A Brief History of Time (Mine)

Maybe not so brief.  OK, this is the self-involved, historical, babble-post.
I was born in a log cabin in rural Ohio to an itinernant preacher and his rosy-cheeked wife.


Not really...My ham life started in college.  I worked at all the local radio and TV stations.  Most of the staff engineers were hams and elmered me into the hobby while the stations broadcast "Dallas" or "Masterpiece Theatre".  College was CW and dipoles.  My skills at Morse Code have always been suspect at best.  It was slow going, but I learned how to cut dipoles to kinda resonance and get them on the air.

I don't remember any antenna tuners....



Shift to California in 1981 (jeesh!) and I lived in apartments. Mostly
VHF/UHF ops due to smaller footprint of antennas.  I could put
2m/70cm yagis on a small balcony and hear little bits of SSB
conversations. I then read a series of articles about ham satellites

in QST and 73 magazines. I was able to
put a small ground station together and work
the AMSAT birds.  At the time there were both
Low and High earth orbiters; I was able to work
100 countries just via satellite. My landlady allowed
me to put up any antenna I wanted as long as she could
not see it from her patio.  Good times.

Circa 1989? 1st floor apartment

Don't Laugh, it was the 80's!

2m/70cm CP

During that time period, I started looking at small footprint HF antennas.
I only held a Tech+ license, so the lowbands were not a high priority.
I tried a Butternut Butterfly model and had pretty good success.
But it was nothing like what I was working at the time via satellite.
We had DX  I was not able to hear on HF so I did not follow
up on folded wire beam antennas.

It all came undone in 1991. I lived 4 blocks from the beach in a rent controlled apartment.  I could walk to the water's edge for sunset and then come home for a little hamming.  I had full reign of the roof of my building for antennas.  I had great friends that I could meet for drinks on the pier and then another great group of friends on Oscar 13 satellite to talk with through the night.  But then everything came "blowed up" in my life.

I was forced to move from my Shangri-La.  My so called friends at the time seduced me into activities I had never experienced in Ohio and I was sucked into a deep pit that I have still yet to recover.  I bought a sailboat.

Union Polaris 36 "The Pit"

To afford the boat, I had to live on it full time.  I had to give up my great apartment in Santa Monica and move to the marina that allowed liveaboards.  Goggle Maps Los Angeles Harbour sometime.

 So this meant all my antennas had to change.  I fought it.  I even tried setting up my long yagis on the deck and on the dock.  It's really hard to point 2.4 GHz dishes on a moving dock.

  My space also dictated my HF style of antenna.  With the great ground of saltwater and and what I was able to learn from ON4UN's previous editions, I had lots of contacts with wire verticals and inverted V's. Think single-masted, cutter rigged 40 ft. mast.  A great platform to play with simple designs.  I had a great time playing with the HF as we cruised down the coast of Baja and stopped at every IOTA on the way.  Oh, I forgot...I had been laid off from my job and took the chance to leave LA.  Left for a cruise around the world with my best girl.  Nice boat, good equipment, no money.  We got as far as Acapulco and prepared for the big jump to the Marquesas Islands.  We had discovered both the joys and challenges of living on a small boat with a small budget and the reality of the next leg hit home with my best girl.

Its a gazillion miles to Tahiti

After I dropped her at the airport for a flight back to LA, I sailed back up the coast with some buddies and we hammed it up via satellite and HF as we bashed our way back to Long Beach harbour.  I was too chicken to continue around the world by myself, so coming home was a sage bet. (that was a typo, but works).

222MHz Cheap Yagi

Back in LaLa, I found work and continued to live on the boat. Its the cheapest ocean front property I could afford.  I upgraded to General and worked lots of VHF/UHF weak signal stuff.  I still had the radios from my satellite days and they still work  to this day.  I wound up living aboard for 15 years and played around with VHF rovering.  That started me out with antenna building.  WA5JVB designed small yagis that I could build for portable use.  That will be a future topic.  I really liked living on the boat.  It was really cramped, but easy to get over to Catalina Island for weekends.  But I started hanging around with a shifty crowd at work and...again...my world began to fall apart.