K4UIE Jeffery W. 'Jeff' Callahan Atlanta, GA QCWA # 28280 Chapter 49

I've been monkeying around with radios since I was a little kid, listening late at night on an old humming 5-tube AM radio I got to work and I was REALLY curious what was below the "5.5" and above the "16" on the dial. I loved hearing Cincinnati and Nashville and Chicago and the occasional Spanish station from who-knew-where. My brother -another geek- gave me a transistorized 5-band shortwave portable and when I wasn't imprisoned at school I was listening to all the freaky noises all over the HF band. When I got into high school, a classmate, WB4RLW, showed us his station and how to work it and some of the people he could contact and a few of us got together and organized classes taught by him and overseen by the chemistry teacher, Mr. Evans. A group of us took our novice test, a bunch passed and I became WN4UIE in 1970. I still love the freaky noises and the freaky people and love the whole world of ham radio, it's utility and usefulness in emergencies and the company it affords to long car trips. I've known some of the most intelligent people (and a few knuckleheads) I met on the radio and they ALL taught me something.

I worked for Georgia Power Company for 22 years as a graphic designer and illustrator in the PR department there, and when they RIF'd me I was happy to go - I miss the people, but not the work - and I was happily unemployed for a month until a ham buddy, W4BJT, called me up to ask if I'd like to work at the local Motorola repair shop in town.... I told him I wasn't qualified, just a ham operator and cartoonist, but he asked me "Do you know which end of a hot soldering iron to hold?" I told him I rekon so, and he said "Well, you know more than half the people working with me here." So I've been tuning duplexers and doing my best not to blow up commercial radio systems for 15 more years.....thanks to my having a little radio experience as a ham.... so it pays to have a spare skill in your bag of tricks if you want to keep a job!

Antennas and ragchewing with my buds around the south are what I love most, and rooting around in boxes of dusty crap at hamfests gives me a charge. Computers have revolutionized radio of all kinds in the past 30 years, with very interesting features and capabilities, but I've found that computers can also be a great liability and can turn a radio into a useless brick in a twinkle when the processor locks up or quits or the firmware is corrupted. So it's handy to have an old tube rig standing by in case TSHTF, if you know what I mean!

I'm an insufferable wise-ass and I read incessantly and my QSO's run to the arcane and pedantic until the liquor takes hold, then I'm fairly agreeable. If I can keep my heart beating for two more years, I'm going to blissfully retire and become a ward of the State and have all day to radio and paint dumb pictures and write dumb stories and take pictures of the sky and just enjoy the onset of decrepitude....

If you really want to QSL, just send me one direct. I've never understood all that EQSL business, but maybe later.

"Between the motion and the act falls the shadow." -----TS Eliott

73
Jeff Callahan K4UIE

December 06, 2015