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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Frederick (Rick) Niswander, Ph.D., CPA, CGMA Professor of Accounting Bate 3110 East Carolina University Greenville, NC 27858