I've been hamming since my college days a Purdue. I would drag the crystal controled dx-60 over to the Collins s-line station so that I could be both rock bound as required by law and still enjoy the selectivity of a 200Hz mechnical filter on the then crowded novice bands.

By the time I was a junior I was operating my own SB-101 into invisible magnet wire strung outside my dorm room window. I met my life long friends Lee and Wayne with this setup. They broke to talk about Purdue where they would be headed the folowing year.

Wayne followd Lee out west and later recruited me to work at Tektronix. I'd met Karen my last year at Purdue. She studied morse while we drove cross country to my new job. While passing through San Francisco the hams on the local repeater encouraged her to try for the General at their FCC field office. She did and has been N9AKO since.

I've been hamming off and on ever since. Every few years I try something new and that gets my ham juices running once again. I discovered 10m FM a sunspot cycle ago and had a blast with that. Then, in the lull, I finally mastered cw. More recently I've jumpped into psk-31 and then irlp.

http://c2.com/~ward/irlp

I've been writting computer programs in support of my radio activity all of this time. Some of them are classics. I wrote the first morse code teaching program to be published by QST (May 1977). The pc version still gets a dozen downloads a day.

http://c2.com/~ward/morse/morse.html

I regret that one thing I've never mastered is confirming qsos and collecting the confirmations myself. Please forgive me if I owe you a card.