When the Sixties began to soar I became WN2EXW in Whitesboro, NY. Upgrading to General, I joined the Utica Amateur Radio Club and worked 20 & 40 CW DX as WB2EXW until saying good-bye to all that in 1966.

Forty-something years later I returned to the Empire State as K1NSS -- my sentimental vanity suffix referencing the Navy station that patiently taught me V, D, E, N and S, my first five letters of Morse, received on my first shortwave set, an Ocean Hopper.

In between I did the usual lapsed ham stuff until 2001, when I was shocked to discover the ability to draw a triode-based Hartley oscillator schematic no longer translated into a passing grade on a license exam.  I didn't remember the test being so difficult. Perhaps it was all that childhood RF exposure.  Whatever, I tried, tried again and became KB1HHC prior to vanitization.

Ticket finally again in hand, I realized a few long-lost daydreams, including DX ops as VP2V, KP2 and VP9. Too, I activated IOTA NA-217, the Isles of Shoals in the Gulf of Maine, from Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island off the New Hampshire coast.  And I worked Saturdays with the FB crew at Salem NH Ham Radio Outlet, where I proved particularly adept at selling repeater directories and spending my wages.

These days, I favor casual HF contesting, dxing and cw ragchewing.

Amateur radio not quite aside, I also draw a web cartoon feature called “Dash! The Dog-Faced Ham.” In the 1980s, I drew comics for alternative media like the New York Press, Baltimore/DC City Papers and San Diego Reader, plus editorial cartoons for a chain of suburban Boston weeklies.

The Cosmophone pictured above is strictly wishful thinking, but certain other radios and devices, while not necessarily in our shack or under our control now, indeed have been, including the Electric Brain computer(in the rack above its D cell eliminator) and the legendary Hallicrafters toaster.

Okay okay...Dash! and I are kidding about the toaster.  But that's all.  Honest.