Member Bio

Greetings from Hot Springs, South Dakota.

I’m a not-quite senior citizen geek who began my communications journey in the mid-1980’s working at several local radio stations mixing commericals and eventually getting on the air. This was about the time that analog was starting to blend in with early digital, and modems and Usenet were the thing. I cut my teeth on The Well, one of the original dial-up BBS systems and collected a room full of PC parts and cables that became my playground. My first tech job was working for a computer service company, both onsite and in the shop doing builds and repairs for small clients. That branched out to assignments supporting Unix terminal systems and writing early utility apps using x86 Assembler and C.

After a few years of gaining experience and training I began working mostly with early coax networking. This led into working with twisted pair and I got both my Novell CNE and Microsoft MCSE certifications. At that point I was on an installation team designing, installing, and servicing networks for business clients. Things started to get interesting with OS/2, then I added Apple products to my portfolio of responsibilities. Along the way as a hobbist I got into CB radio and took road trips to talk with truckers (plain white wrapper, mile sticker 365, wiggle wagon – it was like learning a second language).

Eventually I progressed into senior technician roles for a couple of software companies (one designing CAD tools and the other doing predictive analytics). Moore’s law was kicking in and keeping up with the generational upgrades in hardware became a part-time endeavour by itself. As computer viruses got worse, I branched out to computer security out of necessity. This led to working for a large corporation as their technology director where I spent 10 years and eventually did enterprise management, project planning, and managed a half million dollar IT budget.

As the burn-out kicked in from competing decision makers and C-suite complications, I began to lose interest, having drifted away from my hands-on roots to the hell of administrative decision making. At the end of my career I was managing Shortel VoIP, fiber optic plants, Cisco routing and switching, and was a HIPAA compliance officer safeguarding patient medical data systems. Then the day came, I was called into the corner office, and there was the president of the board, their lawyer, and the CEO (my boss). Refusing to sign any paperwork, I was fired and escorted out of the building by a guard. Thus ended my technology adventures in 2017 rather uncerimoniously.

I took some time off and toured around the western US on a Harley Davidson and got into competition archery (compound division) competing in tournaments in Kansas City and Las Vegas. I also got serious about SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Life project from the space sciences lab at UC Berkeley). Bringing my past technical skills to bear, I built out a server farm in my garage processing astronomy work units from the Arecibo reflector telescope. At the projects end, my world rank was 68,311 out of 4,178,436.

With SETI on hold, and not really interested in other BOINC projects, I circled back and got into ham radio in 2021. In two years I’ve gone from Tech to Extra, dumped thousands of dollars into gear, and dabbled in all kinds of interesting directions the hobby brings to the table. I’m into AX.25 packet, SSTV, SSB nets, CW, and trunking scanners using SDR’s. I’ve started to look into FEMA and ARES training and joined AMSAT last year. Starting to get into electronic theory and circuit design.