13 years of Amateur Radio

Hello everyone. Welcome to my "Internets" about ham radio.

I've been hanging around the airwaves since I was a wee-lil'-girl. I remember toying with radios as a tot, helping my daddy by sifting through his immense collection of resistors looking for the correct color combination for whatever job he was doing. I was always really good finding that rare color combination that existed somewhere in the bucket.

I remember my daddy talking about Ham radio long before any of us got our tickets. I used to listen to the DX'ers on shortwave late at night in the backyard on a little portable shortwave radio with an extendable antenna that we connected another antenna to (and don't ask me what it was, 'cause I was too little to remember). I recall how interested I was to listen to foreign broadcasters, and even the ocassional CW conversation that we would pick up.

So, needless to say, I grew up with radio. In 1994, my father and I went to take our tests for our Technician license. Back then, you had to take the Novice and Technician test, which I did, but failed the Novice the first time. I went back a month later and passed the Novice and then waited and waited and waited for my license to come in. You couldn't get online back then and get your callsign. You had to wait for it to come in the mail. It seemed like forever....

Then on Christmas morning of 1994, I woke up to the best Christmas present EVER!! On the limbs of the Christmas tree was a #10 envelope addressed to me from none other than the FCC. Inside was my license, and my callsign: KE4TKH. Under the tree, and the last present to be opened (of course), was my first Ham radio... A Kenwood TH-22AT HT. A monster was born from there......

Except for one thing -- I was a teenager, living in the 90's, going to high school, and interested in boys... That cut into my Ham Radio time, and before you knew it, I had seemingly forgotten my Radio Roots.

It took about 10 years or so before I would return... but here I am, and now I'm married to a Ham (AJ4JD), I have a Ham for a daughter (HAHA, KJ4EGJ), and my Mom (KF4SSI) and Dad (KU4ME) are still active Ham operators.

Recently, I've upgraded to Extra class, now that they removed the Morse code requirement. Not that I'm not interested in CW, because I am, it's just being a full-time mom, full-time student, full-time wife, and full-time daughter kind of cuts into the time needed to study CW. So thankfully, I was able to upgrade, and I also changed my "mouthful" callsign to a more memorable AJ4IJ.

So... That's that. You can find me monitoring the 145.470 and 147.360 repeaters here in East Tennessee, as well as on 20 meters HF.