Update May 2008: Off the air since 2006, when we moved from a big house with a Force 12 to a small townhouse in Burbank. Now we're moving to Europe (Paris) for a couple years, and I'm going to try and pick up a TS-50 or something small to get on the air from time to time, but I'm sure the antenna potential in a Paris apartment isn't going to be very good!

Ah, the good old days! See below:

Rig: Kenwood TS-950SD (now for sale, too heavy to take on a plane to Europe), Alpha 76A (sold in May 2008), usually 1KW PEP, with a Force 12 C3 beam at 19 meters AGL. Heil Gold Line mike, but I didn't like the way the Heil sounded with the 950, so I picked up a little two-channel (treble-bass) equalizer and roll off the bottom end while peaking the highs. That's it, 2.8 KHz wide SSB. (After all, it's a challenge to make good audio when you deliberately limit your bandwith, isn't it.) I love Kenwood's audio.

I was raised in a farm town in southern Illinois, and passed the Novice test while I was still age 9, but the official license didn't arrive from the FCC until just after I turned 10, which made me miss being the only 9-year old ham in the country by a month. Frustrating!

As KN9CNC, I worked 40 and 80 CW in the Novice bands with two crystals and a couple dipoles. By my teens (in the above photo) the first International Geophysical Year (1957-58) coincided with the highest sunspot numbers in memory to open up the world to this Midwestern kid, so I ignored homework for a couple years, choosing to run traffic and phone patches for stations like KC4AAA and KC4USA in the Antarctic. What a rush!

The rig in the 1957 photo above is a DX-100 and an old military surplus BC-348H receiver. It took me three months to build the DX-100, and three months (and a couple good Elmers) to debug it and get it on the air!

Soon I was studying engineering at university, and working as an engineer and cameraman at a St. Louis television station. My career has taken me to the CBS Network in New York and ABC-Los Angeles...places I'd never have dreamed of working had it not been for the skills learned through Ham Radio. Other calls include W2GGV in New York City during the late '60s and '70s.

For this kid from a small Midwestern town, Amateur Radio truly opened my ears -- and mind -- to the world.