Pete: New and Improved! Now even MORE geeky!

(A tale of ham radio)

So, because I felt that my geek-cred needed a bit of polishing, last weekend I took and passed my FCC exam for the Technician-Class amateur radio license. My newly minted call sign straight from the Federal government is KI6HAX. (That's Kilo-India-Six-Hotel-Alpha-Xray!)

The cool part of the story falls back a few weeks when I mentioned my new interest to my Mom and Dad around Thanksgiving. Strangely, instead of my Mom rolling her eyes and giving a quip about 'another new hobby', she immediately brightened and asked if I knew how much her dad loved ham radio. (My grandfather, Dr. Everett Dye MD, died in 1957, long before I was born.)

My Mom even remembered his call sign (from 50 years ago!): W5WV. Just for giggles, we punched the old call sign into Google, and what did we find? W5WV was now the call sign for the Plainview, Tx amateur radio club. Plainview is where my Mom grew up! Apparently after my grandfather's death, the club petitioned the FCC to keep his call sign for the club as show of respect. The old hams have a great euphemism for dying, they call it becoming a 'silent key'.

For fun, I sent an email to the Plainview club sharing this story, and emails started arriving from people who either knew or knew about my grandfather. One lady, who is a ham and belongs to the Plainview club was telling my story at the local grocery store and the checker not only remembered my grandfather, but my grandfather had delivered 3 of her children. Now that's a small world!

Here is a picture of my grandfather in front of his radios in my Mom's attic in Plainview from 1953 or so. See any resemblance?

Anyway, funny how things circle around.

73 de KI6HAX (That's ham talk for Regards from Pete!)