NOW RETIRED IN NORTHWESTERN NORTH CAROLINA. ACTIVE AS KY4P.

Charles Lewis grew up in Lumberton, North Carolina where he was born in 1942. Starting out as an avid SWL with a Hallicrafters S-53A about 1955, he was first licensed as a Novice with the call sign KN4OVA around 1957. After a year as a novice, he became K4OVA. Some time in the early eighties he upgraded to Extra Class and received the call sign KY4P.

After 24 years working in commercial radio broadcast engineering in North Carolina, Charles entered the Foreign Service with the Voice of America in 1989. Over the years he held the DX call signs A22AA, S92SS, SV0LM, A25/KY4P, and finally S9SS.

Though he acknowledges his inate deficiencies as a CW operator, that mode is still his favorite. Never an outstanding CW operator at his best, he now has to resort to sending mostly "canned" computer generated CW due to a neural problem, resulting from an old injury, that affects his arms and hands. He reserves his greatest admiration for highly skilled CW operators.

The S9SS QTH was on the 346 acre site of the transmitting station where Charles served as station manager. That made him somewhat of an "alligator" much of the time. Sharing a QTH with five 100 kW shortwave broadcasting transmitters, a 600 kW transmitter on 1530 Khz, and another on 945 kHz with 20 kW resulted in very poor receiving conditions much of the time. Use of an antenna tuner, tunable filter, and sometimes the receiver's attenuator, often sufficed to overcome signal overload. When all these transmitters were on the air, the on-frequency noise floor rose in the ham bands. Even worse, there were often periods of intense intermittent wide band noise bursts of varying durations. On the low bands, a nearly constant high level of Equatorial QRN also seriously degraded reception. Despite these problems, S9SS averaged more than 1000 QSO's per month in casual operation, mostly on Friday and Saturday evenings when he did not have to arise early the following morning. Sometimes success despite these poor receiving conditions required patience on the part of the other stations.

Many pictures are available in albums pertaining to Sao Tome at http://picasaweb.google.com/s9ss160m

S50U has an S9SS log check on his web site at http://s50u.s50e.si/zacni.php?stran=s9ss