Ham Radio The Ongoing Struggle

 

I’m a 3rd generation ham radio operator My grandfather adopted my dad when my grandfather was in his 40s so my grandfather was actually a veteran of the First World War and operated a spark gap generator. Taught my father CW when he was a toddler sitting on his lap My dad was licensed at the age of ten in 1946 or 12 so I grew up around ham radio my entire life. I had a weird relationship with my father. He told my mom once that I was the wrong kind of smart was the reason he never taught me anything about radio whatever that means. The closest he ever came to teaching me about radio was he threw a book at me once on “learning CW” and that was it. I didn’t get licensed until they dropped the code requirement and dad had been an SK for almost a decade by then.

When I was originally licensed in 2007 I held my father’s call sign W6NZX and then after several years I became an inactive in the hobby and let my license expire and then I went through a pretty dark period of my life and I’ve just started in the last year and year or two clawing my way back from that.

A big part of that was getting my ham ticket renewed and this time I decided I’m not living in my father’s shadow anymore. Instead so I got N7RAF as my call sign my initials. Everything about radio I had to learn on my own he would always answer basic questions about radio but he never took me under his wing he seemed embarrassed of me and didn’t want me on the air but the joke’s on him because I’m learning CW now!

I’m running a G90 into either a Bandspringer MIDI end fed random wire or the Wolf River Coil TIA.

My loves in the hobby are City Parks On The Air—that’s not a real thing, yet—POTA, but mostly I love DX. At the QTH I connect remotely to the Utah Amateur Radio clubs station. It has a log periodic beam at 90 feet, that works wonders. I also belong to the Ogden Amateur Radio Club.

My hates in the hobby are people who ignore regs and those who wont shut up about politics. I’m a left-winger so I’m surely in the minority.

73’s and see you down the dial.

Rob de N7RAF