weeks of my move I was back on the year on all three digital modes. I was already on the air on VHF and UHF analog with the mobile rig in my Jeep. I traded the Liberty on my Tesla Model 3 (named “Supercholas”) in October 2019 and have been unwilling to drill holes in the Tesla to mount a conventional rig there. But in Supercholas, I use a new DMR HT that I bought, an Openspot 3, and one of several cellular hotspots. This enables me regularly to work DMR when I'm in Supercholas.
I strung a 20 meter dipole off the edge of my deck, which is just long enough. I put up two VHF and UHF antennas on fiberglass flagpoles supported by posts on the deck. They extend a little bit above the top of the house. The UHF antenna is a 10 element Yagi, pointed toward the local repeater that claims DMR capability. The other is a J pole VHF antenna, connected to my analog FM radio.
My 20 meter dipole works great. My house is at the top of a steep slope facing Northeast. The effect of the slope and the slight directionality of the dipole antenna means that I have significant gain transmitting to the Northeast. As a result, from the first day I used the antenna, I worked stations in Italy and Spain, and since then, on an almost daily basis, I work somebody in Europe or North Africa on 20-meter SSB
Occasionally I'll drop down to 80 meters or 40 meters and work somebody, but the custom is to have much longer QSOs (conversations) on the lower bands and I like it better to do the quicker contacts typical on 20 meters, for people who are seeking contacts in different places, as many as possible in a particular time period.
I'm reasonably active with the local hams. I check into a local 20-meter net three times a week, attend some meetings of the local club, all virtual because of COVID-19, and taught two classes for applicants for the technician license.
I've always been intrigued by teletype communication. Who wouldn't be, listening and watching the banks of telethypes in the newspaper offices of the 1950s 60s and 70s, or in the FAA flight service stations providing weather information for pilots well into the 1980s. I had yearned to copy radio radioteletype signals (they make a distinctive high-pitched warbling sound), even when my license had lapsed – I was still permitted to listen. But it seemed like the technical hurdle was going to be a bit more than I wanted to undertake.
After I got back in town radio much more actively in Charlottesville. I decided to get serious with radio teletype (“RTTY”). After frustrating experiences with several third-party decoding software packages, I discovered that my ICOM 7300 base transceiver has built in RTTY decoding capability. After a few stumbles, I was able to get it to work, and so one of my daily routines is to check the RTTY band—usually 20 meters. Usually, I'm able to find somebody and make contact. So far, I've contacted Finland, Estonia, Scotland, France, Italy, Spain, Malta, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Lebanon, Slovenia, Croatia, Hawaii, and several hams in the continental United States.
Next steps are to establish capability on the other older digital modes, particularly FT8, which seems to be the most popular. It works similarly to RTTY, but uses more efficient modulation and coding schemes.
