N1RM

Episode - 329 - Rick Miller, N1RM. 

Transcript Sponsored by: Gerry Jurrens, N2GJ

This episode of QSO Today is sponsored by ICOM America, makers of the finest HF, VHF and UHF transceivers and accessories for the radio amateur, reminding you to check out their new IC-705 all band portable transceiver and their new ID-52A dual band portable, both shipping now. My thanks to ICOM America for their continued support of The QSO Today podcast. 

Welcome to the QSO Today podcast. I'm Eric Guth 4Z1UG your host. 

Flexradio (https://www.flexradio.com) is one of the two Platinum sponsors of the upcoming QSO Today Virtual Ham Expo that will return in March 20-21. Please check out the link on this week show notes page for more information. We will be opening ticketing and registration in December. We at the Expo are very open to some panel discussion ideas as well as workshops. If you have any suggestions, please send me a message through the contact-us link on The QSO Today Virtual Ham Expo website.

Rick Miller N1RM's ham radio story began at McMurdo Station in Antarctica and weaves its way through Russian submarine hunting to operating APRS  on the back of a Harley Davidson motorcycle on a grand tour of the United States. N1RM will fill in all of the Open Spaces in this QSO Today.

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Eric
N1RM. This is Eric 4Z1UG are you there Rick? 

Rick
I'm here – glad to hear you Eric. 

Eric
Thanks for joining in the QSO Today podcast. Can we start at the beginning of your ham radio story? When and how did it start for you? 


Well, I was always kind of a curious kid, and I also happen to have a father who flew in the in the US Navy - not typical carrier planes, but old transport planes.  In one of his duty stations turned out to be in Antarctica in the early 60s when I was in junior high school. And I think it was probably around 1963. The phone rang one night when my dad was down in the in Antarctica. Of course, the world was very large back then and the only way I could communicate with him was letters. It took about two weeks to go in each direction. So it was a very long delay. The phone rang one night. My mom kind of was talking funny like she was talking to Dad but saying “over” and things like that and then handed the phone to me and asked me if I wanted to talk to my dad and he sounded a little bit like Donald Duck and everything, but I could tell it was him, but it would last about 30 seconds, but I think those 30 seconds set an awful lot of things in motion in my life. I had a first of all figure out what the heck just happened and not just what but how it worked and it kind of made me realize I had to have an innate curiosity about how things were done, not just, oh that's cool. And its working but you know, okay, what's really going on? And I didn't have any ham radio mentors earlier on.  I was kind of on my own but I spent a lot of time in the library after that going through QST magazine. I remember timing my visits the library for when the new QST would arrive. 

Eric
Can I ask you a question before you go on? Was that call being transferred to you through like Army MARS or was that a local ham that was doing the phone patch? 

Rick
I wasn't aware enough to be able to differentiate between MARS and non-MARS stations. But I think it was a ham station in Missouri. We were in Quonset Point Rhode Island and so is a long-distance call or she had to accept a collect call, so I seem to remember he was in Missouri. And for some reason he had good propagation to McMurdo that evening was able to make the link.

Eric
So what happened after that? 

Rick
Well, as I said, you know, I was really interested in it. I had no idea really how to go about getting licensed. I think I did get a book on your basic introduction to ham radio from the league (ARRL). But then we moved to California, being a Navy family. We ended up moving every three to five years. But there was a club station at the Naval Air Station in Lemoore, California where we lived. A couple of hams that would frequent it and I would I would just kind of be there whenever they were and I did take my novice test finally in 1968. And my first call was WN6EJR. And then we moved four months later before I had a chance to really do anything about it. I do remember they had a Collins S-line as being a military ham radio station. Of course, I was a novice and in those days it was 75 watts crystal controlled CW only, but fortunately one of the sailors there had an old DX35 that he brought in. So my first QSOs were made on a on a DX35 transmitter and a 75S-3B receiver. So it was kind of a contrast in the quality and capability there. So anyway after that ironically we moved back to Rhode Island just a few months after that and moved into a house. So, not living in a Naval Air Station made it a little easier to get a ham station together. I took my lawn mowing money from the previous three years and had my folks write a check to Heathkit for me, for I think it was $235. and I bought me a DX-60B  and a SB-301, put a dipole on the roof at the other house and worked as far away is North Carolina. Probably on CW. Graduated from high school, went to college, novice (license) of course expired in those days pretty quickly but anyway, I ended up in Purdue University and ended up getting married a couple years later while still in college and got yet another novice license. And  operated W9YB. They managed to cobble together an Novice station there. 

Eric - 06:23
So W9YB was the Purdue University ham radio club. 

Rick
Yeah W9 Yogi Bear - funny. I just worked them this weekend at sweepstakes. 

 Eric
So lets go back just a little bit in terms of the DX60B and the SB301. When you operated that, do you remember your first contact?

Rick
Boy, I sure don't.  I was just so nervous that probably I just blew me away. It was probably very short.  I struggle with code a lot. I really struggled with Morse code a lot. I was always nervous in a contact and I was laying out the RST. Maybe I can get my state out which was Rhode Island. So it is didahdit didit. Funny. I do not remember my first QSO. 

Eric
So how old were you when you got your first novice license? 

Rick
Well, lets see, in 68, I would have been 16 years old. 

Eric
Did you have contemporaries, kids who were the same age? As you were did you say it? That was the Livermore Club station?

Rick
No,  Lemoore. It says its for some reason to Naval Air Station in the middle of the desert in California. Not near any water. But my dad was stationed there. 

Eric
Is that down in Southern California like out near the test range Edwards Air Force Base places like that? 

Rick
Its actually in the San Joaquin Valley, almost the geographical center of California, just south of Fresno. 

Eric
Frankly. I didn't even know there was a naval air station in the San Joaquin Valley. 

Rick
Neither did I until I lived there. 

Eric
It seemed to be, since you moved quite a lot, that it was relatively hard to make connections with other kids your age who were also hams.  Did that work out maybe in Rhode Island?


Rick – 08:00
I did not really have a first-hand experience other than the guys that used to hang out at the club station at Lemoore. I didn't have a first-hand experience talking physically to a ham through any of my novice licenses. You know, whoever was hanging out at the club station I could see but I didn't have any idea of a buddy, you know that I could call up, or a mentor in an older guy that I can call up and ask a stupid question. So I missed that missed that whole part of ham radio when I was young.

Eric
With your research in the library looking at QST's and maybe other electronics books. 
Did you develop an interest in electronics? And did you have The Knack? 

Rick – 08:47
Yeah, I did. I did and you're referring to the the Dilbert Knack (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0), I definitely did have the Knack. Yes, and my folks are very supportive because of course growing up in the 60s, there were a lot of less constructive things I could have gotten involved in but I really fell in love with science and technology. I kind of credit, you know back to even before I knew much about electronics at all in elementary school. I had a science teacher named Miss Lee. She used to wheel a lab cart between the Elementary classrooms and teach mainly biology and so it one time I wanted to be a biologist, but it did really get me involved in science and the scientific method and scientific curiosity. So she kind of planted that seed early on in electronics and then later computers actually in high school. I took a computer science course in 1969 with Punch Cards and everything and computers also formed a big part of that. 

Eric – 09:45
So its easy to say that ham radio played a part in the choices that you made for your education and career?


Rick
It's hard to establish the cause/effect there, Eric, because I think I had that implanted in me, but it sure was, you know, an enabler if nothing else. It was another outlet.  And you know, like I said making contacts with ham radio is a little bit,  what's the right word, daunting for me? Because you know, it was all CW and I wasn't good at CW. I could I could put stuff together. You know, I built some pretty tough to build kits back then and and a couple of little home brew projects, power supplies and things, but it was it was hard to get on the air. So I can't say that I look forward to every QSO but I sure look forward to being involved with the technology. 

Eric
I can relate absolutely. Let me ask you after High School. You said you went on to Purdue? What did you study at Purdue? 


Rick
Electrical engineering? 

Rick
There you go. 

Eric
And did you take an advanced degree in electrical engineering?


Rick
No, I was a horrible undergrad student mainly because I had all this knowledge. But I didn't have a lot of the theoretical underpinnings and and similarly not having mentors for ham radio. I didn't really have mentors for being an engineer and a disciplined engineer. With all that involved. My brother and I were the first in our family to go to college. My dad was a crew Navy naval officer, but he came up through the ranks and my mom and dad were both brilliant hard-working people but never had, growing up in the depression, never really had the opportunities to go to college. So I didn't you know, I didn't know that there were differential equations involved in electrical engineering. I eventually figured out how to do it all but I really struggled in undergrad academically but fortunately for me I've had a lot of luck in my life and this is one of them. I graduated in 1974 and I was on an ROTC scholarship which I managed to hang on to through my through my academic woes. But so I was commissioned as a naval officer, in 1974 and in 74, I had buddies that had excellent GPAs that could not find a job in engineering. It was the middle of a recession so I had a guaranteed job, whether I wanted one or not. I had when I was with the Navy. Depending on what I did for the six years of service, at least four years of service. I was in the Navy and had a job which was good. Cuz I already had a wife and has started started my career there making $9,000 a year is a naval Ensign. 


Eric – 12:46
And what did you do in the Navy? 

Rick
I went into Aviation.  My eyes weren't good enough to be a pilot, but I became a naval flight officer flew S380 Vikings. Relatively new airplane at the time. It was a submarine Hunter carrier-based submarine Hunter and I did two deployments to the Mediterranean hunting the evil Russian submarines.  

Eric 
That sounds like a lot of Tom Clancy. Fun. 


Rick
I took the afternoon off to see Hunt for Red October when it first opened so there was a lot of fun reminiscing. 


Eric
You did a stint there in the US Navy. What did you do after that? 

Rick
Well, actually I don't think we should skip over that, Eric, because... 

Eric 
I don't want to skip over that US Navy if you have more to say about it.

Rick – 13:44
Absolutely, because remember it was my dad being in the Navy and getting a phone patch the kind of started this whole thing. It turned out. I finally got a buddy who was a ham. He was a squadron mate of mine and I ended up sharing a stateroom. Two man stateroom in one of our deployments and he found out it was a ham and I still had my gear and everything and his wife was a ham and they had a you know, a tower and an amplifier and everything like that. We were getting ready to deploy because you got to get your license so you can help me run phone patches on the ship. And so by this time I was unlicensed we were stationed in Jacksonville. So about a month before he deployed, maybe two months before we were deployed, I got the SB-301out through a wire out the window and started listening to code practice every night on W1AW, just did the fast to slow, slow to fast, did everything and got to the point where I was finally up to 13 to 15 words a minute copy and drove up to Savannah, Georgia. Which was maybe a couple hour drive, sat in the FCC office and actually passed my 13 word minute code. So that was that was one of the biggest days of my life right there because I was finally not going to be a novice.  I passed my general exam. They asked me if I wanted to take the advanced exam. I said sure as long as you promise not to take my general away and I kind of laughed and said no. So anyway, I took the advanced exam and I passed that and then I took the paperwork to the very nice lady that was up with the front of the room. And she said well tell me what your call sign is and I'll give you your license certificate. I said, I don't have a call sign. She says you don't have the novice?  No.  And she said, well you have to take the Novice test and if I didn't pass that, they would have taken it all away. So anyway, that was, I was sweating bullets with that but I passed that as well.  

Eric
Well, did you have to take the 5 word per minute code test again?

Rick
No, no, no, I had credit for the code, thank G-d. You know, that would have been awful. Because I probably would have screwed it up.    I'm not going to sleep tonight. Thanks, Eric. 

Eric  16:00
Hate to bring back poor memories.  So, now you have this  advanced class license and you're out to sea. How did that work out there? What was the rig on the ship? 

Rick
Well, this was in nineteen... Let me get it right, probably 1975. We are on the USS Saratoga and they had set up an an awesome ham station there. They actually gave us what would be, at one time, the auxiliary radio radio room. Which was just under the flight deck all the way on the port side, all the way aft.  You've probably seen pictures of aircraft carriers with a big whip sticking out the side. Actually gave us one of those and it doesn't look like much of an antenna but its 90 feet off of the salt water. So it actually did a really good job and we had a Collins S-Line. Of course, we had a 30-01 we had a good antenna tuner for the for the whip and we were a MARS station. So the other thing was once again the world was very large. No internet. Pretty much paper letters, paper and pen letters for all these Sailors, and no satellite comms, at least for normal human beings. So phone patches were huge. And whenever we were outside the territorial limits in international waters, we would be running from patches whenever the bands were open and I would I would run... my buddy and I we were I think were the only two really active hands on the whole ship even though they were 3000 people on it. We would you know fly a couple of missions during the day and then stay up as late as the band was stay open running phone patches and the line (of sailors) would be going down the passageway. Sometimes 20 or 30 (sailors) deep it really, you know, it was It was kind of an interesting way to learn about Humanity because you're forced to eavesdrop on conversations that you're trying not to pay attention to, but you just learn a lot a lot about people in about different situations that folks have and run into. And I kind of led a sheltered childhood and it really, that was a big growing up experience for me. So that was one way,  and ham radio contributed to my education in a non-technical way. 

Eric 18:00
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Eric 22:00
So I would think that married Corpsmen out at sea, I would imagine there's a certain amount of stress on both sides of the conversation. 

Rick
Yes, absolutely. And too, you know to try to stay emotionally detached when, you know, there was a breakup or a divorce or or dishonesty or an infidelity going on, it was sobering. It was very sobering but I felt really good about the service that I was doing. Cuz I know it made a lot of difference in in a positive way to a lot of people so that added a lot of extra work but it was a labor of love. And the other cool thing about it was we were so popular on Navy ships, of course they had a ship's store near where you can buy stuff, and any profits from that actually go into a recreation fund. So that a ship that size several, well, many thousands of dollars in the in the recreation fund every year and they would always have a meeting and they were always trying to give us more money for better equipment. So we ended up with I think we ended up buying a Jake TR4 CW is an auxiliary rig And because were MARS capable and ended up with a Henry 4K amplifier and and of course we had to buy the transformer to convert the weird ship power to the power that the Henry 4K needed so we had plenty of  power on the MARS frequencies. Plenty of folks back home willing to be the other end of the call. The other interesting thing was the plane I flew also had an HF rig in it. It had a 1 KW HF rig in it, and even though it was a relatively small carrier aircraft and its very weird Notch antenna part of the skin of the aircraft. It was loaded up as an antenna. And. I was normally used for a data link. But whenever that data link net was was down I would turn it up on the ham bands and 20,000 feet even allows the antenna works seemed to work pretty good at least back then, and would sometimes have a chat with my wife and run phone patches for the other three guys on the on the airplane through the HF radio. It was actually the reason I didn't want to skip over my Navy experiences because its when I first really really became a ham and really got into it. 

Eric
Well, I wouldn't want you to skip over that because I think that's a great story. Did you drop sonar buoys and all that other kind of stuff? 

Rick
Oh, yeah.  It was actually pretty interesting back then because the Soviets at that the time were very active in submarines. The interesting thing about anti-submarine warfare is that even in peacetime,  you can do most of your mission, you can do the hunter part, right? You've heard of the term “hunter killer”? Well, you can you can do the hunter part, like, all day everyday, and so we end up staying pretty sharp. Finding a submarine is really really hard and when you're you're fitting a 24, 25 year old Lieutenant Junior grade against you know, a 20 year experience submarine Captain, it's a little asymmetrical but we did okay. It was it was very very interesting. It was it was fascinating and exciting, the flying and and the mission.

Eric
And how long did you stay in the service? 

Rick
I stayed in for 5 years mainly because it wasn't scratching my technical itch enough. I mean the the systems I worked in the aircraft and everything were great. But I was an unrestricted line officer, which means I was being groomed ultimately in my career goal was to command a squadron and I wanted to be an engineer. I look at all the stuff my commanding officer had to do and I said, you know if that's what they're trying to get me to do a I really don't want to do that.  So I got out after 5 years. 

Eric
What did you do after that? 

Rick
I went to work for electric boat division of General Dynamics where they build submarines in Groton, Connecticut, and I was an engineer there. I didn't know it at the time because I wasn't familiar with the term, but I guess I was a systems engineer. I did some analysis of sonar systems and I did a lot of software for the ship Control Systems as well as for submarines during the diving trainers.

Eric 
Did the General Dynamics jobs scratch your technical itch?

Rick
Yeah, it really did,  and the other thing was, at that point I said, you know, I really still was filled with regret over how I kind of didn't live up to my potential in my undergrad, and I want to kind of make up for that. So I started in and got a masters degree through an extension of of RPI in and that was in computer science. 

Eric
No differential equations there. 

Rick
No, but finite math. So abelian groups and mono aids and abstract algebra. 

Eric 27:00
So you mentioned earlier that CW was not one of your strong points. Although you got your code speed up in order to get the general then the advanced license, but its my understanding that you're pursuing CW again, how are you doing that?

Rick 
Well, actually its funny I made I guess I made a lot of mistakes when I was younger. I didn't feel adequate when I was young. And so I spend the rest of my life trying to make up for that and actually before I got out of the Navy I passed a 20 words per minute test and got an extra. I did that at the Atlanta hamfest, I guess that would have been the late 70s that was when the FCC used to visit hamfests and it was also when the FCC was temporarily not allowed to charge any fees for anything. So all I had to do is get up early one morning and try to pass a test and I did so I actually worked really hard. I had I definitely had the 13 Word a minute barrier and it was definitely a barrier for me. Cuz once I got over it, you know, I got up to 18 words a minute pretty good and then 20 words a minute with some practice for the extra exam but I never was a big CW operator. So it wasn't something that still was real easy for me, but then I got into contesting and before I built a beautiful station that I just completed this past summer my only station was in a four story townhouse with a stealth antenna going out fortunately to a tree about 80 meters away from me and an antenna tuner on the end of it and a hundred watts challenge antenna. The only way you're going to do DX and the only way you're going to contest is CW. Just the the power spectral density. You just can't get it with phone. So I got into CW and because I started using it many evenings a week. I just got better at it. And it was so enabling once I got to the point where I could do a CW QSO without you know, breaking a sweat. It was it was fun because I got DXCC with that set up in that town house. But was really fun was it was sort of a Full Circle event for me in the course of getting at DXCC over probably three or four years actually made contact with a with a Russian station in Antarctica. So it was my my second QSO with in Antarctica. 

Eric
That's what you would recommend for any operator that has a compromised system who wants to operate contest is to get on CW?

Rick
Yeah, it's at least a 3 db (gain), you can do the math in terms of optimal detection and things like that, but it's a several DB advantage to do CW, I actually teach ham radio classes for our club. I've taught several.  When we get into different modes, and we talk about bandwidth, and we talk about we don't use the term power spectral density because that makes people run screaming from the room. But if you look at it how how little noise you're letting in to your receiver. Once you narrow down that filter and in the fact that the carrier coming through is at full power whenever its on its just such an advantage. And if you don't have to sit and have a 10-minute...  if you've got a station like mine, you're not going to have a 10-minute QSO with a guy in Antarctica cuz you can barely hear each other. You just trying to get call sign signal reports through so its not like you need to be a good rag chewer on CW, but its its its very enabling and so for contesting and DX, you know, I can do 30 to 35 word a minute contest QSOs. Pretty reliably, very few repeats, is more stronger and a couple of other applications to keep that speed up. I'm not a great rag chewer on CW still but it's sort of a marriage of convenience that turned into a labor of love when I got back into CW out of necessity and then really really fell in love. Now CW contesting is one of my favorite things to do. 

Eric
Now, I saw the CW Ops logo on your QRZ page. What are you doing with CW Ops? 

Rick
I took the intermediate course with CW Ops couple years ago on the CW Academy, which is just fabulous. Its an incredible service that CW Ops (https://cwops.org/) does for the community. And then and I did okay and I got a little bit better and then I took the advanced class at the kind of at the advice of the criteria. They had on their web page. wasn't sure that I was really ready for it. But because as I said I can do CW contest QSOs all day at very high speeds, but I'm not a great rag chewer. It taught me some things. I always said we got to concentrate on on receiving. You know, I could always send even with a straight key, I could always send pretty reliably but it turns out there practicing sending really helps and I really made me do a lot of that in the advanced class. And so I actually made huge progress even at this relatively late stage in my life. The other thing that dawned on me going through some of their practice files. Which you know, I'm going to try to pass this concept along to everybody else that I talked to that is struggling with CW is that if you go back to when you learn to read you didn't start out by reading Tolstoy, right, I mean you're reading very limited vocabulary See Spot Run. You know, this is Dad, Run Spot Run etc., so a lot of repetition. So you need to do that same kinda practice with CW, so now when you sit down and read a book and you see the word spot you don't say spot you see the word spot and your your mind just process it without any real active involvement of the decoding of it. And if you do this some of these sort of primmer practices, I found that immensely helpful to me to gradually build my CW word vocabulary rather than just doing the letter by letter ID coding in my head. 

Eric
So its kind of like whole word language or whole word reading, right? So that you're actually hearing the whole word not the individual letters. 

Rick 34:00
Right, and its its really really tough to get there because it's hard to do below 20 words a minute. Because you take so long for you to know what the last letter is and that the trouble that I always have is, I guess you kind of have this search tree going on in your brain and you hear the first four letters and then you try to use context and everything to say what I think it's this word. And so you say okay, that's the word and then the next letter that comes doesn't match. So you need to be able to string it all together so that, (with) your autonomous attention span, you can span it without having to make too many corrections or or backtracks. 

Eric
Do you use a keyer or a bug or a sideswipe or something like that? Whats your device of choice for sending?

Rick
I use an iambic keyer. I know there's a there's a lot of differing opinions as to whether the squeeze came and iambic dual paddle aspect of it works, but it's the the first automatic device that I use other than a straight key. And so I just gotten used to it and the squeeze key part of it, irrespective of what kind of an advantage of gives to me. I find it a lot more relaxing than trying to always move a single paddle back and forth. 

Eric
And which iambic keyer paddles do you use?


Rick
Actually, my old standby is just the original Bencher. I have a Bencher that I've had to band and reband a couple times cuz its gotten dropped and tossed around, taking (it to) the Field Day stuff like that. And you know, its kind of what you get used to. My favorite key however and the one that's on my operating desk is it is a handmade key by Mike March that I bought at Dayton. And it's a  “so beautiful”  Art Deco base and everything. that's got the magnetic tension adjustment on it and its not only pleasure to operate. Its really really looks cool. There's the artistic aspect of it. 

Eric 36:00
Let me take a quick break to tell you about my favorite amateur radio audio podcast and that's the Ham Radio Workbench (https://www.hamradioworkbench.com/) podcast with George KJ6VU, Jeremy KF7IJZ.  It and it now includes Michael Walker VA3MW, where they pursue topics technology and projects on their ham radio workbenches every two weeks. The group documents their projects and makes circuit boards available to their listeners. They have interesting guests and go in deep.  Jeremy may complain about the overall length of the podcast, but friends, let me tell you that I could listen to it all day and that's good. Even if you are a seasoned ham radio builder or just getting started, be sure to join George, Jeremy and Mike now for the Ham Radio Workbench podcast, on every podcast player. Use the link on this week's show notes page by clicking on the image. And now back to our QSO Today. 

Eric
Rick, you mentioned earlier and I saw on your QRZ page that you actually have a new rig and a new set up. Can you describe a little bit about what that is? 

Rick
Its interesting, when I decided to get serious about him radio back into town house that was looking around for rigs and I got a almost got an Omni 7.  I had a Ten-Tec earlier, and really like the Ten-Tec rigs and then I heard that you know, somebody said we should look at the K2 and I said, whats a K2? I never heard of Elecraft. I was looking at the K2 and they announced the K3. And there's something about Elecraft and their way of doing business and their technology in the fact that the designer was was a ham that you might actually work on the air sometimes.  So I actually ordered a K3 and then I heard about Elecraft delivery times. It took me about 7 months to get it and if it in the interim, I had a very capable Yaesu 857 very small rig does everything, you know, I'm so because its a small rig and it does everything and it doesn't cost that much money. It does. It's okay, but not great. And then I got the Elecraft K3 put it together and all of a sudden I heard what a really good receiver could do. So anyway, I got a K3 back at the townhouse in (Natch?) which moved with me to this place. What happened was about the time I retired, you know, for a long time because of the town house situation and because I have the most amazing wife in the world. She says we got to find a place for you to put a ham station. And so yeah, were looking at places. They were kind of far away. I ended up finding a place five miles from my town house with 3 acres and it had one building on it and its a two-car garage with a one-bedroom apartment so it's a similar set up to what you were describing that you have now, Eric. Where it's got a full bath and kitchen, a sitting area and then the bedroom is where my ham station and lab is.  So that's the building it's got fiber optic internet. I've got a generator. Its just like if you were sitting down and build up your kind of single or two transmitter hamshack. This would be it. And it's really well-made. Its not its not a ramshackle building. And that my previous employer was shutting down the site and they had a tower there and I kind of noticed it before it was tilted over on a stand, you know, most of the time. And I've been looking at it as looking at getting a Tashjian DX70 and one day I go by this building and because they were very abandoning the building and I said well maybe the tower's available. I look at it and it's an old Tri-Ex DX70 (http://www.tashtowers.com). I mean, but we're talking old, my guess is, about 40 years old.  So that, the Tri-Ex designs, you know them now as Tashjian, so it's the same design. I talked to the facilities manager and he said we were just going to scrap it. I said I don't want to do anything illegal, but can I have the tower and he said sure. So I got a crane in there because it weighs over two thousand pounds, and fortunately a buddy had a high-capacity trailer. Did get it put up here, and it fit inside the garage at my new place here, and it it needed a lot of work. It had galvanizing that was chipped away and had some very weird modifications done to it. I think it has been a defense research project support. So it had a lot of non-standard stuff on it. The cables were in tough shape, the pullies were in tough shape. And so I spent almost two years refurbishing that Tower cuz you know, I had part-time jobs and full-time jobs during that period of time and got it put together. So now after convincing Fairfax County that, going back and forth with it, that it wouldn't fall over after I put it up there, all sorts of engineering analysis and soil samples. Had a drilling rig out to take core samples down to 25 feet and just all sorts of silliness like that. But at any rate 9 foot deep by 4 by 4 piece of concrete bolted it on there. And so now I have a 70 foot tower that's about 350 feet from the shack. So I buried hardline out to there. And I put a SteppIR DB-18e  (https://consumer.steppir.com antenna) on top of it, being a pretty conservative guy, so I didn't want to get the giant thing up there and it looks like the DB-18 had a good enough performance for me. And so that's what I've got there. I guess we'll probably talk about it some more but along the way I got associated with ACOM, the amplifier a company in Bulgaria (https://www.acom-bg.com/about_acom). And so I have an ACOM-2000 amp, and so the for the first time in my life, I have an amplifier, and an antenna that can turn, after first getting license over 50 years ago. 

Eric 42:30
I saw on your website that you also have a company called Reston Applied Technology (http://restonapptech.com). 

Rick 
Well, it's actually just an independent small business that I started. I guess, about 3 years ago yes, 2017, In April 2017 is when I formed the company. About 6 months prior to that, another very good friend and excellent mentor of mine Mike Lonneke, his current call is W4RN, he had got me into the K4VV superstation here, which is about 15 miles west of here and its just an admin station. Unfortunately K4VV is now silent key and he wasn't really doing very well at the time but it was a super multi multi station with all sorts of aluminum and everything like that. (Due to health reasons, K4VV is now closed and the station is being dismantled. The team of operators who built the station into the world's first Totally Remote Multi/Multi Contest Station has not disbanded. They now operate station W4AAW in contests. QRZ.com) So anyway, that's when I first saw an ACOM 2000. They had an ACOM 2000 at each of the operating positions. Love the amplifier. It just kind of matched what I thought an amplifier should be. So at any rate one of them broke down and I already you know, how I've always kept my hand in electronics throughout my career and throughout my life pretty much. So I said well, let me take a look at it and there's Val at ACOM who is a ham.  Somehow he manages to answer every email that goes to support at ACOM. I told him about the problem and I said where can we send this? And he says well if you if you like to look at things you could probably fix it yourself, and he said he will help me. So anyway, I hooked up my scope to the stepper motor drivers cuz they were best stepper Motors in there to tune amplifier. And I was able to isolate each phase and show how there was one phase missing and figured out exactly which power transistor phase driver was bad and I sent him all these scope shots and everything like that and I got an email back from him and he says you look like you're pretty good at this. Would you like to fix other ACOM amplifiers. That's how my business was born and I guess the rest is history. So I formed Reston Applied Technology specifically for that. I do have a website and I do take on other jobs. I also have contracted with my previous employer on a couple of jobs and a part-time but its pretty much fixing ACOM amps. And I do their warranty repair for all the amps sold through a Ham Radio Outlet and I'm a member of Potomac Valley Radio Club, which is a huge contesting club. So there's a lot of ACOMs in this region. And yeah word of mouth has has kept me plenty busy. The amplifiers are extremely reliable. They're wonderful to work on. They do things the way I would have done them if I were smart as (laughter). I find them very easy to work on.  I learn a lot every time I fix one. 

Eric
You know, you bring up a very interesting idea. I don't think I've ever discussed it with the any of the guests on the QSO Today podcast. And that is that hams like you have years and years of experience and a lot of hands-on experience. And when you retire its kind of seems like well heck, you know, that experience is now not being used. Do you think given the number of hams and the number of ham radio companies that are selling radios of all kinds, that for a retired amateur radio operator with a lot of hands-on experience that doing the kind of stuff that you're doing with ACOM amplifiers, but with other stuff, that might be an interesting part time past time to spend in your retirement years. Is that something that you would advocate for other people as well?

Rick
Yes!  I guess that the short answer is absolutely. I don't know that it's for everybody. One thing that I guess we need to watch out for is that hams are great at making things work. Most hams understand how to make things work, but a lot of hams just kind of try a whole bunch of different things and when they start working they think they fixed it. But they're not really sure why or really if its fixed or if its just some other thing changed to make it work. So I think we have a responsibility to first educate ourselves and then then educate others to make sure that you know, in this day of of the internet where so much data is out there. I'll call it data because its not really information until you processed it and validated it. There's an awful lot of stuff out there, that's just not only inaccurate but just plain wrong, and it's really bad advice for for new hams. And so I think it's important for those who have maybe had a little bit more disciplined education or have taken the time to really dive down, close to first principles, to at least understand the limits of their own knowledge before they dive in and and and start guiding others. I'm I'm a little hard over on that and it's probably not a mainstream view but its sort of a little bit of a pet peeve of mine. 

Eric 48:00
I would agree with you 100% but I think I might also add and probably you would agree with this, that in these days like everything else, it seems to me that focusing on a specific product and brand is probably the best way to be successful probably from the repetition of seeing it more than once but also because it's the best way to get a reputation of being the guy that knows how to fix every FT-101 that's ever crossed his bench. In your case, an ACOM 2000. That focus on a specific product brand probably would bring the most success and not only financial but also in terms of being actually able to understand and fix it.

Rick
Absolutely, 100%, that's and there's a couple of other dimensions that are especially good to me that that you didn't mention. One is, of course, is I can stock parts for ACOM amps. Previous folks than that did service for ACOM, in this capacity would not do component level troubleshooting. They would have to stock boards, which is expensive! Boards are a lot more expensive than a little bag of transistors.  It's amazing how cheap... I fixed an amp one time. They had a whole lot of stuff wrong with it. So that the labor charges, even though my labor rates are really low, were considerable and I think it was I replaced a whole bunch of parts. I think that the total parts cost was $12. So I can stock parts for this line of amplifiers and you know, I know which ones tend to fail more often so I can pre-order those who keep those in stock without having a huge inventory investment. And the other one is I'm retired. I'm not looking for another full-time income or full-time job. I want to get on the air. I want to get out go on motorcycle rides. I want to do a bunch of other things. So I don't want something to to grow too big and so concentrating on amplifiers that are generally pretty reliable that are are well-designed and not too hard to fix and then I can stock parts...it's just in almost every dimension of perfect match for me. 

Eric 51:00
I think the way that I discovered you Rick was is that you wrote an article about APRS. I think for QST magazine, on a cross-country ride on a Harley Davidson. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? 

Rick
My wife and I, we each have Harleys. We still ride quite a bit, but I sort of had a bucket list trip planned. and in, good grief was a 2016? I guess it was. We planned a basically circumnavigation of the continental United States. We live in Virginia, Northern Virginia. So we wanted to go all the way across the Northern Plains pick up the Pacific Coast Highway basically in the state of Washington and take it all the way down to San Diego and then back across the desert come up through the Utah Parks everything. So we basically did about a 9600 mile motorcycle ride over 6 weeks. Everybody asks us why you got those radios? So we can talk to each other? And our comeback is is pretty much the same reasons. If you're going to go on a...it's really nice to go on a 10000 mile vehicle trip with your spouse and never get in an argument. (laughs) So I do all the navigation. She likes to she loves to have me lead. Shes an excellent rider in her own right, certainly goes off on her own quite a bit, but she really likes just following me and not really worrying about where we are and just enjoying the experience. And so if I agree to do all the navigation and leading and she agrees to never comment if I make a wrong turn (laughs) which I do sometimes.  So anyway, we don't have radios and everything. I've never put a ham radio on on the motorcycle. I figured there's already plenty of things to get distracted by the can kill you on a motorcycle. So I never really added that aspect to it. It just didn't seem right for me, but I wanted to do something and I'd gotten it interested in APRS number of years ago and had a small digipeater. And did a lot of research and actually wrote some APRS decoders on my own in Linux and things like that. So I said well, I wonder how good APRS coverage around the country is? I said, this is a great opportunity for an experiment. So I actually put an HT. In fact, I think I still have it here well, I don't have it with me right now. It was a Yaesu APRS capable HT and a small amplifier on it with a quarter wave whip, in the tour pack on the back of my bike and I hooked it up with a battery voltage sensing switch so that it would turn on when I turn on the bike and it would stay on for about a minute after I stopped and it shut itself off. So I literally didn't have to touch the radio the whole time, but what I did is every evening when I checked into a motel I get on the internet. And I would download from the APRS information system, APRS.fi, all of the raw packets that had been picked up from my motorcycle and made it to the to the internet. And so I built these huge data files as I went along and when I got done I did an analysis and kind of plotted it using KML on a map and everything to show where where I was when packets were received and made it to the APRS-IS system and it showed how remarkably good this ad-hoc sort of volunteer system that just sort of grew, how great coverage that is around the US. The article shows that map and I have a color-coded where there's a gap in coverage. Couple of surprises, in the middle of the desert in New Mexico. There's a 10,000 foot mountain with an APRS digipeater on it. I used that for three days. I didn't need any other digipeater as we were going around the parks in that part of the country. Yet going through more densely populated areas say and in the low areas of Louisiana Eastern Texas where its swamps and everything down low there were gaps in coverage. Sometimes significant gaps are even though there is a lot more people per square mile in the mountains. I put it together into an article that it was a little disappointed that they they they cut it down quite a bit because I think they lost some of the science that I put in there in terms of doing the coverage analysis of things like that, but maybe I should should have submitted it to QEX instead of QST, but it was great to get published to have that is sort of a souvenir of the trip. 

Eric 55:45
Do you have that map in electronic format or PDF format? If you don't mind would you send it to me, then I'll put it on a link so that people can actually click on the link on the show notes page and actually see the map.

Rick 
Sure! Absolutely. 

Eric
I'm happy to host it up there. And if you have the white paper that goes with all the science and I'm also happy to post that as well. So that folks can download that is a PDF. 

Rick
Yeah, it's a good idea. I can just put the original article in there is its not like there's a lot of statistical analysis and everything is just there's a lot of details that didn't make it into the final article.  

Eric
People can go to the show notes page and can actually look at the map and download the article if they like to see it in its entirety. I think that sounds like a great exploration when you were talking about the Harley-Davidson. I think some of us think that maybe rightly so at motorcycle riding is relatively dangerous.  On a Harley, is that a different experience than maybe on a Honda? 

Rick
Not in terms of risk, cuz the risks aren't from the the motorcycle or the motorcycle type really unless you get something that's got enough horsepower that you can accelerate it out from underneath you.  The risks. I highly recommend anybody who's interested in motorcycle riding to take the Motorcycle Safety Foundation (https://www.msf-usa.org/). They have a beginners course and they also have an advanced course, that my wife and I take periodically even today, even though we have hundreds of thousands of miles under our belt, because it's all about, it's defensive driving.  You have to, because you will never win in a collision. You have to make sure that you avoid a collision. You need to anticipate what other drivers may do, you need to be a little bit paranoid and you need to be calm and well-rested in and not impaired in any way, just to give yourself a better chance. I mean everything's about statistics.  There are very few sure things in it anywhere in the natural world. And so what you're trying to do is this is increase the odds. Its kind of like what were going to do with a pandemic right now. You can follow all the guidelines and still get the disease, but you can certainly improve your odds by doing intelligent things.  

Eric
I think that the biggest problem that I have with motorcycles is I don't see them when they pass me on the right. For example, you don't see them until they pass you and you're just kind of thankful that you didn't kill somebody on the road. 

Rick 58:00
I learned not to spend time in blind spots. In fact, there's probably people that think I'm showing off but when I'm passing a vehicle that I tend to accelerate very rapidly past them and not spend a lot of time beside them. It's just little things like that that you do just sort of self-preservation. 

Eric
I somehow remember that one of the things that you are supposed to do on the road as a motorcyclist is to kind of stay on the right side of the lane so that if I'm looking through my rearview mirror, I see you. For some reason I don't see that (being done.)  Maybe it's just, you know, the way that motorcycle riders around here a trained. I think that the highest death rate in this country, on motorcycles, is pizza delivery drivers.  

Rick
(Oh, Cheese!)  Coz they are in a hurry and have a hundred other things on their minds... I can't imagine...

Eric
... like sidewalks entering parking lots from the exit rather than the entrance...

Rick
Just not being seen. Not being seen is the biggest cause of motorcycle incidents. 

Eric
Right. They're fast and invisible, right? 

Rick
Well, not just that, but they'll see, they may see you (on the motorcycle) but it doesn't register to them (car drivers) that you are moving at the same rate as a car because you don't look like a car, you know, so I mean unless their level of consciousness has to be above a certain amount for that to register, that you are another vehicle. Not bicycle. 


Eric 60:00
What do you think is the greatest challenge facing amateur radio now? 

Rick
Oooh.  That would have been a good one to send me last week. (laughs)  I am really really bullish about ham radio right now, but let me digress because... let me draw parallel. I've always been interested in space science and I live near the Smithsonian institution. So I often get to go to panel sessions, or used to before before shutdowns of things like that. In one I went to was a panel session with Scott Crossfield. He's a brilliant engineer and he later got into helping in serving on Boards of universities and helping in science and technology education with places like Caltech. Not your run-of-the-mill outfits and there is a Q&A at the end and I was working on my Doctorate at the time and I had a question that he seemed like the exact right guy to answer, and so I said, with there being such a huge rate of increase in the number of things that we need to learn as engineers and scientists because you know, when you think about in the last few decades how much has been invented and discovered, did he find that students were not as well grounded in the fundamentals? Because you sort of jump in, you know in your resources, your research sources and you jump in at the top and you see all this stuff and then the underpinnings, the Maxwell's equations and things like that get lost and he he stopped he didn't answer right away and I remember Walter Cronkite said do you need him to repeat the question? He says no, that's a thoughtful question and it requires a thoughtful answer. I remember those words exactly from him and he said the students that are graduating today are the best, smartest and most well-educated students in Engineering and Science in history. And so I think a lot of us Old-Timers in ham radio saying these young kids don't know anything about how to click a mouse button on FT-8, and I see a lot of that and I know a lot of that is sort of grousing in normal old guy stuff, but I teach ham radio courses and I teach both youngsters and people later life getting into ham radio, their level of curiosity, and ability to absorb and ultimately, I think, contribute to the Hobby is as good as anything that it was back in the 60s when I first got started. So I'm very bullish about ham radio. I think we certainly have challenges in terms of how we're going to justify the amount of spectrum that we have. And I have been working on these amplifiers. I do have a couple of commercial customers. So there are commercial customers for HF. And fortunately that it hasn't become so mainstream that there's going to be, I foresee, too much emphasis or pressure, commercial pressure on the HF spectrum, but there certainly is at the higher frequencies. I think the other challenge that we have is in terms of public service and I also have been so involved in ARES Amateur Radio Emergency Service, is that there is a lot of bureaucracy. And I'll explain what I mean by that, involved in areas that there didn't used to be. There's a lot of more memorandum of understanding, there is a lot more training. So that's all good. But we know what to expect from each other. We know how emergency organizations do business. But I think what I see happening in some areas, in some cases, is that ham radio emergency operators are basically becoming unpaid supernumeraries to emergency organizations. And what were losing there is what I call the orthogonality of ham radio and other words, we do things differently in terms of how we communicate and the equipment in frequencies and modes that we use compared to say a large County like Fairfax County that I live in, where they have this incredibly sophisticated infrastructure, so if we just become other operators of that infrastructure, were losing our unique contribution. Excuse me. If we maybe we all we have is an FM repeater in the area. But if its well located in an independent power and not relying on the internet for instance, for linking. It may be able to serve in a disaster where you know, the the the infrastructure crashes or whatever it in the county. So I think we have to remember that there are some unique or technological aspects that ham radio brings to public service and not just try to be clones of the agencies that work that were served.  Get on the air. But I mean, its pretty much not just us returning hams, but get on the air, get licensed. If if you've been a ham before, you should  get licensed in a month. If they don't know how to, give them my email and I'll tell him how. And then get a radio and get off the internet, don't go to eHams. Don't go to the websites that show you all these antennas and should I buy this antenna or that antenna, if you're getting on VHF? Build yourself a 19 inch whip ground plane out of an so-239 connector and stick it on a fence post and see how that works. It might be all you need and then and then go from there, but I think what what happens is hams these days tend to treat building their station the same way they treat shopping for anything today is to get on Amazon and they go to all the websites and they learned, you know, the 10 best things to have in everything like that and you go to customer reviews which you know is crowdsourcing - customer reviews is is kind of okay, but its just fraught with inaccuracies and biases. The way to the way to figure out what you need for ham radios to try something, get on the air. One of the exercises I do for one of the ham radio classes is on the way to the class on practical antennas, I stop by the hardware store and I buy everything we need to build a 10 meter dipole and we build a ten meter dipole in class and then we go to put it on the air before the evening's out and use it and I think the total cost is about $12. That sort of goes in what I started before. What I was saying before is that there are things that we can do that don't require a lot of investment that are still very effective. So boy, that kind of went off. 

Eric 67:00
I think its important, that I would add, join a ham radio club and find a mentor from all of us older mentors. I've been in almost fifty years. We have all kinds of junk even working rigs that we would loan or give away to a new ham just to get them on the air.  It doesn't have to be expensive and it doesn't have to be a brand new rig. If you cant afford a new rig, there's got to be plenty of Elmers out there that have lots of stuff that's sitting, gathering dust. 

Rick
Right and I went through that experience. So now I mentioned Mike Lonneke, who is one of the best ambassadors to ham radio I've ever seen. W4RN. He makes his his station available at his place, he's got everything connected remotely and he's got buddies all over the world that he lets anyone call in and operate his station, even during contests and everything and he's, you know, what he's gotten done with this particular receiver. Would you like this receiver as a controller, you know, so even in the last 5 years, even though I've been licensed for over 50 years, you know, I'm finding mentors like him that that are still helping me along and then I'm paying that forward because there's some new hams that are, you know, old as well as young in our class and I'll invite them over to my shack and I'll walk them around and I'll show them why I did things I'll show them my bench and I'll say you know, hey, could you use this? So absolutely clubs are very important. I've always belong to at least one Club. I think I'm now belong to about three, served as an officer in clubs and they have been a huge resource for me in improving my abilities is a ham. 

Eric
Rick. I want to thank you so much for joining me on the QSO Today podcast. It was really a pleasure and I loved hearing your ham radio story. I want to thank you so much, and wish you 73. 

Rick
Its a pleasure being here and thanks for all you do for ham radio Eric. 

Eric
That concludes this episode of QSO Today. I hope that you enjoyed this QSO with Rick, please be sure to check out the show notes that include links and information about the topics that we discussed. Go to www.QSOToday.com and put N1RM in the search box at the top of the page. Be sure to click on the Expo menu item at the top of the page for updates on the upcoming QSO Today Virtual Ham Expo. I'm updating the web page as we have more information.  My thanks to ICOM America for its support of the QSO Today podcast, please show your support of ICOM America by clicking on their Banner in the show notes pages. You may notice that some of the episodes are transcribed into written text. If you would like to sponsor this or any other episode into written text, please contact me. Support the QSO Today podcast by first joining the QSO Today email list by pressing the Subscribe buttons on the show notes pages. I will not spam you or share your email address with anyone.  Become a listener-sponsor monthly or annually by clicking on the sponsor buttons on the show notes pages or use my Amazon link before shopping at Amazon. Amazon gives me a small commission on your purchases while at the same time protecting your privacy. I'm grateful for any way that you show appreciation and support.  It makes a big difference as I head towards episode 400. QSO Today is now available on iHeartRadio, Spotify, YouTube and a bunch of other online audio services including the iTunes Store. Look on the right side of the show notes pages for a listing of these services. You can use the Amazon Echo and say “Alicia, play The QSO Today podcast from TuneIn.” My thanks to Ben Bresky who edits every single show in allows both this host and guests to sound brilliant. Thanks Ben!  Until next time, this is Eric 4Z1UG, 73. 

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Transcribed by W3TTT.