A personal note:  I've been involved in many aspects of amateur radio over the 56 years I've been licensed.  It's been fun.  I did some of the earliest portable e.m.e. (moonbounce) work--in places ranging from Alaska to the Utah-Nevada border.  Early on I found out I liked radio contests and also building things for the VHF, UHF and microwave bands.  In the 1960s I discovered that "mountaintopping" made it easier to win VHF contests.  Eventually I finished #1 nationally in the single operator category of 12 VHF or UHF contests--all while operating in a parked van or camper on various mountaintops from coast to coast.  That resulted in several scoring records  that were never broken under the old section multiplier scoring system.  (In the 1980s latitude and longitude-based grid squares replaced ARRL sections as multipliers and then more categories were added, including the rover, high power, low power and QRP categories).  Under the new system I won another 17 contests nationally as a rover and four in the QRP portable category, setting more scoring records. 
     The Tehachapi Mountain antenna farm (shown above) was the realization of a longtime dream:  to have a good non-portable station on a mountaintop.  Building the buildings and putting up the towers was a lot of work, but when the weather was bad it was a luxury to operate inside a building on a good mountaintop, not in a car (until the fire, see above). 
    Portable VHF contesting prompted me to look for better and simpler antennas.  With the help of Will Anderson, AA6DD, I designed the Quagi antenna on a backyard antenna range in 1972.  That led to the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) Technical Excellence Award in 1977 and helped me win the Radio Amateur of the Year award at Dayton in 1980. 
    I served four terms as an elected ARRL vice director in the 1980s and early 1990s and was chairman of the ARRL Contest Advisory Committee during the 1970s.  I've also done some writing about amateur radio, including a number of articles for QST, CQ and Ham Radio magazines.  I co-authored a book about amateur radio with Jim Steffen, KC6A,  Computer Programs for Amateur Radio (Hayden Book Co., 1984).  Now we have the Internet.  It's wonderful to be able to publish these pages electronically and have them accessible anywhere.