Ham Radio has been a blessing

I have been a ham since 1977. I like to consider myself a jack of all trades ham. I enjoy many areas of ham radio including HF, Sats, digital modes including FT8 and VarAC, VHF modes including DMR/Wires and D-Star as well as the occasional contest and chasing DX. I was dabbling with FT4 on Sat and doing APRS over Sats. I guess I like to figure things out and move on. I also enjoy improving my CW skills. The list goes on and on.

My professional background has been in and around Information Technology (IT). In middle school at the age 11, I became interested in ham radio because of my Uncle Florian (W1FA SK) who used to come into town and visit us (in the house my grandparents owned and he grew up in) and drive me up from out of the valley and near the airport to work 2 meters.

This was fascinating to me. I jumped in and found the local ham radio club. My elmer was indeed a ham named Elmer. Monthly club meetings were held in his barn. I borrowed a lot of military surplus gear and got licensed around my 12th birthday in August of 1977.

I did my best to make CW contact with folks using a crystal controlled Heathkit DX-40 transmitter and a Hallicrafters SX-110 receiver. I actually had a newspaper article written about me in the local paper then later in the statewide paper. All I could contact in the end for the local paper was a ham across town! Living in the valley in an aluminum sided house had it’s drawbacks!

I used to ride around town on my bike with my handheld and my home station hooked up as a jury-rigged repeater for my HF station. Not exactly legal back then but how else could I talk to Russia from my bike downtown?

In high school, my electronics teacher was a ham and we setup a station and an antenna on the roof of the high school. Before I even had my paper route, a local ham gave me a job sweeping floors at his company. I enjoyed ham radio and eventually got my extra class.

In those days you had to go to the FCC office to take your CW and written tests. Getting to Boston might just as well have been on the other side of the country for me. Luckily, I was able to catch rides with the other hams going down there.

Hams were always good to me. I got my first software development job while going to college and somehow worked college classes in mid-week while writing firmware thursday to monday. The engineering manager was a ham and the fellow that got me into the company was a ham from my club. I started in the hardware lab but I was so bad they gave me a chance in software. Thank goodness I did OK in that.

In college, I had a love/hate relationship with my professors. It was a state school and the computer program was new. I was active in software development and very curious especially about Unix systems. I was probably a little arrogant too! I would either do really well in a class or barely squeak by. Some younger teacher wouldn’t necessarily enjoy the questions I posed but the seasoned ones, like the ham radio operator professor did!

I used to hack into the academic computer system and because I had done a work study in the computer department, they knew who I was and of course, I got caught red handed at the computer terminal in my “phantom” account. I would create this superuser account and let the computer department know how I did it and ask them to keep it open for me to experiment. Of course, they would shut it down and I would do it all over again. Ok, I realize how this must have been pretty irritating for them!

After leaving college early, I started working in software development in the Rt-128 area of Boston. I started consulting on the side when a local restaurant asked me to help them build a point of sale system for them.

That was the beginning of a long journey building multiple companies in training, consulting and eventually managed services. It was amateur radio that helped me get off the ground. Getting into AT&T Bell Labs (many hams were there too) as a low level Unix consultant did not hurt either.

Ham radio has been a constant in my life. Not only did I make friends and contacts that helped me in my early career, but as a kid, it made me feel unique and confident and I’m sure that it contributed to my ability to communicate with people outside of my provincial bubble.

Not only has Amateur Radio helped me professionally, but it has guided me personally. When I first met my wife 30 years ago, she told me that her father was a ham. I of course had my doubts thinking that he probably had a CB radio. She told me his callsign very quickly and I was impressed. I’m not sure if that sealed the deal at that point but I did believe (correctly) that it was a sign!

In hopes of giving back to this hobby, I joined the ARRL in 2022 as the Director of IT. It was a great experience where I met a lot of great people and some very skilled hams. I had the opportunity to learn the internal and public facing systems including Logbook of The World (LoTW).

My time there was spent working on a lot of system integration issues and the beginning of a cloud migration process. Moving LoTW to the cloud in order to at least get the current system running within a new sustainable architecture was a background process for me, my consultants and the staff. We had a few major issues that we were able to resolve in that time which furthered the need to build a modern replacement platform.

I did develop a plan for an incremental and modularized replacement process of LoTW. This began with addressing the need to reduce the support requirements on our LoTW support staff by improving the TQSL application (certificate backup and recovery) and moving much of the processing of QSO records to a cloud based process.

Unfortunately, I left the ARRL in September of 2023 and did not have the opportunity to improve LoTW or complete the cloud migration process. For a relatively small organization the ARRL has a significant amount of proprietary legacy systems. This combined with a very small staff and financial constraints make modernization a difficult but not impossible challenge.

I will be forever grateful to the ARRL, this hobby and the people that helped a young kid into it, gave him a few breaks along the way, and that continues to amaze me when thinking about those invisible waves.