Steve Williams is hosting a podcast where he interviews his friend Jim Reed, who is a ham radio operator. Jim talks about his background in marketing and broadcasting, and how he started his YouTube channel called Ham Tech Library, which focuses on the basics of ham radio. They discuss the importance of promoting the hobby in a positive way and attracting new people to it. Jim also explains the different aspects of ham radio, such as HF operations and contesting. He mentions the DX Century Club as one of the awards in ham radio. Overall, the conversation highlights the diversity and opportunities within the ham radio community.
Hey folks, this is Steve Williams, and you're listening to Steve Williams and Friends. I'm your host of this podcast, where we're just going to be kicking back, relaxing, and just talking like we're talking right here on the front porch with the cold one. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy tonight's episode, and thank you for listening. All right. Well, good evening. All right. Good evening, everybody. This is Steve, your host of Steve Williams and Friends. I have a very good friend of mine today who's a fellow ham radio operator.
He has been a member of the Atlanta Radio Club, very active in the amateur radio community in the Atlanta area, and he's the founder of the Ham Tech Library. His ham radio call sign is N4BFR. That's November 4, Bravo Foxtrot Romeo. And it is my pleasure to welcome to the show my very good friend and fellow ham, Mr. Jim Reed. How are you doing, Jim? Hello, Mr. Steve KZ4AZO. Glad to be on your podcast, and thanks for having me in today.
Oh, it's a pleasure, man. It's a pleasure. Well, to begin our show, I like to let our guests give us what we in Toastmasters will call the icebreaker. So, Jim, I've known you for at least 15 years, but I'd like for everyone else to get to know you as well. So, hey, take a few minutes and break the ice and tell us all about Jim Reed. All right. I'll tell you all about Jim Reed. I am a retired marketing executive for a big technology company.
Cool. And prior to that, I was in broadcasting, TV, and radio. I worked all across the country. I've lived as far west as Pocatello, Idaho, and as far east as Bangor, Maine. Wow. And I've really enjoyed that part of spending my younger time in my late 20s and early 30s kind of traveling around and doing different things and working in different places. I had a lot of fun experiences there. Met my wife in the mid-90s, and we settled down in Wichita.
And I started working at the cable company there. And from that, I got promoted to the big corporate headquarters in Atlanta a couple years later. And I've been in Metro Atlanta now for over 15 years. Wow. And retired right before COVID hit at the end of 2019. And I have been for the last couple of – I started a YouTube channel, which was basically Jim's stuff. It's called N4VFR Vision. And the basics behind that is just these are things that interest me.
So I travel and take photography. I do electronics projects. I play ham radio, those kind of things. And that was a lot of fun, and I got a couple hundred subscribers out of that. But I decided late last year, early this year, that I wanted something that was going to be a little more focused on ham radio. I wanted to give back a little bit after I've been a ham for more than a dozen years. So I started the channel you mentioned called Ham Tech Library on YouTube.
And we will provide a link, by the way. Okay, great. And the really – the genesis of this is it's the basics of ham radio. So in ham radio, they call somebody who helps guide you through things an Elmer. This is a virtual Elmer. So if you have a question on why is somebody saying 5-9, I explain that. What's the – all the little code letters you hear, QRZ and QST and 73, what do all those mean? I explain those.
Our alphabet soup, as I like to call it. Absolutely. For field day coming up, I did a bunch of videos related to how do I get started? How do I operate from home? How do I enter my score? Because that's a whole thing just among itself. So I'm trying to just five- to six-minute videos that really just help people figure out the basics of ham radio. And you probably know from being a ham, there are a lot of ham radio YouTube channels out there.
Oh, yeah, there are. And I'll tell you about yours is when I first saw yours, Jim. That's what really spurred me to think, well, hey, I haven't talked to Jim in a while. It would be a great opportunity to talk to Jim. I've watched at least two or three of your videos. And I think they're fantastic primers. And we need people like you out there to be, I guess, for lack of a better word, evangelists for the hobby.
And that's kind of how I see you is you're an evangelist for the hobby. Well, thanks. And I'm trying to do that in a positive way. So I see a lot of videos out there that are, you know, wow, the FCC never should have made this change. Or, you know, they've got the clickbait headline, find out which radio the FCC doesn't want you to use. That's not what I am. Well, no, to me, I think I like it.
You're accentuating the positive. And if we want people into the hobby, whether you want people to be in ham radio or you want people to join the Toastmasters Club or the Lions Club, you don't go out there and air your dirty laundry, do you? No, no, you definitely don't. And I was just having a conversation with that about somebody in another club the other day. So you're 100% right there. And you'll see in the videos for people who are kind enough to take a look, and I definitely appreciate that, you don't even see me a lot because I didn't want it to be about me.
So as I was, I kind of had this aha moment one day where I was sitting and watching another YouTube channel called The Lockpicking Lawyer. And I don't know if you've ever watched LPL, but he calls himself a YouTube hands channel, because really all you see is his hands and his locks. And that's the focus. They're simple, short videos that talk about what's good about this lock or bad about this lock or how to pick this lock.
And I'm like, there's something to that that makes it compelling, that it's just simple and not about the person but about the topic. And that, you know, having spent a lot of time in marketing, that really kind of reflected well on me. And then ham radio being a niche that I was pretty familiar with. And it's a, you know, the thing about ham radio is you can go 10 miles deep, or you can go 10 miles wide with it.
It's a broad hobby with a lot of different things. And I thought it would be an opportunity to introduce people to things in short ways. Now, I don't think that one of my videos is ever going to be the be all and end all of what to do at ham radio. But it's enough, hopefully, for somebody to look at and go, okay, that interests me enough. I want to go find out more. Or, okay, that's not really what I want to do.
Let me watch another video and see if something else interests me better. So I've got 17 videos up so far. I'm trying to do one or two a week. And we'll keep grinding it out and seeing if we can't make something a little kind of viral at this. Well, in my opinion, you're off to a good start. And if I may just add my two cents, I've been a licensed ham for, it'll be 34 years in July.
I first got licensed in 1987 as a novice. And I passed my novice at Georgia Tech. And then I passed a tech at a ham fest at Albany. And I'm actually licensed at what back in the day was the second highest level called the advanced class. I'm grandfathered in as advanced. And you're the extra class, which the extra class is the highest class of ham radio license that there is. It is. And it means I get, like, 200 more kilohertz of spectrum than you.
It's just a tiny little thing. Little bit. Just a tiny little bit. Just a tiny little bit. But I think, you know, like, we can both be volunteer examiners and those kind of things. Right. Although, as an extra class, yours could be a full. And unless they've changed things from back in the day, advanced VEs, I believe, could only administer up to tech class license exams. I think it might be general, but I'd have to look.
I'm not. Well, that's okay. No problem. Hey, you know, Google, as somebody in my IT career once told me, and I took it to heart in my last 15 or so years in my career, Google is my friend. Yes, it definitely is. Yeah. Google is your friend, and you can find anything you want at Google. But, oh, man, I was losing. Oh, well, I know what I was going to say. Now, one thing I really like about ham radio is that there seems to be a place for everybody.
Ham radio is not just for people who, say, want to get on what non-hams would call the shortwave radio rig and talk to Upper Botslavia or something. If that's your thing, that's cool, because a lot of hams love to do the HF thing where they hook up their HF rigs and want to do what we call DX contacts with places all over the world. And one of the neat things about it is, in fact, years ago I had an HF station.
My brother Chris and I had an HF station that we'd operate, and I used to enjoy getting QSL cards from people all over the country and even all over the world. And I even worked all states and worked all continents. My cards and all that are somewhere down in the basement. But, yeah, there's other things, too. Tell us about some of the other things, Jim, that are out there for people who want to be ham radio operators.
Sure. So I personally break down ham radio into three big special interest groups, but, again, these go way deeper beyond that. But it's like the 30,000-foot level, in other words. Right. At the 30,000-foot level there's the high-frequency shortwave type guys who want to talk to upper Botslavia, and a lot of those guys like to do things called contesting or radio sport, which is they'll sit down behind their radio for 24 or 48 hours and see how many people in the world they can talk to in a weekend and try and get a few thousand contacts there.
So that's the HF side. And you mentioned the different awards. One of the other big awards is the DX Entry Club, and that's for people who have talked to 100 different countries. And I was just able to upgrade my DX Entry Club, so I've got it all on voice now. I had it mixed before this. Well, congratulations. And, of course, one of the things you have to do is you have to submit proof. Yep. And that's Logbook of the World primarily now, and that's a whole different animal versus the cards like it used to be.
You can still do cards if you want. It's a lot harder to get people to send you cards today. Yeah. It's a lot easier to get people to click upload and send their contacts to Logbook of the World. So what happens is the ARRL does a blind matching. So if I send up a log and said, Different from when I did it back in the day. Yeah, yeah. If I sent up a log that said, Hey, I talked to KC4AZO on 20 meters on Tuesday night, and KC4AZO sends up his log and says, Hey, I talked to N4BFR on 20 meters Tuesday night.
They said, Okay, that's a match. You both get a credit. Hey, that's a whole lot easier. It used to be back in the day you'd have to either go to a ham fest where you've got somebody who's certified as a card checker or otherwise have to pack all your cards and send it somewhere and hope that your cards come back. That's how I did my worked all states. I did my worked all states with cards. Yeah.
But that was 10 years ago, and now it's really moved towards digital. I still get cards, you know, maybe two or three, not a month, but one a month, two a month, somewhere in there. And I send them back because I keep them handy. So that's one of the tenets of ham radio. The second one is emergency communications, and this goes really broadly from storm chasers and true people who go out and deploy after something like Hurricane Katrina to help the communications infrastructure be more robust and fill in the gaps to, I'll call them preppers, kindly, but the people who want to be able to do simple point-to-point communications with handheld radios when other things go down.
So that's kind of the when all else fails group of ham radio. So you've got the international guys, you've got the when all else fails, and then you've got the radio science group as the third group, and that group does things like figures out new digital modes and ways of communicating that need less power and less latency. They design custom satellites that get launched and hams can communicate through the satellites. They work with the International Space Station and NASA and the other ISS groups to put radios on the ISS so you can get on your radio, go stand outside with the right radio and antenna and bounce a signal through the International Space Station and talk to somebody else in another part of the country.
And for something like that, let me say, let's just say I have a handheld 2-meter rig or I've got a mobile rig in my car. Yep. If your rig can do 2-meter and 440, even if it's just a receive on one of those two bands and you have a relatively directional antenna, you could probably even make one of these tape measure yaggies. Plenty of guys are working amateur satellites. My brother made something like that one time years ago.
I've got one over in the other messy part of the shack here. Oh, okay. But yeah, I got, see, my thing is I like to do a little bit of everything, so I have all the toys. I've got radios that can listen to satellites. I've got clocks that I've built that listen to the GPS so they have super accurate time. I do HF. I do, I help out, like I mentioned, emergency communications. Public service communications might even be a better term for that group because they do things like the Peachtree Road Race.
So I've helped out with the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta for eight years. And you go and you stand on the sidewalk and you wait for the runners to come by. And if somebody falls down, you call in their BIM number and you get somebody to come for help. Or you get more water cups or you help direct people and pick people up. It's a lot of fun doing those kind of things. So there's a lot of different broad things to ham radio that are really entertaining as well as helpful.
I mean, if you go back to its genesis, the ham radio universe was really put together to be supportive to the military in the World War I, World War II era, more World War II. So there was, they saw a need for trained radio operators and this was a way for people to train themselves. Now in World War II, I just said, sorry, but in World War II, I believe that regular ham radio communications were banned, but you basically were limited to if you were like, I guess, authorized by what they call Mars these days.
Yep. So the military auxiliary radio service. And these would be the guys who would help people get messages home. Hey, I was in this battle, but I'm okay. Stop. Tell my wife I love her. Stop. I think if you like to watch mash, you can see where they've done that and done phone patches a few times. That's the kind of thing that they did. And yes, regular amateur radio was suspended, but it was interesting. I went on a trip to England a couple of years ago and I went up to Bleckley Park, which is where they did the code breaking.
Yeah, the code break. Yep. And the Radio Society of Great Britain has a display there as well. They've got some space and some museum-like displays. And a huge computer they used to break the code. Yes, that huge computer is up there and it's awesome to just sit and listen to and go tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. The Enigma is the code they broke. Right. Oh, I'm spacing on the name of the machine right now.
But yeah, the big machine with the wheels. Right. So one of the interesting things that I found out was the ham radio operators were pressed into service by the British military in Britain. And they'd be home and be going to the grocery store and those kind of things. And they started to get harassed by citizens saying, hey, you're an able-bodied man. Why aren't you in the army? Why aren't you fighting the Germans? So they actually put the hams in uniform in Britain in order to kind of give that indication that, hey, I'm working and I'm helping out and I'm fighting for the cause.
Well, yeah, I mean, they were, as I say, they were what you'd probably call combat support or service support. Absolutely. They would do a lot of triangulation of German intelligence. Yeah. And so it allowed the places, the code breakers, places like Bleckley Park to be able to take the different signals and triangulate them. So, you know, Steve, who's up in northern Scotland, heard a signal from here at 90 degrees. And Jim, who's down in southern London, heard a signal from 60 degrees.
Where do those points meet? That may be where the signal's coming from. So now we know where the Germans are communicating to. So basic, simple things like that. And those kind of things are still used in ham radio today. And that's what they call fox hunts? Fox hunts, yep. So trying to find busted transmitters, stuck microphones, things that are interfering. People who are interfering sometimes because you have some people out there who just don't want to play by the rules.
But we're not going to harp on that. Okay, yeah, let's not do that. But, yes, yes. And our friends in the federal government have lots of big listening stations, and they can turn them on and point antennas in various directions and locate you fairly quickly. In fact, it was interesting. I was speaking of radio facilities. I went up to Green Bank, West Virginia, on a road trip. I know you love road trips. I do, too. So I went over the river and through the woods and up and down the hills into Green Bank, West Virginia, because that's where they have the big space telescopes.
And that is an area called the National Radio Quiet Zone. So there is, in order to protect the communications of these telescopes, you are not allowed to use radios. So before I got into this area, I had to unplug my radio. If you wanted to operate on the outskirts of that range, you have to get special permission. They get airplanes to limit their communications while they're flying over this part of the world. So it's very radio quiet.
The microwaves are shielded in special cages just to keep the audio. Like the Faraday cages? Yep, Faraday cages, exactly. So we were up there. I had a radio on my car, but I had it disconnected. But I was driving a Tesla car, which is just electrically noisy. And as I'm pulling out of the museum there, the DX truck that they have started following us out, because I must have been making a lot of noise with my car.
But they were more than happy to see me go down the road, and they turned off and left me alone. I'm hoping they were just going to get a beer because it was the end of the day and not really following me. But they might have been following me. Well, I guess if you have an electric car, just be careful when you drive up in that part of West Virginia, maybe. That's right. But they were – you can't even – if you have – you can't take your cell phone – they'll take you out on a bus tour on a specially designed diesel bus because they don't have smart plugs to drive around the big antennas.
You've got to leave your cell phones. You've got to put them in a Faraday cage, your key fobs, all those kind of things. They are really serious about it. Even the key fobs for, like, your car? Yeah, yep. So you put them in – so when you go to tour the place, they have, like, little Faraday cage-type lockers that you put your – put all your electronics and things in? You can either leave it in a car or, like, if you need your car keys, when you get on their little bus, there's a metal – looks like a big – an old milk box.
Yeah. And everybody puts their keys into the milk box and close them up, and off they go. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's kind of cool. I am – I think I was talking to one of the women up there because in my old line of work, working for an Internet service provider, we get the occasional comment about how, you know, the radio waves in the Internet are interfering with my whatever. I don't feel good around radio waves.
Comments about RF sensitivity, and I asked the woman who gave the tour if they had had a lot of that, and they said they had a little bit of it, a little bit of people moving there because of radio sensitivity, but it hadn't been as big as you might think. But the population up there is only about 4,000 people in the county. It's one of the smallest counties in the U.S. as far as population-wise, so there's not a lot of people up there who want to live in no radio land.
Especially us ham radio operators. Especially us ham. I tell you what, man. I mean, it's one thing to live in a subdivision that has covenants. You can't put up your big old honking transmitter antenna, but I can't imagine living in an area where it's like I can't use my ham radio, I can't use my cell phone. It's like I might as well just go back to the Amish, the old days, and live like the Amish. That's right.
Wired telephones, and I'm not sure what they did for – I think they have wired Internet, but I don't know if they have a lot of Wi-Fi up there. I don't think they do. Oh, no. Well, I'll just – when I go up there, Jim, I'll have to remember that. I guess I'll just turn off my – I guess I'll just turn off my cell phone, and then when I get out of range I'll just turn my cell phone back on.
It's a nice trip. Go up the Blue Ridge Parkway. I'll go on cell phone silence. You go up the Blue Ridge Parkway or up I-81 until you get to – I want to say Winchester is the name of the town. It's the town where Virginia Military Academy is in. Winchester? Yeah, I think it's Winchester, Virginia. I know Winchester is up – I've been through Winchester. Winchester, I think that's up where – up near the Maryland border.
It's in that little jug handle. Yeah, if you go up there and then you can cross over to – you cross over to West Virginia from there. It's a couple hours. Yeah, okay. I'm double-checking right now, but I'm pretty sure that's where I'm thinking of. Yeah, Winchester, that's also, if you're a country music fan, that was Patsy Cline's hometown, and her grave is there. Yep. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, once you get – you go west on the US-50 out of – you go west on US-50 out of Winchester.
Yeah, I've actually been out that way before. I once – Mary and I took a – went out from D.C. out 50, and I decided to go down to 81 and 66, so we're out – yeah, back to D.C. I know what you're talking about, yeah. You get into the – there's a national forest there, George Washington National Forest. Once you get into there, you're in a quiet zone, in the radio quiet zone, and then you keep going through there up and down over that mountain range into Green Bank, West Virginia.
Oh, okay, and that's on I-81 you get into the quiet zone? I think the – because the quiet zone's really big, and it kind of has several layers. Yeah. I think at its widest layer it does clip 81 a little bit. Oh. But for the most part, you really – you've got to be off 81 and going west before you start to get into the quiet zone. Oh, okay. Periodically. Wow. Yeah. Well, tell me just a few other things while I'm at it.
So you know that we do have several famous ham radio operators. Some that come to mind I can think of are Ronnie Millsap, country singer. He's WB4KCG. Joe Walsh of the Eagles. Is a ham radio operator. Let's see, I think Donny Osmond was or is. Bubba from the Rick and Bubba Show in Birmingham. I know he is. Okay. He's WB4JJ. Yep. If you ever listened to that talk show, I think Bubba's a ham. I'm familiar with the show, but I haven't really listened, but okay.
And, well, let's see, of course, local celebrities. And I think the one celebrity ham that I remember meeting is one time when we were having lunch there in Chambly over at the Bistro, I remember when Johnny Beckman stopped by for a few minutes. Yep. Our legendary WSB and later Channel 11, and then he ended up his career at 46, weatherman Johnny Beckman. Pretty cool guy. I didn't get to talk to him long, but it was pretty cool to meet Johnny Beckman, who I grew up watching on TV.
That is cool. Yeah. WB4JJ. Okay. Okay. I have never worked him. I've never worked him. I've all Q-sode, but, you know. The most famous ham I've talked to on the radio is a former baseball player by the name of Joe Rudy. He's a pitcher. And I actually, somewhere in my collection, I do have a QSL card from him. Wow. So that was kind of cool when I looked him up. I know that Leo Laporte, who runs the Twit podcast network, has his license, and I've seen some presentations and met Bob Heil.
He's a really cool guy. Bob loves audio, and I've got one of his Heil microphones here. Is that what you're using right now? That is what I'm using right now because he makes great stuff. Oh, I love that microphone. I love that classic look to it. Yep. And then Bob is the guy who came up with some of the coolest – he came up with quadraphonic sound. That's Bob Heil. Oh, wow. The whole – I always forget the name of the guy, but it's the old late 70s song that had the guitar that went – Peter Frampton? Peter Frampton.
He invented the device for Peter Frampton to make that sound. Yeah, do that wah-wah. Yeah, do that wah-wah thing. So he's really into ham radio and good audio, and he was a nice guy to meet. This one's always cool for me is that Steve Wozniak, Woz who helped invent the Apple computer, he was a ham prior to being in his younger days because it was a great place to electronically experiment. Did he not keep his license? He didn't keep it up.
He was a WB something. But I have – I name my workstations here, and I have a workstation that I named Woz because he was a ham. Wow. Like on your network? Yeah, yep. One's called Woz, one's called Edison for Thomas. Wow. And then the one behind me is called Tesla for the man who started it all. Oh, yeah, Nikola Tesla. Yep, I love him. Talk about travel and stuff, and I want to go see more Tesla stuff.
I've never been up to New York and seen – I think there's some – like on Long Island somewhere, there's some old places where Tesla was trying to test some kind of thing like wireless – I think wireless transmission of electricity. You are correct. And he – it's a place called Wardenclyffe. Yeah. I have not been there, but he had an apartment in – off of Washington Square in Manhattan. And I have been there, and there's a plaque on the building.
But the cool thing is, is in the basement of that building, there's a coffee shop called Patent Coffee. Yeah. And you can go in and get a coffee during the day. But if you go in in the evening and knock on the divider that's behind the desk, it turns into a speakeasy bar called Patent Pending. And all the – and it's in Tesla's basement. And you go in and you drink there, and you can look at all the different – they have his patents printed out on his – on the menus and stuff.
So a really cool way to do that, and that's in the basement of Tesla's old building. Now, didn't Tesla – if I recall, didn't Tesla do some kind of experiment where he's working with, like, harmonics, and it was causing the buildings to shake, and he was just scaring the crap out of people? Yes, he did. Mr. Tesla – He was quite an eccentric dude. He was. He kind of got how the vibrations and harmonics things go.
So if you think about in nature, everything has its natural vibration. He really kind of brought that and took that to its extreme with things like shaking buildings and radio waves, which radio waves have their own natural vibration as well, and electrical waves. So he got that kind of better than anybody else in his time. That's his – all his stuff is really based in that. Wow. And another thing, too, if I recall in my history, is that his relationship with Thomas Edison would not be what I would say fantastic.
In fact, I believe, and I could be – and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that Thomas Edison at least tried to screw Tesla out of certain things that he invented. Yeah, so they did not have a good relationship. Tesla worked for Edison for a while but didn't think Edison was being fair with him, so he left. And then they had the Battle of the Currents. So Tesla had AC, alternating current. Right. And – Edison had – that's right, Edison.
Edison had DC. Yeah. Edison did – supposedly, from my reading, allegedly, he demonstrated the negative aspects of AC by electrocuting an elephant with – I have actually seen. I believe I've seen a video where he's done that. I mean, of course, if you did that these days, you'd have people screaming bloody murder. Now, not that it was a good thing to do back then, but I can't imagine somebody doing that to an animal, much less videoing it.
But yeah, he – but yeah, you know, but I'd say, I mean, in the end, Tesla's AC won out because I remember seeing pictures of old DC transmission lines, and it's like the whole sky was clouded. And with DC, you had to use a whole lot of repeaters, so it was very inefficient to push DC power as opposed to AC power, which essentially works on sine waves. Yep, short range versus long range, right? Yeah. Yep, that's totally it.
I'm with you there. The boys definitely had their battles. But I'm a fan of Mr. Tesla more than I am of Mr. Edison, although Mr. Edison did a lot for us. Oh, he did? He was definitely an invention factory. Have you ever been down to his house in Florida? I have not. I have not. I tried to go. I came through New Jersey on a road trip last month, and I was hoping to go to the Edison site in Edison, New Jersey.
Wow. But it still wasn't open due to COVID, so I missed it this time, which just means I'll have to make another trip to New Jersey, Steve, just have to force myself to do another one. Oh, darn, I've got to go to New Jersey. Yeah, maybe I'll have to go by way of Blue Ridge Parkway again. I love the Blue Ridge Parkway. Yeah, I've done part of the Blue Ridge Parkway, too, from its southern ending at 441 there at Great Smoky Mountains.
We went just a little bit up into North Carolina. In fact, I'll just quickly share my ham radio story. One of the biggest thrills is I had my HT with me, and if you go up the Blue Ridge Parkway, that's how you get to Mount Mitchell State Park. Mount Mitchell, of course, is the highest point in the United States east of the Mississippi River, Mount Mitchell, North Carolina. 6684 feet. Well, I remember when I got up there, it was the middle of June, and I had to wear a sweatshirt because it was a little bit chilly, and it was cloudy that day, and it was almost like you were just being right there in the middle of the clouds.
Imagine like when Jesus and the disciples had Moses and all them come down. It was almost kind of like that feeling. But one of the coolest things that I did up there was I'm glad I had my HT, so I believe I actually hit at least a couple of repeaters, probably one in Knoxville, and this was an HT with I think I was pushing maybe what, five watts? I was probably pushing five watts out of that thing, but to be able to work just with a little bitty HT, to be able to work a repeater on top of Mount Mitchell, North Carolina was one of the coolest things I've probably done as a ham.
I mean, there's hams who've probably done a whole lot cooler things, who have like gone on exotic de-expeditions and stuff like that, but that's my one ham radio and road trip memory. That's cool. I did a couple of years ago, I did a road trip which was virtually the length of the Blue Ridge Parkway, all 462, except for there was one part of the road closed around Roanoke. Yeah. On the first trip, I got a flat and had to skip part of the area between Mayberry and Roanoke? Mayberry.
Yeah. You're talking about Mount Airy, which is Andy Griffith's hometown that Mayberry was based on. That's right. I got a flat about 80 miles outside of Mount Airy, so I was off the, bent the rim, so I was off the road for a couple of days and had to- Did a Gomer or a Hoover come and help you? Sorry. Who was the guy? I got picked up by a flatbed and taken back to, I don't know where.
I should have had him bring me back to Mount Airy, but I didn't for some reason. So trip one, I missed a bunch because of that. So last fall, I said, I'm going to go and do the whole 462 again just to make sure I got it all. Yeah. That way in the road geek community, we'll call clinching it. Yeah. I want to clinch it. So I went to Mount Mitchell and I got up just outside of Roanoke, road closure mudslide.
There you go. This was in September. So had to go around, still didn't have that section. Drove up to Connecticut in May and I said, all right, I'm going up 81. I'm going through Roanoke. I'm going to go over Blue Ridge Parkway and clinch that section and finish it all out. Still closed. There you go. So I am about 10 miles away from clinching the Blue Ridge Parkway. Well, the day you do it, man, put it out there on Facebook.
You got to let us know. Party, party. I will. Party, party. It's like take pictures. Woot, woot. Woot, woot. I've been loving driving though lately. And I guess I always did, but now that I'm, I retired last year, even more so I did. So I did, before I retired, I did trips like all the way up to Fort Kent, Maine to. Oh yeah. The end of US1. The northern end of US1. Northern end. I've been on the southern end at Key West.
Yeah. That's the easy one. Yeah. I've been there too. But the hard one is the northern end. So I've been to both ends of US1. Wow. I've been to the top of Mount Mitchell. I've been to the top of Mount Washington, which is the highest peak in New England. And. Is that the one where you can get a bumper sticker saying you drove up Mount Washington? Yes. Okay. And yeah, it's very similar to Mount Mitchell. As you get to there and then there's just a little bit of a walk to the top.
In Mount Washington it's a little shorter. And in Mount Washington it's a little more touristy. They have shopping and those kinds of things. Whereas Mount Mitchell was pretty much just walk up to the top and there's a little monument thing. Yeah. So I've done that. I've driven out around Bar Harbor, Maine and Mount Desert Island. But my big one. Oh, and I've driven all the way down the Florida Keys from Miami to Key West. Oh, yeah.
The Overseas Highway. I enjoyed that drive. Yeah, it was right back in 07 I did that. Yeah. Yeah, I did that in 2016 with a buddy of mine. And we continued on down the Keys because there's actually you can sail out to other places. And there's a national park called Dry Tortugas National Park. It's three hours by boat out of the Florida Keys. And we operated radio from there on Dry Tortugas. Wasn't that a fort that had a federal prison at one time? Yes.
And I'm thinking among other people that might have been held there might have been Jefferson Davis after the Civil War. That I don't remember because we were so focused on getting there and operating. I don't think we optimized ourselves for. You were more into Ham than history in other words. More into Ham than history on that trip. And that's cool, you know. Yep. So my next big trip and I've just started planning it. Atlanta to LA.
Oh. I'm going to do that in September and I'm going to hit some big sites like you're familiar with the Trinity site where they tested the nuclear bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Yeah. It's open two Saturdays a year. One in April and one in October. So I'm going to plan the trip around going there. And then see just all the great American things along the way. Like I've seen all but one of the space shuttles that are currently on display.
I've never seen the Endeavor space shuttle and that's out in California. Oh, wow. I want to check that off my bucket list. Going to the Trinity site is a bucket list. There's in Tucson, Arizona. There's the big plane where they bring the big airplane boneyard. Yeah. There's also a Titan missile museum you can tour. I want to check that out. So I got a lot. Oh, is that the one where it actually was an actual operating Air Force based silo? Yes.
Yep. And they also, that's another tie in with ham radio though. They have the big antenna that they used at the silo and they will let hams plug into it and operate from it. Oh, cool. So I'm bringing my radio so I can operate radio from an old missile tower. Cool. Take lots of pictures. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of cool things you can tie in ham radio with in addition to road trips. Parks on the air is what they call that.
Yeah. There's even people that I think I saw one time who would put highway rest areas on the air. There was people who joked about working all waffle houses and those kinds of things. Oh, man, I can just imagine right now going to a waffle house and setting up your ham radio. Man, what y'all doing there? Trying to talk to more people on the radio. Yeah, man. Hey, man, you think you can talk to somebody over there? Is that somebody? You talking to them Russians there, son? Yeah, exactly.
Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I'll work all waffle houses. I'm just imagining this right now. You know, maybe that might be a good way to put ham radio out there to show people. It's like find a waffle house that will let you set up in their parking lot. A waffle house special event station. Maybe be coordinated with a waffle house that is based in Atlanta and Norcross. Maybe if you get in with Waffle House Corporate, you could, I don't know, W4WH or something.
There you go. Just got to find the right guy up the street. Hey, we did it for Coca-Cola, right? We did for Coca-Cola's 125th anniversary. They had a big party down in Centennial Olympic Park. They basically took over the park and had rides and singers and American Idol people come in and all those kinds of things. One of the things we did, working with Ham, who had been at Coca-Cola, was we did a special event station where we worked several hundred stations around the country from Centennial Olympic Park as KOK for Coca-Cola and operated that.
That was a lot of fun. I got to be involved in that, too. Oh, cool. Before we wrap up the program, I know before I hit the record button, we were talking about that you're involved with a maker group. Tell me about these maker groups. Sure. So maker groups are about getting together for creativity to learn and share what you do and explore. So if you think about, this goes back to when you and I were probably in high school.
We had shop class and we had electronics class. So we learned how to use a table saw and how to build a basic circuit or how to tune an engine, those kinds of things, right? Not as much out there today. And even if there is, if you live in a city, where are you going to build a workshop or a wood shop, right? So there's a great opportunity for people to come together and put together a shop and a space that allows you to make a lot of different things.
Would you like a tinker, maybe? Yeah. So the group I'm involved with is Decatur Makers, and our saying is build, share, explore. So I can go in there on a Tuesday afternoon and use a wood shop for an hour and make some boxes or some tables or whatever I want to make. Oh, cool. If I need help along the way, it's a peer-to-peer experience. So like the Ham Radio Elmering, it's the same kind of thing. Hey, I want to make a dovetail joint.
You know how to do that. Can you show me how to do that? Or I want to wire some plugs into my table. There's an electronics shop. Can somebody help me with that? And there's things like 3D printers and laser cutters and those kind of things. So a lot of shared tools to allow you to do that. I'd love to come and visit, man. Absolutely. You're welcome any time, but you pay a basic fee every month, and you've got access to all this equipment.
And part of kind of the covenant of being involved is you're sharing and you're exploring with others. So at Decatur Makers, we do things like classes. We have a family build night every week. We have monthly classes on various things, and they go from how do I make a birdhouse all the way up to there's a couple of guys who will teach you how to make your own speakers or how to make an electric guitar. This is the kind of skill sets that we have at Decatur Makers.
There are classes for kids, how to build a computer, how to fix a computer, how to get started programming a computer in the summer. There are – Oh, like teaching kids how to code, for instance? Teaching kids how to code, absolutely. So crafting and making parade floats and all different kinds of stuff. So anything from like woodworking to the technical, you name it. Whatever is interesting that you want to be involved with, it's probably going on in some way, shape, or form through Decatur Makers.
There's crochet groups that meet there. There's small business startup groups that meet there. There's people who use it just to build like business prototypes. Say I want to – hey, I got the next great idea for a widget that I want to sell. This gives them the access to kind of 3D print and put together a prototype for a widget to take to other people and start to develop. I've seen beautiful, beautiful woodworking tables and chairs and all kinds of stuff come out of there.
I've never seen my woodworking, which is meh. But I have fun, and I enjoy it. It's not a lot of months to be able to do that and contribute. I'm not only kind of buying into a space where I can go and do things. I'm contributing to the Decatur and Eastern Atlanta community by having the ability for other people to go there, too, and kind of a shared space for people to go to. So it's really exciting.
It's kind of like a cooperative where you're doing your thing, but you're giving back as well. Exactly. It's really exciting. I've been on the board two years, and I'm about to start, hopefully, if I get elected, my third year on the board there. I've been a member like six or seven years now, and I'm really happy to be part of that group because they do a lot, not just for the Decatur community, but they're kind of one of the premier maker groups in Metro Atlanta, and them along with a group out of Marietta and a group out of, I think it was Lawrenceville, Geek Space Gwinnett, back about this time last year when there was a big demand for masks.
They got all the maker groups together, and they made masks and distributed them to hospitals. My brother-in-law, well, now late brother-in-law, he passed away. He suddenly passed away recently. He actually used 3D printers to create masks for the police department there on the campus of Tallahassee Technical College, whatever it was. It's just amazing what you can do with those printers. Yep. Print up some bands into plastic shields, and you're good to go. Yeah. He printed, I guess, the equivalent of KN95s.
Yep. If you think of it like we were talking earlier about ham radio and having the, you know, building up the base of knowledge of people who know how to use radio in case of emergency, I almost see a correlation there with Decatur Maker that you're building up a group and a place of people who know how to do things and build things in case of emergency, and this is really where it paid off in being able to get a large group together quickly and make masks and solve a community problem.
So I think it's really cool that the space was part of that. Wow. You should talk to the Lions Club about the stuff that you've done with that because, as I said, I'm a member of the Lions Club, which is a service organization, and that's something that I think it would be great. I know there are, right in your area, there's a Lions Club that meets once a month there at the Lighthouse there in Chamblee, which is right just up the street from where the Bistro used to be.
Okay. Yeah, and there's also a Lions Club that meets in Tucker that calls a couple that meet in the Tucker area. One, believe it or not, is the Decatur Lions Club, and the other is the Tucker La Vista. And I know people in all those clubs, and I'll have to put a bug in their ear and say, hey, you guys need a program? You can come talk to them about the maker community and especially what y'all have been doing.
Bless you. Sorry. No, no worries. Because to me it's like that is just one awesome piece of community service that you guys did, and I really appreciate you sharing that story. I'm glad you did. Yeah, well, Jim, I'll tell you, it's been a pleasure. We're going to have to get back together sometime in person. I know things are starting to get more and more back to normal. All right, all right, let's do it. I'm getting ready, and I think I got my shot, so let's get together.
Oh, yeah, I got my shots, too. Well, Jim, I just want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk, and we will be providing links to the Ham Tech Library, and we'll also give you a little bit more info about how you, our listeners, can earn your ham radio license. And if you want to learn more about maker stuff, well, you're welcome to email me, and I'll just pass it on to Jim.
It's Steve at SteveWilliamsonFriends.com, and, of course, you can visit our website, SteveWilliamsonFriends.com. I'm glad to be an am-friend. Well, you are, yeah, definitely. That's it. It would be kind of boring in just Steve Williams. It's like just hearing me groan on and on and on. I don't like – it's like sometimes I get tired of hearing myself talk. All right, well, I'll tell you what, Jim. Again, it's just been a pleasure. Appreciate you stopping by, and this is KC4AZOKiloCharlie4AlphaZuluOscar saying 73.
73 from N4BFR. All right, take care. All right. You've been listening to Steve Williams & Friends, created, hosted, and produced by yours truly, Steve Williams, for Subligna Valley Productions. On the Web, please visit us at www.SteveWilliamsandFriends.com. Please direct all inquiries to Steve at SteveWilliamsandFriends.com. Again, this is Steve Williams. Thanks for listening, and tell all your friends about us. Until next time, peace out, y'all.
