I am honored to be a new lifetime member of CWops, #3052. First, I would like to thank all of my CWops CW instructors for getting me all the way from zero to membership. Tom Kravec (W8TK), Mike Brown (N7ID), Ken Bell (K4EES), and Buz Tarlow (AC6AC). They all exemplify what is great about CWops and the CW community in general. Also, a big thanks to my sponsors.
I got my Technician license in 2010. At that time all I had was a HT. I ended up not doing much with the license as I didn’t have any real connections to the ham hadio community. That all changed, years later, when I joined my local ham radio club, W7AW — West Seattle Amateur Radio Club https://w7aw.org/ Because of this club I attended my first Field Day, made my first HF contact, and was hooked. I studied up, got my General license, and got my first HF rig. The W7AW club is full of knowledgeable and helpful Elmers who have helped and encouraged me in all aspects of ham radio. I won’t call out individuals here because there are several and I don’t want to miss anyone. I will just say, it is an amazing club to belong to.
I currently enjoy contesting and doing portable operations like POTA/WWFF. My home rig is an IC-7300 into an end-fed half-wave that runs around my yard. I also am lucky enough to own a KX3 which I use for my portable operating. I feed the KX3 into home-made EFHW antennas. As I continue to work on my CW, my next steps will be to get my Extra license, get started on DXCC, and get my two missing states for WAS CW (RI and ND).
I was born in Orange, CA, grew up in Southern Oregon (Grants Pass), and moved to Seattle after college (Math/computer science) where I live now with my wife Dianna. I worked at Boeing, doing Flight Manuals, low-speed aerodynamics, and eventually flight test software for the 777. I also wrote medical software for anesthesiologists, streaming multimedia software, and now work at Amazon building large scale systems for AWS.
Work does not leave me much time for hobbies outside of Ham Radio, but I am trying to teach myself woodworking. I have also recently built Lego models of the Saturn V and the Lunar Lander which was a lot of fun. 73 es CUL on CWT!
This biography is what appeared in Solid Copy when the member joined CWops.