As most of you know, I’m a ham radio nerd. I’ve been in Amateur Radio since I was 16, when I got interested because I found out that the National Weather Service uses hams to do weather spotting. We had given my father a scanner for Father’s Day to use to listen to the local law enforcement radios, weather, and the like. In the process I found that the hams in the area would have ’nets’ on during bad weather and talk to the National Weather Service over the radio. I studied and got my license pretty soon thereafter.

I found a radio and a radio club on a Thursday night ’net’ that was used for area announcements and selling radio gear. I got my dad to take me to the club meeting the next night, and found out that there was a testing session the following day in Ft. Worth. Dad was nice enough to cart me around again, and I passed the first test with flying colors. The following weekend, before I had my license, I already purchased a used radio from a nice gentleman in Ft. Worth. A few days later, my ’ticket’ arrived in the mail, and I was on the air.

Three weeks thereafter, I found out that there was this thing called Field Day that would be happening near the end of June, followed closely by (or was it preceded by?) something called Ham-Com. Anyway, in some order I visited both of these orgies of ham radio delight, and found out that there was a whole other world to amateur radio other than the short-range local communications I was used to.

At Field Day, I got to help set up radios and antennas in an emergency-like environment, running all of the equipment off of generators, batteries, or solar power. I found out that you could talk to people all over the country and even outside of the U.S. with relative ease. At this time, I also figured out that I was pretty good at making contacts, and making them fast. Field day was the most fun I had had in a long time—I was outdoors, camping, and playing with geek toys, and I got to stay up for almost 3 days straight. What more could one want?

At Ham Com, I found out that there are a lot of wierdos in ham radio. Guys that walk around a convention center all day with antennas clipped to their hat brims. Others that walk around with antennas sticking ten feet above their heads from backpacks, and carrying radios that would barely fit on my desk at home. These guys were nuts. But it also turned out that most of them were techies, many were storm spotters, and almost all were interesting – in their own little peculiar way. That day I attended my first Skywarn School. I walked out a [semi] trained storm spotter.

Soon, as my priveledges allowed me to get on the worldwide shortwave bands more and more, I opted to get a new callsign through the FCC’s vanity call program. I searched far and wide, and since at that time I only held a General Class license (leve 3 of 5 at the time), I could only get a call that was one letter, followed by a number, followed by 3 letters. This is called a 1×3. The more desireable calls are 1×2, meaning they only have 2 letters trailing the number. These call are a sign of stature because only the highest license class is allowed to request them, and they help to push up contest scores slightly because you can say them faster. At that time, I switched from my origional call, KD5AKO, to K5AEA. I chose AEA because it was a great callsign in morse code (called CW because of the method for creating it) [ -.- ..... .- . .- ] as opposed to [ -.- -.. ..... .- -.-—- ] for my older callsign. I thought I was hot stuff because my callsign was shorter in CW than many of the 1×2 calls. Later, as I began to compete in amateur radio contests, I found out that as good as it was in morse, it was a tounge twister to say in voice contacts.

Over the next few years, I discovered that there were many outlets in ham radio that fit my geekdom well. I could leave messages on a computer on the Mir Space Station that contained the moves to a chess game that a guy in South Africa and I played over a few weeks. I could pick up the mic at just about any time of day or night and talk to people all over the world (once I upgraded my license and got worldwide shortwave priveledges). I could chat with friends 40 miles away on my drive to school everyday for free.

Soon my electronic tinkering melded with my ham radio fun and I began building antennas. At first I just copied other people’s designs—I was 17 and didn’t really have a clue what reactance was or why radio waves were reflected if you put the right size antenna elements in the right place. But I had fun trying new things and coming up with crazy alternatives. Then I continued a tradition I had throughout high school of building electronic kits and ordered my first radio kit. It took me two days to assemble the kit, and about two weeks of poking around with a voltmeter to figure out that I had the transmit/recieve transistor in backwards. But it was the first radio I could say I built with my own two hands, and it worked wonders.

One thing led to another and I figured out that I liked this electronics stuff a lot. I liked the communications side of things even more. So I dropped the long-sought plan to do aerospace engineering and went for electrical. How happy was I when I found that UTD had an amateur radio club.

I quickly found that the radio club did not have any members, and set about it as my mission in life to find more people that were interested in ham radio. It turns out that they were few and far between. However, I had a lot of fun in those first years of college working stations all over the world on the shortwave bands from K5UTD.

After a year spree at TCU, I was back at UTD and found that the little bit of a club that I had helped build up before I left had all but disbanded. I quickly set about to fix this problem, and rounded up some of the old members for meetings. Later that year, my life in amateur radio took a crazy turn for the better. I wasn’t on the air much, and was active in other facets of radio even less. In the fall of 2002, Oliver Prinz, DK1CM came to UTD for a semester research position. Oli really taught me how to contest, and showed me what fun sitting on the radio with a station like that at K5UTD could be.

He could sit there early Saturday mornings on the radio and ’run’ Europeans like he was a contest super-station, and that was when there was no contest going on. I saw Oli make 200 contacts in a couple of hours of operating, and realized that was really where the fun was. Oli and I ran some major contests, with help of course, and actually did very well in a couple of them. We took K5UTD to collegiate radio fame by winning that category of a national radio contest. Oli also taught me that I didn’t know jack about radio or engineering. That was a motivator for times to come.

In early 2003, I started looking for a new callsign. I loved contesting, and K5AEA was just too to hard to say quickly and pronounced in phonetics (kilowatt – five – alpha – echo – alpha). So I found a great resource that I had used years before to pick my first vanity call, vanity headquarters. There, I found a list of 1×2 calls in zone 5 that were availiable. There were only about 3, and all of them were either really bad on voice or really bad in CW, or both. But one call that expired in March of 2004 caught my eye – K5EM. Kilo – Five – Echo – Mike. That sounds really nice. How about the morse code? [ -.- ..... .—] Dang that’s short. And it follows the rule of thumb for contest callsigns—that is, it must have a dash at the end. This is because a trailling dot under really bad conditions is almost always hard to hear. K5ME would have been worthless to my needs.

So the waiting began. I didn’t tell but a few people about the call, I knew that some of my friends would love to have the call too. After over a year, I took the chance and applied on the first available date. Then I applied again. And again. At the end of the day I had given the FCC almost $100 and had 5 separate applications in for the same callsign. I did this because it is allowed and because I figured many people would try to apply for the call as well. It turns out that I had 5 of the 11 applications made on that day. Because the process is a random lottery, I had a little less than a coin’s toss odds. And I won.

And that is the incredibly overstated story of my new ham radio callsign.

The end.