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 sats 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 of 11, I became interested in ham radio because of my Uncle Florian (W1FA, SK), who used to come into town and visit us and drive me up out of the valley 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 its 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 set up 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 mid-week while writing firmware Thursday to Monday. The engineering manager was a ham, and the fellow who 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 at 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 of the younger teachers wouldn’t necessarily enjoy the questions I posed, but the seasoned ones — like the ham radio operator professor — did!
After leaving college early, I started working in software development in the Route-128 area of Boston. I started consulting on the side when a local restaurant asked me to help 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 it contributed to my ability to communicate with people outside of my provincial bubble.
Not only has amateur radio helped me professionally, it has guided me personally. When I first met my wife 30 years ago, she told me that her father was a ham. I had my doubts, thinking 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. As IT Director, I began thinking through how an incremental, modular modernization of LoTW could work — starting with reducing the support burden on our LoTW staff by improving the TQSL application (certificate backup and recovery) and moving much of the QSO-record processing to the cloud. I aspired to begin that work, but I left the ARRL in September of 2023 before it got underway. For a relatively small organization, the ARRL has a significant amount of proprietary legacy systems. Combined with a small staff and financial constraints, that makes modernization a difficult — but not impossible — challenge.
I will be forever grateful to the ARRL, to this hobby, and to the people who 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.
