My Life as a Radio Amateur


Operating CQphone and Skype from office PC		Operating in my living room on the notebook PC

EARLY (downstairs) SHACK circa 1992 Conferring with my buddy Willy		BELOW Modified (33 feet) CushCraft 17B2 beam - 20 elements @ 144 Mhz - Dubbed "BIG BERTHA" (Click here for more details.)

Downstairs shack after antennas were moved to the roof Operating all bands 160 - 2M from then new QTH. Rig: TS-820S via Dentron Kw to tri-bander at right --- Not seen - 2M FM rig with 160 W brick to the 13b2 ---		Rooftop Antenna Farm Circa 1997 in Brighton MA Roof mounted 30 ft. tower with tri-bander and inverted Vs for 40 and 80 topped by a single 13b2 VHF beam at 60ft AGL with separate rotor for VHF beam. Adjacent high gain 2M vertical on lower tower. Personal 2M Dx records: Repeater: 500+ mi Boston-Norfolk VA, Direct: 300+ mi, Boston-Nova Scotia, CANADA
My Ham Bio

I was licensed in 1956 in Brookln NY as K2SMG. I operated mostly 40 first CW and then phone (AM). I built my own transmitters and got a Hallicrafters SX28, receiver, which for its day was quite a receiver. But I lived in a big COOP apartment house and had to string "invisible" wires from my windowsill to various street lamps.

To make the wire almost invisible I used enamel covered #26 magnet wire which was invisible (as long as it didn't snow), but with my dual 6146 final amplifier at about 100W AM, you had to limit your transmissions, or the wire would melt.

Summers were better when we migrated to a cottage in the Catskill Mountains where I had a vertical and a high dipole. When I left my parental home and moved into my own places, ham radio took a second place to other interests, and I only casually operated with an acquired Swan 350 transceiver (good rig)

In 1970 I moved from NYC, to Boston. I still did just about nothing with ham radio except to occasionally try a quick end fed wire with the SWAN. In those days however, the FCC still had time to administer the Amateur Service, and maintained the requirement that if you moved to an area of another call prefix, you had to get new call letter assignment. I was lucky, since they were then re-issuing old calls, so I became W1GMQ.

One afternoon, with a casually strung wire at almost ground level I gave a call on 20m and immediately got a call from a Brazilian station. It turned out his wife was in one of the hospitals nearby and he needed a phone patch. While I had no patch I was able to put him in touch with his wife by the "acoustic coupling" method. After that I never made another contact and sold the Swan while I still could.

But, in 1991 I bought a little HTX-100 while shopping for a switch at Radio Shack. Since 10 was open then, I worked the world from my car (with a cut-down (50") hustler CB antenna. That got the juices flowing and I became more active in the hobby than ever in my life, operating HF, 160 - 10, and 2M FM.

Later on, around, around 1996 I moved the antennas to the roof where I eventually erected a traditional tower mounted HF / VHF DX beam combination.


First shack - top of house - room with to door to the deck	Big Bertha was on the deck outside the shack