N3CMH Wesley E. 'Wes' Smith Miton, FL QCWA # 36829 Chapter 84

Licensed as a novice in 1966 as, WN3QGK and upgraded to WA3QGK a year later. Soon after, Uncle Sam sent me to Great Lakes for boot camp and then electronic training. Then after finishing my two years of training I was sent to Washington, DC. and then to Annapolis, MD where I worked on the, BIG transmitters.10K to 250K watts and up. .No wonder I lost my hair!

Moved onto the Indian Ocean as WA3QGK/VQ9, later changed to VQ9WES and experienced for the first time what a real pileup was like. What a ball! 'There were so many stations and so little time.' I definitely kept my QSL manager busy.

While on Diego Garcia, I recall a west coast station getting upset over my call sign.s suffix and especially since his antenna was facing north. Guess he never heard of long path? Oh well...

After spending time on, 'DG' I moved to Northern Ireland as GI5AZF; where I spent four fabulous years of hamming with some incredibly wonderful amateur radio operators; skin diving and most importantly, getting married to a fantastic woman. Although she isn't a redhead, I still catch hell almost on a daily basis, even if I didn't do something wrong. Ah well, I probably deserve it anyway. Guess that is why we have been happily married for for over 42 years.

Then we moved to the Caribbean, 'Oh darn!' and was assigned the callsign of KP4FAI. Ever hear of the, 'FAI theory' concerning TE (transequatorial scatter)? Neither did I at the time, but someone came up with that name. I thought it was pretty cool since it matched the suffix of my callsign. Now keep in mind, a good ham friend of mine, David (KP4EOR) and I worked Argentina on 2 meter SSB almost every evening for many weeks from Puerto Rico. As a matter of fact, it was a world record at the time! I have to admit though, David's native language was Spanish, so carrying on a conversation was a lot easier for him than it was for me. Maybe that is why I was never able to confirm a good two way 2 meter SSB contact with 'LU' land?

Since the weather was hard to live with, (the sun must have cooked my brain) I decided to preserver and decided to move to Gitmo. That is, the Navy decided to move me there. Anyway, I was given the callsign of KG4WS while in Cuba. Had a great time even when you had to use a piece of, "Astroturf" to put your golf ball on because the coral dust and sand would chip and wear the head your golf clubs. The putting greens weren't bad, but with the way I played golf, I wore out a lot of Astroturf pieces.

Eventually, I made it back to the states and was assigned my current call sign of N3CMH in 1983 as an advanced operator. Since then I upgrade to amateur extra and really enjoy the extra band width.

Active from 80 thru 70cm and maintain an echolink node on 20273 on the N3CMH-R repeater located in Milton, Florida.

73's Wes

November 27, 2015