Upon graduating high school 30 years ago this week (back then mid-term graduation was available upon having enough credits and a job (farming counted!) even though I would not receive my diploma until May, I was technically graduated) and finding myself in the real world, there needed to be something to occupy my time. I had always read books and listened to the radio (AM on a very rare purple Panasonic Pana-Pet) as the only family TV had broken in the early ’70s and it never got fixed. Growing up on a farm offered many opportunities to learn various crafts in a hands-on manner, but electronics, from which I was intrigued by my dad’s army days stories in radio school, wasn’t really one of them. Even so, just before I left high school for good, a class required an essay and being tired of writing about dairying, I went to the library to look for a subject. By some quirk of fate (I prefer to think of it as divine intervention) I found “Amateur radio” in an encyclopedia. I put together all I could find into the essay (I don’t know if the manuscript has survived until today, that would surely be fun reading), which wasn’t much. The most important bit of information I received from that effort was the mailing address of the American Radio Relay League and I was soon learning more about the fascinating world of amateur radio and electronics.
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