HI ! Thanks for stopping by. I go by the name Bob and I live in Jarrettsville, Maryland. Jarrettsville is about 20 miles north of Baltimore and 10 miles south of the PA line, Northwest Harford county.

I was introduced to the ham radio hobby in 1963 at the age of 12 by Warren Oliver - W3HPV, now a silent key, and received my Novice Class License WN3DUR. Warren worked at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and was my fantastic Elmer for many many years. The Novice class at that time was good for one year and you upgraded or lost your license. During the year I achieved the highest class license at that time, the General Class, and had full spectrum privileges with the associated call change to WA3DUR. I enjoyed CW and AM operating on 75/80 and 40 meter bands.

Later, thanks to the ARRL and their incentive licensing programming, I had to upgrade to Advanced to regain most of the phone privileges that the ARRL and FCC took away from the General class. With the FCC allowing us to pick a vanity call sign I decided to upgrade to Extra and shorten my call sign to N3UR. I always liked the sound of cw N3 during my novice operating and what a difference the new call has made in contesting, an easy call to pick out on CW.

Prior to graduating from Northern High School in 1968 I received my FCC commercial license and started an effort to get into the Broadcasting Engineering Field. I went to work at WMET-TV, channel 24, in the fall of 1968. Shortly thereafter I was the assistant Chief Engineer for the TV and Radio Stations WSID-AM a 1000 watt non-directional station and WSID-FM (changed call sign to WLPL-FM) a 20,000 watt FM station. Later I went on to WEBB-AM, James Brown owned, as Chief Engineer of their 5000 watt, 3 tower directional array daytime station. At night I would use the towers for MF and HF work. I spent about 6 years in Broadcast Engineering and then moved on to 2 way radio servicing for about 6 years with the Baltimore City Police Department. There I learned from the best, Ed Macon W3EHT, Tom WA3PZI and Jim K3DRJ to mention a few. Our Base stations and portable radios were Motorola and mobiles mostly GE with some Motorola and RCA units. I moved on to Columbia Gas Transmission Corp in 1978 to maintain their two way Base Stations and mobile radios, microwave radio system through the state of Maryland, 5 sites, and SCADA system for the pipeline. Enjoyed working there for over 25 years. I am currently employed by Verizon Wireless Corporate as Senior Technician with the National Network Operations group working with Terabit Fiber ring networks, TDM-IP switching and Gigbit Microwave system. I say I 'worked' but I have never work a day in my life, it has been a pleasure to go to 'work' everyday, more like extended hobby time. I have not missed a day of 'work' in over 33 years, Umm maybe I missed out on a lot of extra vacation, I mean sick days . Oh well no matter, I hope I will never have to retire.

Besides the love to work with antenna projects, work on my repeaters; other parts of the hobby are circuit design - construction electronics and programming in Assembly and C. Started in 1973 with Intel 8xxx chips, quickly moved to the 68xx Motorola series. Since the 90's I have been exclusively using Microchip MCUs for my projects.

In the 80's and 90's I spent a large amount of time with the NOAA, Russian and Chinese weather satellites, received interesting pictures and other data. Thanks to Charlie WA3UTC and Greg WA2WYK, always nice to have someone to share a common interest.

It was happy days for me when my wife N3MVS and two daughters N3OSU and K3CAT took an interest in the hobby and joined our fraternity. Now we need to work with my grand daughters.

I operate 160 meters through 450 MHz, all inclusive using CW, SSB, AM, FM, RTTY and PSK31 modes; if you hear me on please give me a call, looking forward to chatting with you, 73.