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| This is my antenna farm after a big windstorm in April 2004. The satellite |
| antennas in the foreground were not damaged at that time, but they got |
| crumpled when a big tree limb fell on them in another storm in 2008. |
| And then in 2020 my house burned to the ground with all my ham gear! |
I've been involved in ham radio since I got my Novice license when I was in high school in 1968. I quickly upgraded to Advanced (in those days there was a waiting period before you could apply for the Extra) and became active in the CW traffic nets. I made BPL (Brass Pounders' League) several times and was the manager of the Eastern Area Slow Net for several years.
I attended Wesleyan University (Connecticut) from 1968-1972, graduating with a physics major. After that, I attended night school at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Hartford Graduate Center to get my Masters degree in engineering. I needed a day job to support myself, and the ARRL was just a few miles away in Newington, so I worked there as a W1AW operator while attending grad school from 1972 to 1976.
My first job out of school was designing amateur and marine radio equipment for R. L. Drake Company in Ohio. While I certainly did not play a big part in the glory days of Drake's ham radio history, I did do several designs while I was there, including the 220 MHz band module of the UV-3 tri-band FM transceiver, portions of the MRT-55 marine VHF radio, the MN-2700 high-power antenna tuner, and the L-75 kilowatt amplifier. In 1979 I moved to California to join Hewlett Packard company where I remained (even after they changed the name to Agilent Technologies but before they changed again to Keysight Technologies) until I retired in 2005.
Over the years I have written many articles and other publications in the amateur radio field, and have received the QST "cover plaque" award three times. I am the author of several chapters of the ARRL Handbook: Modulation (2010 edition) DSP and Software Radio Design (2010) and Test Equipment and Measurements (2012). I also designed the electronics board for the sun sensor module in the AMSAT AO-40 satellite. I am a past President, Repeater Chairman, Secretary, Board member, and long-time newsletter editor of SCRA, the local ham radio club. I have earned DXCC (CW and mixed-mode), Bicentennial WAS, 40 WPM code proficiency and BPL, and I hold ARRL TA and TC appointments.
Since "retiring" in 2005 I have been doing some consulting, mainly for the American ham radio company Elecraft. I designed the P3 and PX3 panadapters. A "panadapter", is a type of special-purpose spectrum analyzer that connects to the IF output connector that is available on some receivers so that the operator can see all the signals on the band at one time. I both designed the electronics and wrote the firmware. The architecture is a software-defined radio (SDR) in which all the signal processing is done digitally (DSP).
Since my house burned down along with all my ham gear (see photo above) I've been mostly off the air but have bought a house in southern Utah and am planning new antennas, pending home renovations.
| Web articles by N1AL: |
|---|
| Homebrew remote coax antenna switch |
| Digital modulation modes with spreadsheet |
| Ultra-lightweight Morse code keyer paddle |
| Fan controller for MFJ-4125 power supply |
| The Elecraft K3 HF transceiver |
| Ham radio organizations |
|---|
| ARRL - American Radio Relay League |
| AMSAT - Amateur Satellite Corporation |
| NorCal QRP Club (Lots of cool construction projects) |
| AC6V and eHam.net are excellent sources of ham info |
| QRZ.com - For looking up callsigns, etc. |
| FCC's site for the Amateur Radio Service |
| Ham equipment manufacturers |
|---|
| US manufacturers |
| Elecraft - Maker of the K3 and K4 transceivers |
| Ten-Tec - Maker of the Orion, a competitor to the K3 |
| MFJ - MFJ-4125 is the 12V power supply I used for the K3 |
| Radio Shack - I have the HTX-202 HT and HTX-252 mobile |
| Japanese manufacturers |
| The "big three": ICOM, Yaesu, Kenwood |
| Alinco - Good VHF/UHF radios |
| Ham equipment distributors |
| Ham Radio Outlet - They have a store in Oakland |
| Texas Towers - Everything to do with towers |
| Universal Radio |
| Parts distributors |
|---|
| Digi-Key started long ago with a Morse "digital keyer" kit |
| Mouser - Digi-Key and Mouser are the biggest |
| Parts information |
| Octopart - Search engine for electronic parts |
| Download data sheets |
Last update November 22, 1021