To help address the issue of the “ham-ness” of Howard, I asked him to take a few minutes and list out some of his ham-related activities.  The list is below.  What he describes is the background of an ordinary ham who has had a lot of other conflicting responsibilities in life.  I suspect his list is similar to the types of things and relative activity of 90% of our membership. 

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Here are some items:

· Licensed as WN2ITX (15 or 16 years old), upgraded to General Class and Advanced Class within about one year.  Upgraded to Amateur Extra Class in about 2000.

· I've operated CW/AM/FM/SSB/Digital on 80/40/20/15/10/2 on equipment that I have either built, repaired or modified.

· Built my own AM/CW transmitter and multiple pieces of test equipment (o-scope, capacitor checker, signal generator, etc)

· Repaired and operated a Motorola 100W, 2M FM base station and Motorola 2M FM mobile rig while working for a mobile communications company while in high school and college

· Repaired and operated a RTTY terminal  -- when punched paper tape was king

· In the military, where ever I could set up an antenna (80/40 dipole or 5-band vertical) , I operated mostly SSB.  (Portable from Massachusetts, California, Maryland, and Ohio), or 5-band mobile.

· Currently I have a 5-band Galaxy tube rig (for which I built the AC power supply from scratch) and a ICOM solid state rig.

· Favorite activities include attending hamfests (to find old stuff to repair/re-purpose), contest operating, especially state QSO parties (sometimes portable to sparse counties) and DXing (especially on 80/40)

· Active member of the Bergenfield (NJ) Amateur Radio Club and Civil Defense RACES until I went into the military

· Life member (although not currently active) of the Southeastern Massachusetts Amateur Radio Association.

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Frederick (Rick) Niswander, Ph.D., CPA, CGMA

Professor of Accounting

Bate 3110

East Carolina University

Greenville, NC  27858