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MySpace LayoutsHello and thank you for stopping by the Myspace page that I have been working on. One of the hobbies I enjoy the most is Ham or Amateur Radio. I was first licensed at the age of 13 in 1978 after passing the Novice exam. In 1978 the procedure for the Novice exam was to find one licensed Ham Operator who held a General class license or higher. When you were ready to take the exam the volunteer examiner would write to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and request that a Novice exam package be sent to him/her. The Morse code test that was required was to demonstrate that you could both send and receive five (5) words per minute. The examiner would send five minutes of text to you and you were required to receive a minimum of one (1) minute with no mistakes. Once you passed the receiving exam you were then required to send approx five minutes of text to the examiner. After you passed both the send and receive test the examiner would open the envelope that held in it your written test. I honestly do not remember how many questions were on the exam but once you were finished you and the volunteer examiner would complete the application (form 610 then) and send it back to the FCC. Back then the tests were graded by the FCC and not the volunteer examiner, the examiner would verify that the applicant had passed the code test and forwarded everything to be graded and processed. After about two months of waiting to hear if I had passed or failed, one Saturday afternoon I received something in the mail from the FCC. I opened it up and there it was, my Amateur Radio license issued by the FCC with my original callsign WD2AHD. When I received my license I did not have any ham radio equipment or an antenna to operate with. After several weeks of shopping and doing research on HF radio's and antenna's my parents helped me pay for the difference of what the equipment cost and what I had saved from my paper route. I can still remember my first QSO, it was somewhere on the 80 meter Novice sub-band which at the time was 3.700 to 3.750 MHz. My first contact was with WB2SIE who was located in Rahway, NJ just a few towns over from Woodbridge, NJ where I lived. I have to admit that I was shaking in my shoes making that first contact but as I look back on that day I think every new Novice was probably feeling exactly what I was feeling that day. During the years to follow I was primarily active on both 40 and 15 meters, my first "DX" contact was to what is now known as Panama. Back then it was called the "Canal Zone" and the prefix was "KZ5", in fact I had made several contacts with the Canal Zone and still have the QSL cards with the prefix KZ5. Actually I was lucky to be getting in to Ham Radio during the time I did as it was during the peak of the sunspot cycle. I can remember many nights operating on 40 meters until 3am and a majority of my contacts for the ARRL award for Worked All States were made on 40 meter CW. To this day I enjoy operating on 40 meters both SSB and CW.
Now I spend my days as an internet/ham radio junkie. I am an Administrator and Editor for QRZ.com and Webmaster/Owner of radioshacksucks.biz
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