Everyday Ham Podcast: Amateur Radio Conversations
Welcome to the Everyday Ham Podcast, where three friends dive into the world of amateur (ham) radio with a casual, lighthearted twist. (Visit www.everydayham.com)
From discussing what we're working on, current events, and lessons learned to sharing our gripes and off-topic banter, we bring a mix of fun, relatable conversations and radio expertise.
Whether you’re a seasoned operator or new to the hobby, join us for engaging chats that celebrate the quirks, challenges, and joys of being on the air.
Everyday Ham Podcast: Amateur Radio Conversations
Special Episode: 30 Years in Ham Radio with Ray Novak N9JA
We have a very special treat for you! In this exclusive interview recorded during EAA AirVenture, we sit down with amateur radio industry veteran Ray Novak, N9JA. Surrounded by warbirds, fighter jets, and the constant buzz of the Oshkosh Air Show, Ray offers a fascinating glimpse into his world at the intersection of aviation and amateur radio.
Broadcasting from his impressive mobile setup – complete with a hex beam antenna towering 35 feet above his motorcoach – Ray shares incredible personal stories and experiences that bridge decades of radio evolution. From his journey as a Mississippi farm boy who avoided computer programming because it meant "wearing a suit and tie" to becoming a key figure in amateur radio manufacturing, Ray's path mirrors the transformation of radio technology itself.
Episode Highlights:
- Ray's transition from MFJ (nearly 300 hamfests!) to major radio manufacturer
- Behind-the-scenes stories from 30+ years in the amateur radio industry
- Technical insights on radio development and open protocols
- IC-7760 development challenges during COVID disruptions
- Remote operation capabilities that let you control your home station worldwide
- Getting young people excited about amateur radio at special event station W9W
- Tales from technical support (hint: upcoming episode!)
Unique Audio Experience: As young visitors stop by the Warbirds of America special event station W9W, you'll witness firsthand how these operations kindle technical curiosity in the next generation. Between thunderous F-35 flybys and impromptu visits from fellow aviation enthusiasts, this conversation captures the spirit of amateur radio at its best – technically sophisticated yet thoroughly human, preserving tradition while embracing innovation.
Hosted by: James Mills K8JKU, Jim Davis N8JRD, and Rory Locke W8KNX
What's your journey in amateur radio? Have you experienced the thrill of operating from a special event station or explored remote operation? Visit everydayham.com for show notes and links, and follow us on Instagram @everydayhampodcast. Share your stories – we'd love to hear how radio has connected your world!
Note: You'll hear authentic airshow sounds and may notice occasional audio delays due to the remote connection from Oshkosh. Nothing's perfect, but that authentic atmosphere adds to the experience!
Short show intro audio clip
Short outro audio clip
The Everyday Ham Podcast is hosted by James Mills (K8JKU), Jim Davis (N8JRD), and Rory Locke (W8KNX) – three friends who dive into the world of amateur radio with a casual, lighthearted twist.
Follow us at: Website: https://www.everydayham.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everydayhampodcast/
Hey everyone, james K8JKU, I'm putting the final touches on a special episode of the Everyday Ham, an interview with Ray Novak N9JA. It's a great interview. He shares a lot of his personal experiences, his history in ham radio as well as a little bit what's going on at ICOM America Johnson. So please be warned, there are points where there are jet noises in the background another air show ambiance. That's going on. We did the best we could to try to eliminate or fix the audio, but there are points where it does drop out. Be patient, it will come back. We hope you still enjoy the episode. Also, my audio. I do apologize. I joined at 2.30 am at an airport hotel with Wi-Fi. That is not the best, so my audio has a little bit of a delay and drops in and out. However, if you are watching on YouTube, please remember to like and subscribe. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please remember to leave a rating and subscribe as well. You can find all our links to our socials and other information at wwweverydayhamcom, and with that, I hope you enjoy this interview. Wwweverydayhamcom, and with that, I hope you enjoy this interview.
Speaker 1:Okay, we are here, joined by Ray Novak N9JA. Ray, thanks for taking the time to join us today. We are all kind of spread out all over the world. I'm in Germany, jim is in his home office, rory's back in Southline as well. And Ray, where are you today? If you don't mind, maybe introducing yourself and what's going on.
Speaker 2:Ray Novak, n9ja, with ICOM America. I'm here in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for the 2026 EAA AirVenture. We work with the Warbirds of America for a special event station and well, it's going to be fun. I mean, right now there's a sail plane right now, so we won't hear much noise out of that, but it's a podcast recording. Yeah, there you go, just to show you guys a little bit underneath the awning here. You know, let me, let me stand up and walk around here are you guys?
Speaker 1:yeah, as I say, are you teasing a hex here?
Speaker 3:yes, indeed yeah man.
Speaker 2:So this, this is a radial waves hex beam that we've got, okay, and you can see it's a, it's a pretty good size and on the back of my coach we've got a us tower alm 31. I don't know how I'm doing for zoom or anything else, but it's, it's mounted on a trailer mount. We've got three different pieces of coax running up to it and I mean this is my personal coach, but hey, I got to wave the flag here for the love of ham radio, of course.
Speaker 1:And then my call signs.
Speaker 2:But on the top there we've got a Comet GP3. And I'm sorry this was soft ground when I rolled in on on friday. You can see the ruts oh yeah tripping over them.
Speaker 2:But we've got a radio waves off center, fed dipole. We've got their hex beam and on the very top is a comet gp for bhf and uhf. And when I say I'm into warbirds I'm not kidding. I mean, as far as you can see, there are planes out here that. And then I'm right here with a reenactment camp Sorry about all the sunlight here and then we've got what we call fighter town and I'll walk over here with you guys. I mean, you can see the lorebirds, provide us nice signage to get people to roll in here. Tuskegee airmen set up and I mean, isn't that beautiful?
Speaker 1:that is pretty. You guys are in the thick of it there, ray, I am but am.
Speaker 2:but come on, guys, on Mustangs World War II Corsairs, they moved the Dauntless. Anyway, that's what you see.
Speaker 1:I was going to say. You don't get to radio in that kind of environment very often, so that is something unique.
Speaker 2:No, you don't, and because we possibly have some rain coming in and wind, I've got the canopy down, but it's nice to get to play with some of the toys.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. It's a beautiful coach for one. We're getting the full tour here. Appreciate it, Ray.
Speaker 1:And Ray are you? Are you? So you're obviously operating, but are you running a guest station there, like a get on the air station for visitors?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is what our primary thing is, so we're using a 7760.
Speaker 1:Nice. This sits out on the table.
Speaker 2:Then we got 200 watt RF deck. There's a 9700 behind there, so we had a.
Speaker 3:Oh, there goes the F3535 guys.
Speaker 1:We hear it oh there it is, oh there it is, yeah, oh, that's pretty awesome so I hope everyone likes really cool jet sounds, because that's what you're going to get right now.
Speaker 4:No, that's cool.
Speaker 2:Pulling out both and let's see how well these things work for noise canceling. All right. All right, because he does a 15-minute show and you guys are wanting to do a 30-minute show. Half of it. I won't even be able to hear you guys.
Speaker 3:We'll work with you on that one, ray. It's just awesome to have you here this evening. Now I do have a question for you. You mentioned that there is a special event station out there at Oshkosh. Can you give us a few details on where we can find that and when it's spun up there?
Speaker 2:Well, there's two of them and since this is recorded, the special event station will be done with. We shut down on Saturday. Okay, we're Whiskey 9, Whiskey W9W, and when I do the CQ, I'll call out CQ20, CQ20, Whiskey 9, Whiskey Warbirds of America special event station for the 2026 EAA Air Venture, calling CQ Awesome calling.
Speaker 2:CQ and then when we work through the contact, we tell them if you QSL, please QSL with Kilo 9, Echo Charlie Foxtrot. We will have a commemorative QSL card and shoot me an email. I will send a GIF over to you guys that we've used on social media that will show the previous QSL cards that we've done.
Speaker 3:Man Yep Okay.
Speaker 2:Today we had a young man who was looking at getting his amateur radio license from Australia. Oh wow.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, cool. And Oshkosh brings in a pretty diverse crowd, right. So folks from all over, not just in the United States, but from everywhere.
Speaker 2:I just worked up on CW. I hate that I'm not there, but thank you for the contact. Let's see Delta Lima 8, radio Delta Lima. I hate that I'm not there, but thank you for the contact. Let's see Delta Lima 8, radio Delta Lima. And what was so funny is last year he's operating and then the F-35. And in a few minutes he's going to come down about 500 feet just as fast as he can below the spawn area. We hear it and we're just at the dangerous end of the engines when he does that.
Speaker 3:Jeez yeah, when he comes by, I'll tell you what Ray it about washes everybody out of the fog.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. It's cool to hear, though, I imagine in person.
Speaker 3:it's just ear-splitting out there, but it has to be an awesome spectacle.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is incredible. I talked to one ham a couple years ago. He was a retired Pratt Whitney engineer and he helped develop some of the radial engines that are used in the planes that I was showing you guys, those Corsairs, in the planes that I was showing you guys, those Corsairs. He sent me a nice package with decals and historical information about some of the engines that he designed. He's a ham radio operator. He told me how many years that he had spent out here and what he did and everything else and he goes. Hey, thanks for putting it on the air for us.
Speaker 3:It's wild. I have to imagine that in person. It's just unbelievable. Yeah, it's really nice to hear that you guys were able to get these folks on the air and, like before we got started here today, ray mentioned that there are a number of amateurs that are part of the part of the folks that show up to the Oshkosh Air Venture, right, yeah, yeah, and there's also and also and I can't take away credit from the, I think it's the and they're up in Kitt Fenster to let the kids see a little bit about ham radio.
Speaker 2:So we're not the only ones. Down here, camp Shuler, there's a bunch of hams that will put up verticals and things like that. They start looking up for W9W and I'm sorry I haven't had time to get it up on QRZ, but we do have a good time and draw a lot of people in here and that hex beam being about 35 feet in the air, it is the tallest thing in this end of the field and that has become a landmark for people to go. Oh, you see the antenna over there, I'm right next to it. Right, right, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 4:One of these years I'll have to get to Oshkosh. I've not really been a flyer but I am a 20-plus year member of Civil Air Patrol and I know Civil Air Patrol supports Oshkosh in various ways and one of these years. Over that way.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 4:Over. That way. There's a whole camp of them. Yeah, they, uh, they set up and and and serve they. There's a national blueberry academy that runs along with the air show and then, uh, the wisconsin wing also helps support a lot of needs of the air show. So that's, that's a big deal in wisconsin wing and people do cap members from all over the world all over the world, we're a us thing all over the country, go and support that. So I'll have to get there at some point. So, ray, you mentioned earlier you were originally living in Chicago and that was when you kind of got your first time up to Oshkosh. So tell us, oh, we have to see what we have to see. Oh, look at that.
Speaker 4:As all our heads get closer to the camera oh, look at that as all our heads get closer to the camera. Gosh, see, we get to be part of the air show now. That's pretty cool that aircraft?
Speaker 2:yeah, yep, and at one time everything was called amateur radio, because there was no such thing as broadcast or professional radio or commercial two-way or any of that stuff. It was just a bunch of experimenters experimenting and experimenting with. What can you do with these radio frequencies?
Speaker 3:so, rory, I think you were, you were on one, and then, uh, the f3d5 came by, so go ahead so ray, what came?
Speaker 4:what came first? I know the interest in aviation is there and you got up there to Oshkosh. What came first, the interest in aviation or the interest in radio?
Speaker 2:Well, so I joke around. I'm a product of Mississippi Public Education. I grew up on a farm and I got exposed to a computer in my junior year in high school. I taught myself how to program it with BASIC and immediately went into neuroscience. So I went to college to get my BASICs out of the way, started studying COBOL. Fortran PASCAL Probably could still work for the US government. Knowing COBOL, nice Asked my advisor what kind of career path?
Speaker 2:And my advisor told me you could go work for an insurance company. So you got to realize there's redneck tendencies from growing up in Mississippi. I grew up on a farm and what crossed my mind had nothing to do with money. I go, I'm going to have to wear a tie, aren't I? Yes, you'll have to wear a suit and tie every day. And I go no, that's not for me. And she's like well, what do you want to do in computers? And bless Miss Lott. I told her I wanted to do computer games, I want to do video games. No one ever sat around a computer and played games on there.
Speaker 3:I do think that that's a common thing, that perhaps a younger individual might say right, but even now folks would say, hey, if I'm working on a computer I might want to help program a game.
Speaker 2:It's photographic, my youngest would cry because, well, Josh is watching the screen. He sees where I respawn and he kills me. And I'm like Jojo, you're either a shooter or a target, son. So true. Everybody's like. Well, your son's not going mountain much. All he does is play video games. I go, you know what, Looking back today, he could be sitting there flying drones and making all kinds of money Absolutely Sure.
Speaker 2:Because he's got this kind of hand-eye coordination. Absolutely so I look at it. Don't chastise today's youth that they're doing something different than what you think is normal, Because they're inventing tomorrow's technology.
Speaker 1:Well, a lot of people think we're strange for the ham radio stuff, but I have two kids. I have a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old and they actually will encourage kids now to play video games because of the hand-eye coordination, as you said. Also, there's a lot of games out there now building blocks like Minecraft, so people code for these things now at a young age they do creative arts and other things with them. So you know, the evolution of a lot of things is real and you're exactly right Don't put down kids because they want to do something that maybe isn't. You know the everyday and that's one of the most important things.
Speaker 2:Everything can be a skill. You know, gentlemen, I got a neighbor that just stopped by just to show you how friendly he brought me something to eat nice, that's good, and do I look like I miss many meals?
Speaker 3:well, happy to have a snack, then. Those are good. Thank you very much. So what snack did you bring, by the way?
Speaker 2:What snack is this, sir? Yeah?
Speaker 3:Chicharrones, chicharrones, chicharrones.
Speaker 2:Kind of like Chichichon, chicharrones okay.
Speaker 3:Nice.
Speaker 2:Alright, sounds good. So, chicharrones, okay, nice, nice, all right, all right, sounds good. There's a little 35 doing something else over here. Oh, he's coming in for a landing, so he's doing a hairy landing.
Speaker 3:Okay, okay, oh that's cool. There we go.
Speaker 1:I would love to see one of those actually set down.
Speaker 3:I imagine it's quite a show as well, right. Not only can they take off in very short order, but I imagine that they have quite a bit of control in that landing too, upon the computer for part of its flight patterns, right, like the way that it flies is very computerized, right. I don't know much about it, but it is very interesting to see how technologically advanced that thing is. There we go, there we go, well, very good.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, these are a bit cool.
Speaker 1:I'm going to let the F-35 land there for a second.
Speaker 3:Okay, okay, you guys can still hear that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, let the f-35 land there for a second, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, a little bit. It's a weird sound.
Speaker 3:It sounds kind of like a vacuum cleaner when it gets stuck on the rug? I would yeah if that visualizes it for you.
Speaker 2:I'm glad it doesn't sound like a rainbow with it no, it's not quite that I told you guys, this is going to be a wild ride with me.
Speaker 3:I don't think you're going to be able to see it in 30 minutes. That's just fine that is just fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're happy.
Speaker 3:So do they bring out all the aircraft that are out there? Are those all for the most part, privately owned folks that fly out to the thing for showing off their own personal stuff? I don't know much about it, so I'd love to know more about how do they get them all there.
Speaker 2:But yeah, most of these the Warbirds are individually owned. We got to hear Jack Roush from Roush Racing. He started a business because he owned a P-51 Mustang and they don't make the engine parts anymore. So he started a business to build P-51 Mustang and they don't make the engine parts anymore, so he started a business to build P-51 Mustang engine parts. Okay, yeah, that's pretty cool. The owner if you guys do any lawn care Scott's Lawn Care he's a warbird enthusiast. He's out here. There's a lot of people out here that own several of these aircraft. The neighbors that are right next to me. They have an A26. They were on their way in. One of the engines started revving too high so they ended up stopping. Was talking to some of the mechanics here about what was going on and he goes we've lost over five gallons of oil.
Speaker 3:My gosh.
Speaker 2:And it blew them away. Here's a 30-year-old mechanic that goes. I can guarantee, if you remove this cap and remove this, there's a gasket that is broke. The next text that came in was a photo of that gasket that was broken. Jeez, Put it back together, put oil in it and learned on the A-26 that it wasn't uncommon for them to lose two gallons of oil during flight. That was acceptable during World War II.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, it's also based on the names you listed in their private collection. I'm going to guess it's a very expensive hobby.
Speaker 2:Yeah, ham radio is hobby. Yeah, ham radios mean nothing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I can get my nice 7760 there before I'll be buying me a Warbird.
Speaker 2:Yeah, these P-51s start out at $1,000.
Speaker 4:That's outside of my reach, for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I mean. I guess you're owning a piece of history at that point, if you can afford it, why not?
Speaker 3:oh, yeah, yeah, I've heard that being said before, james is to say that when you buy one of those, right, you're really just shepherding it along part of its story, right, because more likely than not it'll outlive you and the guy that buys it the next time too, right? So it's up to you to maintain it and kind of keep that story going, and I'm sure not an inexpensive proposition. But it's just awesome to see some of those things restored to the high quality that they are. They're still, they're buffed immaculately, they're still flying just as well, and you've got a crew of people there, like Ray just said, that can still fix them right, that have that knowledge from when they learned it, that can apply it and get these guys in the air again. It's just awesome to hear all that.
Speaker 2:But the interesting thing about it, the way the people are around here is just like what we see in amateur radio. I mean, you go to Dayton Hamvention, everybody looks at the big contesters, the multi-multi-contesters like K3LR and W3LPL, and those guys have got antenna farms that people only dream about, but they're there to share the story. They talk about the antennas that are designed, they talk about different techniques and things like that. It's the same environment, just a different toy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great example, right, and certainly, I think, some of those big names that you just listed right in amateur radio. We've all probably looked at their QRZ page or seen the antenna farm and said, man, wouldn't it be sweet to have access to that with all of that reach that those antennas bring Most of us, especially all three of us working with much more compromised situations here and so enjoying the hobby nevertheless and I think that you can scale it to whatever you have available to you, whether it be a very inexpensive radio all the way up to a very nice radio like the 7760. Same with antenna right, you match that antenna to the situation that you operate in. All three of us are kind of in a limited situation. I have a DX Commander in my backyard. That's a vertical antenna that has worked well for me. James runs something similar and we've run NFEDs and that type of thing on HF as well. So, right, it's nice to see your hex beam out there in the field, and I imagine it does.
Speaker 1:We dream of a hex beam one day? We've talked about it a few times, but I think that's for all of us.
Speaker 4:We're all HOA hams, though, unfortunately so it's, it's which is why I love POTA quite a bit. Yeah, no hex beam going up on the balcony here, that's for sure.
Speaker 2:And the thing is I'm the same way as you guys. Everybody's like oh, you've got an antenna farm? No, I don't. I live in an HOA area to keep the family happy and it takes the pressure off of me, Yep, Because the maintenance and upkeep of those type of radio systems is unbelievable.
Speaker 2:Yeah absolutely, and I don't get enough time at home. I mean, we were talking beforehand. I was just in Germany for Friedrichshafen at the end of June. Then I'm here, I drive home, drive the coach home on Sunday, monday morning, fly to Seattle. I'll be at the Tokyo Ham Fair after Huntsville in August. So I mean I'm not even home enough to enjoy a big antenna system hundred and you're 7760.
Speaker 3:I love it. It's awesome to hear and I imagine that you've had quite a bit of a success with that, even on the road wherever you end up parking for the evening and calling your home. So that's really cool.
Speaker 2:Now you'd asked me earlier about how did I? What was my transition? What was my first love? My dad was a pilot. He had. He had a few warbirds in his life. He never got certified to take off. We just taxed him.
Speaker 2:I decided computer programming wasn't the way to go. I wish I had my friends in Seattle that I do now, because I probably would be retired, like most of them, from Microsoft at that point. But that wasn't the cards that was dealt to me. I ended up changing my major to work on hardware instead of software. So I got my associate's degree in electronics, was wanting to get my double E and decided, yeah, I've got $15,000 worth of student loan debt and back in the 80s that was a lot of money to me.
Speaker 2:And I went to go work for Martin Jew at MFJ. That's cool. I remember his first question to me why would I want to work for him? And as I got older and learned to be fluent in sarcasm, the last time we had the day in the park I go, it was because I owed money and I needed a job. That's why I wanted to come work for you, because I had no clue who MFJ was, had no idea what amateur radio was other than my dad was running 500 Watts on 11 meters and I got busted playing around on his radio and you need to get your ham radio license If you want to talk to people around the world. Got my license because, uh, the first year I was there everybody vacated the building to go to a thing called dayton hamvention. I said that wasn't going to happen. Next year I got my license and my first dayton hamvention was to talk about a thing called packet radio.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And got bit by the bug to go to the shows and they started meeting people. And I did learn one thing about packet radio and that was what made it very popular was a thing called DX packet clusters. Very popular was a thing called DX packet clusters. All these guys wanting to get the rare countries bought these TNCs so they could get notified when a rare one was available. And what? What happened? It was an old ham that would ask for a young kid that knew about computers to come set it up and that computer never got shut off. That two meter mobile never got shut off. Don't touch it, it's black magic in the corner that gives me my DX spot.
Speaker 4:That's awesome, you know it's, it's we think about. You know, I sit here and I'm looking at my phone blow up with ham alert as we're sitting here and and very know that's a, that's such a simple thing. Now it's. It's fascinating to sit back and take a moment and think about the where, where that all got started. And of course, I got licensed in the early, early 2000s when there was still a little bit of packet going on, but the the Internet was was starting, of course, or was there already of of course. But I do know a couple hams they're all silent keys now. They did do the packet dx cluster and that was kind of exactly how ray just described it was. It was a thing. They couldn't tell you exactly how it worked, but it told them when they needed to find what they were looking for on the air. So that that's a cool story. Reminds me of a couple stories. Some of the older hams I once knew, um, told me I'm hijacking, hijacking you guys real quick.
Speaker 2:There's one of those poor stairs firing up right now okay yeah, just to the yeah. And then the next one farther out, the one with the bigger nose, is about to fire up as well. Okay, that looks like some type of bomber. And then there we go. We got the guys in the orange vest walking away. So I'm jumping around. This is Matt Bauman. He's one of the local guys here. Turn around and show the shirt.
Speaker 3:Very cool Yep.
Speaker 2:So when we're operating, they see exactly what we are when we're sitting in the chair operating. And then the warbirds of America. And his son earned his earlier today over here walking around, eli, eli. So this is what we're looking at, some of the operators. So he earned his shirt today with how many cues? Six cues, good work. So he doesn't have his call sign yet, but he's getting his feet wet here.
Speaker 3:He'll have one soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the guy said congratulations.
Speaker 3:Yep, absolutely Good work.
Speaker 2:So this is being recorded. It'll be next week, so you can tell all your fans. I'll send you the link. Have a great day, thanks, november 9. It's one of those hard ones. November Mike Hotel. November 9, november Mike Hotel.
Speaker 3:Okay, it's fun to get a little insight into these special event stations. I hear them all the time, right For all different reasons that they're on the air, and I think it's just a really neat way to promote some things that are either ham radio adjacent or are looking for another way to to get themselves seen and heard Right, and so it's cool to see a little behind the scenes from W9W there at Oshkosh. I never I haven't seen any of that before.
Speaker 4:Excellent to see getting the kids on the air, getting some younger folks on the air and getting exposed to it. Unless you have family in it or somehow know about ham radio, you're probably not going to know, not going to find it, unless someone, someone brings it to you or has something like that. So that is, that is excellent to see. I enjoy seeing and hearing about kids on the air, for sure.
Speaker 2:Last year we had a 12 year old over here pounding out 35 words a minute CW. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 4:Nice, that is excellent.
Speaker 2:And then when I get out I'm like he looks familiar. And then I saw dad right around the corner with his other brother. They were a whole ham family.
Speaker 3:Very, very cool, very very.
Speaker 2:I was there for about five and a half, almost six years. I started out as a as a tech, working on their stuff, but somehow they thought I had the gift of gab and could sell and I ended up getting into their, their domestic sales, doing all the ham fest. And then, yeah, I heard that sarcastic remark, then became international sales manager. So I had gone to Friedrichshafen back in 89 or 1991. So at that point here I am, wearing a suit, a tie and a mullet and there we go.
Speaker 2:They did there because I was told the Germans are more professional than the US hams. And this was before they moved it to the Zeppelin building. But yeah, I went to also Pescara, italy forum to do a ham fest and then received a lot of pressure. Ray, you're working your butt off. You're driving all these shows. I think at MFJ in the six years I did almost 300 shows, wow, and we drove to all of them. Jeez, yeah, that was a big mistake. With the suit and tie I get to have more fun now. We fly to the shows now.
Speaker 2:But one of the interesting things is you need to go work for a real manufacturer and I kept hearing that so much. I got on board with ICOM through their technical support department because it's most corporate America. You need to have a four-year sales degree to get into sales and I didn't have that. But I had a friend that I'd met going to the different shows. That got me in through the back door into technical support and it took me a year and a half in technical support to start.
Speaker 2:People start seeing, hey, maybe he's got some sales skills, yep, and then four, four years after that they moved me to chicago. I spent almost four years in chicago as an outside salesperson selling all of our divisions land, mobile, amateur, aviation and marine products. Then the person that was running the amateur division decided to take a career change and that opened the door for me. So I became the national sales manager for ICOM's amateur division around 96. Wow, and I haven't looked back yet. Yeah, so now I'm in charge of not only amateur but the aviation division and the marine division for ICOM America.
Speaker 3:If I can ask there, ray, I assume that the amateur division's the most fun for you since you've kind of come up in it. But I'd be curious how much time do you spend on any one of those three right at any given point? Does amateur represent a lot of your time? Can you break it down at all for us?
Speaker 2:Amateur and marine are the two that I spend the most time on. Aviation has been kind of, I would say, stagnant for us because I've been I've been doing all three divisions for the last four years, so right after COVID, and our product in the aviation industry is pretty mature. But we are showing a concept radio here at this show. I let my sales team do the booth. I come out here and watch these guys and the only time that I can get on the air because you got to realize I'm salary so I'm never really off the clock Sure, so when we start getting some of the FCC purists out there going, oh well, you're under an ICOM tent, you can't be on the radio I will get on the radio and tell them hey, I'm on the air before it's my booth duty or I'm taking a 15 minute break to work some cues.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, that's one of those things that you don't ever think about. I think when we, when we talk about folks in the industry that are also amateurs at heart and are doing it as a hobby, right, there is a sort of conflict that we even have thought about here on the everyday ham thing. Is, you know, as we kind of get this thing rolling, what is business, what is pleasure, and how do we make sure that we're respecting the rules of the FCC as they were?
Speaker 4:There's a money shot for you. Look at that right over the hex beam, there we go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that is an awesome shot.
Speaker 2:It's NA1 Goodyear. There's two Goodyear blimps here because it's the 100th anniversary. Ah, there you go, so both N1A and.
Speaker 3:N2A are here. Those, I assume, are the tail numbers for the blimps. Is that correct there? Yes sir, okay, yep. I think, I just saw somebody post in the Parks on the Air a picture of them activating across from the blimp landing site, and I thought it was an incredible picture. Right, the blimps set down across the field from them and they're sitting there working their radio.
Speaker 4:what a unique way to go, okay, yeah, yeah these are all ham, ham, ham shows that are on our list. We we hope to go to germany someday and I hope to go to tokyo someday, and that one's, uh, that one's coming up too soon, too soon for this year. I think I need to save a few more quarters before I can go to Tokyo, but with Tokyo right around the corner.
Speaker 4:I guess that means we're coming up on a year of the 7760. Is that true? I think that was last Tokyo that that was unveiled.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was unveiled at the Tokyo Ham Fair. I was invited to come out and Josh Nass from Ham Radio Press Force and myself did a live stream for Michelle. We were watching. We were talking about trying to do something like that from Friedrichshafen, but then we looked at the logistics that when the show opens it's midnight. He's like yeah, I love you, but not that much.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we were all but not that much our hands on and take a look at it. We didn't operate with it. I guess we could have gone over to the Dayton Amateur Radio Club station and played with it at their special event station but didn't make it over there. But at the ICOM booth it was excellent and I'll be darned. I wish I remember the name of the fellow who came over and talked to us and was exceptionally friendly and forward with our questions and letting us look at it and look under it and look at all the things. So that was. That was cool.
Speaker 2:It was nice to have our hands on it, the one in the ICOM booth yeah.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, that's my buddy Scott. Scott is in 7SS. He's here operating the special event station for me. Okay, so while Matt's the local guy, scott comes in. He's a pilot and we have a lot of fun together. Retired Microsoft and it was funny. We did a couple of field days together and I'm an honorary member of the Microsoft Amateur Radio Club called MicroHams and we got a gentleman's agreement. I don't complain about their software, they don't complain about my radios and we get along perfectly.
Speaker 4:That sounds like a good plan. For sure. I think those cooperative agreements like that, those go a long way.
Speaker 2:You can help each other out and just keep it nice, of course um well, last, last year was extremely funny because, as you can imagine, the microsoft guy is anti other other os manufacturer, of course, and he goes I'm pissed at you and I'm he's like I'm pissed at you and I'm like why, what did I do? You made I go. Dude, I didn't make you buy anything. He goes. Yeah, you did. You told me about Marcus's software, marcus from Germany, that works on an iPad that controls the 705.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:And I'm like it's a good thing that I brought my 705 here, Take it home. After we set up last year he stayed up to about one or two o'clock in the morning playing around with the 705 setting it up so he could do ft8. And then I've got a, a um buddy pole, buddy stick. Scott put the radio over by the buddy stick because it's like a six foot um coaxial cable for it, and then he's walking around here working FT8 on his iPad. He goes dude, this is so cool. And then I reminded him it was my 705 and he's like, yeah, I gotta buy one of these sold another one.
Speaker 3:Ray, you sold another one one addiction at a time that software from Marcus does work incredibly well.
Speaker 2:Yes, one addiction at a time that software from Marcus does work incredibly well. Yes, well, after raising five boys, I love them all dearly. So I've had the most fun with the 7300. Because that one you can just take anywhere you go. I'm having a blast right now with the 7760, just for the simple fact that all I need to take with me is the head. And around Dayton, around Dayton, we launched a Windows app that you can buy from the Microsoft store that allows you to monitor your PW so I can travel anywhere in the world. Used to travel routers with VPN and I can have a full KW as my base station, nice. So that that isn't it. That is an interesting one. We've had several hams that are pilots that came here and have asked well, what's that? What are you guys doing? That's all the radio. And then we show them the body and he goes. Well, I've been thinking about putting a tower by my hangar with a tri-band. There we go. Where can, where can I take the, the head of the radio?
Speaker 4:anywhere you want. Anywhere you want, yep talk to me about.
Speaker 3:I'm curious on that. It's on the the want list over here in my shack ray, so I'll tell you that. What kind of bandwidth does it require to get connected to the head? Do I need do I need decent bandwidth, or is it pretty, uh pretty resilient to, uh say, being on like a cellular tether?
Speaker 2:well, to quote scott okay, I can't believe all the stuff you guys have got in that thing.
Speaker 3:Nice Okay.
Speaker 2:So you can tell it if you're using a Wi-Fi adapter and then set up the latencies for that. You can do wired. I mean there's so many different things, but what is the common? I'm not really sure. He's my expert on that. I mean he knows the IT manager now and that's why I bring it.
Speaker 3:I should have known there was some magic built in. I should have known there was some magic built in. I think it answers my question, which is to say it's likely very, very resilient to a bunch of different network speeds. That's one thing that I've wondered about, because I'd like to set it up here in the shack and take it with me. We just put a trailer back in our loadout here and we've been going camping all summer and it would be fun to throw it in the truck with me and take it out there and operate remote Like that's kind of like what you're doing, but without the hex beam of course.
Speaker 2:I had a guy tell me he's got an F-350. He's put the body in the back seat of the truck.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:And has a Scorpion screwdriver in the bed of the truck and has a scorpion screwdriver in the bed of the truck and he's using the 7760 as the remote head of his HF mobile.
Speaker 4:I don't know, jim's got an F-350. Is that on your list? Sounds like a plan?
Speaker 3:That does sound like a dream setup there, guys. I like it. I like it. 200 watts out the back of the truck without any extra work.
Speaker 2:200 watts out the back of the truck without any extra work.
Speaker 3:From what I can remember on the guy's explanation at Dayton is he's got enough dash space to put it right on the dash. Yeah, not an insignificant space. Well, it's an absolutely amazing looking radio and I would love to put a little more time in with one before I finally get one in the shack here. But it was fun to put hands on it for the first time down in Hamvention this year. It was, of course, my first Hamvention going down and seeing you guys in the booth, being able to see all the stuff that you guys do, and it was just really awesome.
Speaker 3:You had a huge presence down there at Hamvention and I have an Icom 9700 that I run as my primary UHF and VHF rig here in the shack and it's just an incredible radio, so absolutely wanted to see that, and I can see a future where both of those sit next to one another in this shack. So really, really fun to see it firsthand and hopefully we'll have one here eventually.
Speaker 2:And I'm still trying to figure out what is my favorite one. I mean the 705, the story with Scott Well, the 705, and I cannot remember the website for it. I'll find it and email you guys so you can reference it in the video. Excellent, circumnavigated the planet over over in a I think it was a SpaceX Dragon capsule. Yeah, yeah, we were. We were talking about it at Dayton, something to Fram or something like that. Anyway, I thought it was real cool that they. They took amateur radio. The goal of this was to take photos and instead of going around the equator, they went north, south, north south and they were doing slow scan TV shots to schools and you had to receive several of them to get the big picture.
Speaker 3:That's cool. Piece them together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, that's really cool, and the gentleman that did it was from China and he had made a lot of money in these cryptocurrencies and took four of his friends, but then made it about technology and the 705 was a radio of choice but then made it about technology and the 705 was a radio of choice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's so compact and it offers so much packed into that small package that I can imagine that it makes a lot of sense for that type of deployment right Someplace that we know is going to be space-restricted. And you need a lot of radio in a small package. It seems like an excellent option.
Speaker 3:I just got done capturing the SSTV from the ARISS event that just came by and I've been receiving those images from the space station in my own shack here and so, yeah, I always get excited a little bit by SSTV, even though I know it's kind of an older mode at this point. We've been having a lot of fun with it here in the South Lion area and it's just a really neat way to promote radio in a way that's friendly to folks that don't quite understand radio yet Young kids, they see a picture. That's a cool way to get them interested in doing radio stuff, and I think that that's what SSTV shines at is being able to get folks that are maybe not interested in rag-chewing or getting on HF just yet to show them something cool that radio can do for them.
Speaker 4:Well, we have a lot of guys in our area here that like the crossover between the radio and the computers. We have a lot of people who are in this immediate area that are very interested in some of the quote-unquote older technologies, the APRS, the packet, all the things, and slow scan kind of falls into that. So it gives an opportunity. Opportunity to do that. And then we found the chance that, all right, it can be inexpensive to do because slow scan can be decoded so easily on on an iphone app if you don't have all the things to make it go on the computer. I was just looking online.
Speaker 4:It looks like it was called fram to ham there you go yeah, fram, the number two ham, and it was on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, okay, and I do remember hearing something about that and it talks about the mission and how that was done. I do recall hearing about that now that I'm looking at some of the details but yeah, that's such a cool thing. And again, same thing getting kids, just like you guys are doing with your special event station out there at oshkosh, you know, get, get the kids into seeing all these things and it opens their minds for sure.
Speaker 3:Very cool well we're developing the next, uh, the next wave of new hams right and hopefully that we can get some, get some new and younger blood on the air.
Speaker 2:That's awesome well after we had shut down for the day. We can only operate till five o'clock.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:And we saw a mom with two kids that the kids look like they might've been five or six years old and she says they've already shut down the radio station. We'll have to come back tomorrow. So it's always incredible to see those that I call technically curious.
Speaker 4:Yeah absolutely.
Speaker 2:I never liked the word nerd or geek or anything like that. So technically curious is I mean. My dad used to tell me I could tear up a freight train with a rubber hammer, and it wasn't until later that I learned how to put it all back together again.
Speaker 3:That was. That was one of my dad's favorite things to do. He'd bring home a piece of old equipment from work and he'd give us a screwdriver and say take it apart, see what you got it, see what you can find inside. And we never intended for us to put it back together, but he just liked a equipping us with tools and letting us dig in a little bit and. B discovering that there's something under the shell of each of those things that you're pushing the buttons on that you can only see the outside of. So really cool.
Speaker 2:Yes, I have oh yeah, I mean just watching them A lot of our radios like the 2730, our dual band mobile. It is CI5, which is Charlie, india, victor, which is computer interface version five. It was the CI4 back in the late 80s and then they moved it over to TTL Logic and called it CIV. Our radios are all the way backwards compatible on the CI5 from the early 90s. But this dual-band mobile is computer controllable using that same technology. The same command sets to change VFO frequencies directly into in frequencies.
Speaker 2:I'd love to see schools start coding and doing stuff with that. I mean you don't have to hack in. You don't have to hack in them and start trying to learn how to program machine language and things like that. But remotely controlling a radio, I mean that that's. That's fun. Now one one of the other things is you were talking about slow scan TV earlier. We do picture sharing on DSTAR, the ID52, the later ID51 pluses, the ID52 pluses. You can see it on the screen of the handheld the 9700,. You can see it on the screen of the radio, the 705, on the screen of the radio. There again, the app is on both the Google Play Store as well as the iOS store, reverse, engineer that protocol. See how they can control the radios. It's still going to be the CI5 command structure for controlling the radio. But you guys can figure out how we're doing the data because the radios have a modem built into it. All you're doing is sending ones and zeros to send the image.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's a neat idea, james, and, like I said, I think it does appeal to that younger audience that you're talking about right there. I just did a little Google search on CI5 while we were talking and it looks like you guys have a ton of documentation out there pretty clearly available too. So, like you said, no hacking required. It's something that you can go out there, learn a little bit about and probably put into practice.
Speaker 2:And the thing is we were doing. Everybody talks about how great open source is, that CI5 protocol has been published since the 90s.
Speaker 3:Right. So, we were doing open source before you guys even came up with a name for it. Yeah, yeah, I got it. Yeah, it's nice. I just broke the reference guide open and it's pretty clear here. I did have the ID52 here in the shack and that is a slick radio. I had the Anniversary Edition myself and sharp radio for sure, and I should have given a shot there. Rory and I have a tendency to play across town. He has some D-Star equipment in his shack.
Speaker 4:I have some in my shack here, so we've dabbled in digital around this area and it's really interesting to see. We'll have to do some images on DSTAR between my 5100 and your 9700. We'll have to do that at some point because the 5100 can do it with the app in the Bluetooth module that I have. So I have that installed on both the 5100 in the house and the 5100 in the car. So, okay, that is.
Speaker 3:That is something we could do at some point always, always like discovering a thing that I wasn't aware of, and, uh yeah, it just goes to show there's so much that all of these radios can do. You just need to get ray ray on to chat about it and he'll tell you something you didn't know I honestly had forgotten about the uh about sending images by d star I.
Speaker 4:I actually I'll pull that out.
Speaker 2:We'll have to do that across town so you can see that good well, I don't know how, I don't know how much footage you guys have got to fill your show with, but I guess I will continue down this path of my favorite radio okay and leave you with this okay my favorite radio is always the next one.
Speaker 3:I can acutely feel that statement there.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. We're always waiting and ready. I'll tell you we're right on top of paying attention to what's next, and very, very interested. It's fascinating watching the technology. Both. You mentioned the 7300 earlier and how that one. You know that was a tremendous value. I mean that radio, crazy good value for what it does and what it is. And so many of our friends one of my close friends and James and Louis, a bunch of people in our club have had the 7300. But look back at the 718. That thing's still chugging along. That's a solid radio and it's still built on solid technology. Did you guys stop making that one and then start making that one again? It had a start and a stop, if I remember.
Speaker 2:It did. A lot of the components, because of COVID became no longer available.
Speaker 4:Okay, so that's the story there.
Speaker 2:What we did is we took the FPGA technology out of the 7300 and used that architecture concept to put an FPGA in a 718. So it's still, but there again, I look at it and I'm like, okay, I got a choice between a 718 and a 7300. I interface is just so easy to operate and even though we've seen others release new product and, oh, you got to update it, you got to update it. Really, what needs to be changed on it? There's a wish list and I still have people that argue with me from the very first video I did about that radio. It's an entry-level SDR, a lot of the things that people are like well, I wish it had this, I wish it had that.
Speaker 3:It's entry-level, guys, yeah, it's a great way to look at it. Right is is that lets folks get in the door with sdr. Uh, to have a radio that can do as much as it can for the price point that you guys offer it at, it's a. It's still a hell of a radio and I can totally understand where you're coming from on that.
Speaker 2:It's been and it's pretty one-dimensional. Yeah, I mean the contesters well, I need to have this receiver because of this. Okay, well, how many sub menus do you have to go into to make changes? I mean, you can you can lose cues because of a submenu. Yeah, and if the goal is to work as many cues as possible, then wouldn't you want to do that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I think you're definitely on the ease of use bandwagon there and we can understand that 100%. The easier the radio is to make it do the thing that you need it to do when you need to do it, that is the most important thing, right Operating at its foremost, and hopefully the technology just kind of works with you and not against you in the way that you're operating. So very good. Well, ray, I want to thank you personally. I know we're going on just about an hour and it's been an absolute pleasure having a chat with you here. Love to have you on and talk a little radio and talk a little bit about ICOM and your background here. But I wanted to give you an opportunity to say anything else that you have to share here, anything related to ICOM or yourself, before we wrap this part of it up for tonight. I appreciate you jumping in with us.
Speaker 2:Well, I appreciate the invitation. I look forward to doing this again. I've had a lot of fun with the three of you guys Absolutely, and that's why I keep doing what I do, because I love doing it. It's fun, I get to do some very unique things and I really don't feel like I work a day in my life and my wife will agree that I don't work a day in my life.
Speaker 4:I play a dream that's the dream and you're living it. Yeah, the dream for sure yeah.
Speaker 2:The thing is, though, that you guys don't get to be on this side of the camera, because you you hams can be a little patient, trying I can, I can, yeah, I can only imagine we are all.
Speaker 4:Everyone knows. Anyone that watches or listens or knows me knows that I don't have much patience, so I can guarantee I know about that.
Speaker 3:But at least you own it, rory, at least you own it.
Speaker 4:I'm not ashamed. I learned that some time ago. There's no reason to be ashamed about it. But certainly next time we're at Dayton we'll certainly make sure we have an eyeball cue with you in person and I don't know if we'll have a chance to Do. You do hamcation, by the way we're planning. We're in the early stages of doing hamcation, actually in the winter.
Speaker 2:Yes, so we primarily go to five ham fests, Okay, and Dayton being the largest hamcation being second, Huntsville being third and then, um, Seaside, Oregon, Um, I basically label that as a sanity break, because it's it's. We go from Dayton hamvention for 30 to 35,000 hams to 2,500 hams on the West Coast. Get to hang out on the beach and just listen to the ocean. You need that.
Speaker 4:You need that break after Hamvention. I would imagine that's for sure. That's a different environment for sure, heck, I needed that break after Hamvention, just from being a you know a spectator, so that I can only imagine, after being being a you know presenter and doing the, doing the booth there. So that's for sure. So, uh, what, uh, what's next? Tokyo's next are we? Are we expecting a something to be covered up underneath the curtain at tokyo this year?
Speaker 2:no, I've got huntsville ham fest next and then the weekend after that is going to be the Tokyo Ham Fair. And speaking of technically curious, one of my neighbors stopped over and I'm hanging out with a video show. So this is Bruce. Bruce is a chief technology officer. I sent him an email last night and his email address doesn't have his name at all. It's Snake Snake at. And I saw that and I start cracking up. I mean, this guy is more fun than a barrel of monkeys because he was telling me he really doesn't have a job title, but he is the hold on. I'm going to see if I can remember this Bruce, because it references a book that I had read and it was very interesting. He is the cheese relocation ambassador.
Speaker 1:Okay, If you've ever read the book who my cheese?
Speaker 2:that's yeah. Yeah, he's okay. It's about doing different things to to change the way people do things. Nice, smart and it was very funny. He works for this company. He comes over, he sees the ICOM red umbrella and he's like are you with ICOM?
Speaker 2:And I go a little, and then he rattles off a part number on a one of our network products that I mean it takes very unique people to understand and install these things and what he's done is taken multiple technologies. He's taken our airband base stations, interfaced it with our interoperability box, which he called it's a VEPG4, and has interfaced it with our Wi-Fi based radios Wow, based radios, wow. So they have many fixed base operations across the United States and a couple of international ones and you really can't have humans there 24, seven, three, 65,. But the company is and they use these wifi radios for anybody to answer a pilot that's coming into one of their controlled airspaces, radios for anybody to answer a pilot that's coming into one of their controlled airspaces and it interfaces to his computer with a dongle and I'm like, okay, how did you get involved in this? He goes this real curious thing years ago called a computer and I keep telling my guys, our goal is to get him interested in getting his AM radio license, and he's fighting it real hard.
Speaker 1:Is that the next Oshkosh you're going to get him licensed? Get a couple of VEs there.
Speaker 4:I'm sure you can get a bunch of VEs around and bamboozle the guy and get him his license. I'm sure it could be done.
Speaker 2:I just want him to sit down at a radio, because when you've got control ops that are extra class license holders. You can sit down and operate Absolutely so the 12-year-old young man that came here from Australia. He's wanting to get his ham radio license but he had never had anybody take the time to sit him down at a radio and he operated and got about 10 to 12 cues.
Speaker 3:He's going to go back home and get his license good for him. He should.
Speaker 2:Well, it'll be good, dx, when he gets on the air. There you go, but one. One last story for you guys. We had a young lady, we had a young lady from australia that got on d star and we had a ham here from Scotland and told us to to go over to the reflector that his Scottish buddies were on.
Speaker 2:We got to see three groups of people that were confused by a common language to hear an to hear an with a, a US call sign, talking to Scottish people and I can't remember what animated movie it was, but McSqueezy was the beaver. You guys go search YouTube for McSqueezy and listen. That's what these?
Speaker 1:guys sounded like talking to this Australian young lady.
Speaker 4:I have a hard enough time on Reflector 24, charlie, which is linked into a bunch of Detroit area repeaters. There's a Scottish fellow that gets on there and talks to someone local I have a hard enough time with one. American accent and one Scottish guy when they get going. So yeah. I can only imagine.
Speaker 2:So you're in the Detroit area, you said.
Speaker 4:Yeah, all three of us are. Yeah, metro Detroit, west side and north side of the metro area.
Speaker 2:So yeah, Okay, so one of the directors for the Warbirds just passed away. He's from Detroit and worked down at the Detroit airport working for Jack Roush and keeping his airplanes FAA certified. I've known John Russman for many, many years 30 plus years and he's the one that said, yeah, let's let him do it.
Speaker 4:Very good.
Speaker 2:He's a silent key and it was always funny he would come here at least 10 times a day just to get out of meetings.
Speaker 3:Well, I like that he hadn't out.
Speaker 1:I mean, when you got a trailer full of toys. I think that's a good plan.
Speaker 4:Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:It's easy to get distracted, yeah, but I guess from our point of view, ray, I really do want to thank you, by the way, for your time. You've been more than generous with us and we've really enjoyed hearing the stories.
Speaker 4:And I said we were going to go 30 minutes and I think we're over an hour now. So well, he laughed at us when we suggested that. So he knew he knew better. He's warning us right at the beginning that that wasn't going to be how it was going to be, and I'm grateful for it. Ray, certainly, like I said, now that we mentioned Hamcation, if you're going to be down there, we certainly will find you down there, because I think that's in the plans for us this winter, because, of course, being in Detroit, we have no reason to stay here all winter. We've got to go to Florida for at least a weekend.
Speaker 1:Got to. We have no reason to stay here all winter. We got to go to.
Speaker 4:Florida for at least a weekend Stay sane, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, you guys may not ever invite me again, because I'm a Blackhawks fan.
Speaker 1:That's OK. I'm a hockey fan in general, so you're still welcome. I mean, it's questionable now, but I think we can say out loud that the Red Wings haven't been on the greatest run.
Speaker 3:for the last couple or many years it Red Wings haven't been on the greatest run for the last couple or many years. It's looking like that, Ray. It's looking like that, unfortunately. Feels like another era.
Speaker 4:I will say living only four hours from Chicago, there's enough crossover and people that have moved here or there. We have to be nice to the people who like the other teams. It's okay.
Speaker 2:Well, I got a good friend of mine that works at ICOM Canada. They're out of British Columbia and it pains him to fly through Chicago here, especially when the Blackhawks are in for the Stanley Cup. He goes the ugliest colors you could ever imagine are hanging at O'Hare Airport and he even jokes. He goes man, I'm going to have to become a Seattle Kraken fan to get a Stanley Cup.
Speaker 3:Don't do that to yourself. Despite its origins being from Canada, they haven't had much luck in the Cup for many years.
Speaker 1:Florida just keeps winning. So I guess you just have to be in Florida now. That's the secret, Turns out.
Speaker 3:If you, if you, if you get paid really well and and you want to live in a really nice place, you go down and play hockey in florida you go you put you're on the ice all day and then you go out to the beach at night and save yourself a mai tai. It sounds like a pretty solid, solid setup for me.
Speaker 2:Now I do have a show idea for you guys okay we're all ears tales ears Tales from Ooh, okay. Because I did go through both MFJ technical support as well as ICOM technical support and some of the tales that I could share with you guys that just make you laugh hysterically. I love it.
Speaker 1:I will also admit that I'm taking the note now and we're going to take you up on it.
Speaker 4:I was going to say I say we have Ray back and we do Tales from Tech support. Absolutely, I think we'll be having a good laugh. I can only imagine. I know some of the stupid things I've done. I can only imagine what other people have done.
Speaker 3:I did tech support for five years, so I know.
Speaker 2:There you go. You guys could share some of yours too, but I'll share one with you to give you an idea. Okay, icom had a T21 at one time. It was a two meter handheld, micro handheld. It was about five inches tall and part of that was a nickel cadmium battery that popped in the bottom of it. So we're talking about four layer boards and very complex design.
Speaker 2:Guy calls me up and I keep hearing a stupid clicking noise. He goes I'm looking at your T21, click, click. I'm wanting to do the Mars mod to it. Click, click. I've got it open. I go okay, what board are you looking at, sir? And he tells me, click, click. I go. You know what, sir? The best thing for you to do is to put it all back together. Well, why is that? I go. You come anywhere close to that board with that Weller 100-watt gun that I keep hearing you heating up. You're going to vaporize traces in the board and you're going to be SOL. He's like what do you mean? How did you know? I had one of those? I said I can hear you clicking it to heat it up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's funny, that is that's, that's impressive.
Speaker 2:So when you guys go to rig picks, look at the T21, you'll fully understand. Oh.
Speaker 4:I have it up. I'm sure Jim has it up now. Oh yeah, no, I I've got it up. I can't say I can't say I've ever, I've ever seen that one and I I've seen. I'm usually pretty good with the obscure. There you go, jim, there's your, there's your next one you got to find I was just gonna say it's.
Speaker 3:It's one of those ham swap hunts. Now. Next time I see one sitting on a table abandoned two meter.
Speaker 2:Two meter transceiver with 440 receive. It was called abandoned half abandoned half, all right and we had the one that's even more rare is the t41, which was a uhf transceiver with two meter receive see that well, well, that's I do love.
Speaker 3:I do love finding those what do we want to call them? Little treasures? When you go to the swap. They've they've been abandoned. Nobody really understands just how cool those were back when they first launched.
Speaker 2:Right, they've kind of been forgotten, but that's just a great one the z1a is another one where the front panel would remove off the radio. Then you would put your speaker micro adapter, snap it in the head place and then snap it, and then it was your speaker mic. Yep, yep, the A4L killed it. Instead of talking about the technical wonder it was, they trashed it because the audio was tinny.
Speaker 3:Oh, because the speaker was in the removable head portion so it had to be smaller.
Speaker 2:It was a ceramic disc. I mean, there again, it's that technology Absolutely. I mean we even had the 900 and the 901 that we ended up using fiber optics because we needed the data throughput that you could not get on wire. So it was expensive to remote the head of the radio because it all communicated over fiber optics.
Speaker 3:You said that was the ICOM 901,. Huh, all right, I'm going to have to look that up too.
Speaker 2:909.01.
Speaker 3:Oh, my okay.
Speaker 2:A lot of ham radio operators would take the rf modules. I mean it came as two meter 440, but then you could add a 220 module, an expanded receive module, a 10 meter fm module and the guys I'm looking the guys would take a repeater controller that would take one of those rf modules and then you'd add a band to your repeater.
Speaker 3:Oh, wow, okay, Yep, I see it listed here. The optical fiber cable interface unit E766 was the number for it, apparently.
Speaker 4:That is a cool-looking radio. I won't lie.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was a sexy little radio from back in the day. Now I think it's like it might have had 50 memory channels. And today's people, man, they go nuts over how expensive the handhelds are. My first radio that I bought was not an ICOM, it was formerly known as Trio, and that thing was $650 in the late and you had to buy the tone encoder, decoder board to access the repeaters, which was another $75 and, trust me, mfj didn't pay that well that one took a little saving for.
Speaker 3:Yes, it did. Jeez, see, those are some awesome gems to hear. Like I didn't have any idea some of the cool stuff that you guys had put out in the past. I always love finding out about those older rigs that just had unusual and awesome engineering for their time, or things that were pushing the envelope even way back when.
Speaker 2:And one of the things that's kept me with ICOM over 30 years is I've met the founder. He's a real nice gentleman and first time I met him was at a land mobile show. We start talking as ham radio operators and he told me the philosophy. His philosophy was to develop performance and technology, not worry about making it as cheap as possible. And you take a look, I mean people complain about ICOM being the most expensive out there. But you take a look at some of the technology that we're doing in the ham radio world, the ham radio world.
Speaker 2:Who would ever thought you'd find a 10 gig commercially available off-the-shelf transceiver to do 2 meter, 440, 1.2, 2.4, 5, 5.6 and 10 gig? And I mean, yes, it's spendy, but you take a look at the guys that have experimented and built their own from transverters and start calculating in your own time. That gets pretty spendy. Anyway, you guys, I can talk all day long about ICOM radios and the different things that they've done and the technology. I mean everybody wants fiber to their house. Why? Because of the data speeds. That's what the 900 and 901 did.
Speaker 4:I'm still looking at it. I was mesmerized clicking through pictures of that.
Speaker 3:That might be the next or you'll be looking for one in the car.
Speaker 4:No, I don't think I need that in the car. I'm good with my 5100 in the car. But yeah, I'll be looking for one to play with if I can find one that's intact. I'll be looking for one to play with if I can find one that's intact.
Speaker 2:When I first started working at ICOM, the 271, 471, 571, 1271, those were your all-mode independent band transceivers. I mean the guys complained well, why would you put the operating system of a radio on a RAM card? And you take a look, that was in the late 80s. I think RigPix says like 87, 88, when those radios were released, which means they were being developed in 82, 83, 84. That RAM card, the microprocessor on that radio, ran at 15 megahertz. What was an XT clone running back in the day?
Speaker 3:Yeah, shoot, not even close, probably. I would imagine it's unbelievable.
Speaker 2:Read-only memory and the EPROMs that were available in the early days during development of this did not run at 15 megahertz. The only thing that would run that fast was RAM, so we had to put the operating system on volatile RAM.
Speaker 4:Interesting. You tend to forget about those, you know. I don't want to say limitations, because we were doing pretty well with technology in that era, but there were limitations compared to nowadays. And you guys, icom, needed things to be stable and make sure they would work for, in some cases, 30 and 40 years. People would be running these things. So those were the decisions that had to be made. One of my questions I had written down back to the 7760, actually, what was the engineering time on that? Do you have any idea, when it went from concept to Tokyo last year, how many years that was and how much time was spent with the brands working on that guy?
Speaker 2:Normal R&D for our products is anywhere between 18 to 24 months. We did run into an issue with the PW2. I was at the Tokyo Ham Fair in 2019. We introduced that radio there at the Tokyo Ham Fair and my rule of thumb is if it's under glass, give us a year.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:So, and you take a look at all of the products that we've launched at Dayton under glass. A year later, we were shipping it, but the PW2, 2019, we introduced it COVID hit. All the R&D that had happened came to a grinding halt. Then, when the engineers were able to work together again in the same building because working remote did not exist, much less being able to share all your CAD drawings and all your electronic experiments and things like that that's not going to happen remotely. No, by the time they were able to report back to work no, by the time they were able to report back to work, a lot of the components that they were developing had been discontinued or were short life and we had to go back to the drawing board again. So it took us five years to launch that product. We finally started shipping January, February of 2025.
Speaker 4:So showing it in August of 2019 to January 2025, it took a little while. Even on a good schedule, I would say 24 months is impressive. I'm actually surprised it's that short. Of course, you guys have a fair amount of people working for you, but the ham radio manufacturers don't have unlimited resources. You guys still have, you know, all your various divisions and I'm sure people spread out across all of them to do various things. So that's pretty good. Two years, I would say. So that was one of my curiosities for sure, especially with how complex the 7760 was, especially since we got to see the guts of it before anything else the year before it dated Right.
Speaker 2:So I knew it was so much fun. My riddle was the bits and pieces that are in this box belong to a radio, but not all the bits and pieces of the radio are in this box and pieces of the radio are in this box.
Speaker 4:That was fun. It was fun to watch people speculate and see the speculation and everyone telling everyone else they were wrong and that was a good time. That was a good time.
Speaker 3:And it drummed up that interest, that hype.
Speaker 2:And it was so much fun watching all the YouTubers. I come so stupid for doing that and I'm sitting there going. Yeah, I got you guys talking about it, didn't I? Yeah?
Speaker 3:See, there you go. No bad press, right, as they say.
Speaker 4:Heck, we're talking about it two plus years later, so that's good. No, that was a good one for sure. Pictures of people zoomed in on the thing, guessing what different things were. It must be this Ponents. It must be this, it must not be that, and that was and that was, without anyone seeing the control head yet, because I don't believe that was part of that.
Speaker 2:That box I don't. If I remember right there were. There was a multiple um usb ports okay, I and I was even having fun, the guy oh, it's got 200 watts and I go, okay, so it's only going to have one of those boards. It might not have two or three it causes. Now that's that's not right to do that to us stirring stirring them up right from the beginning.
Speaker 2:I like it I like it and they're like, well, do you know what it is? And I'm like, yeah, I can neither confirm nor deny yeah, yep, geez almost, almost had a flashback of irobot.
Speaker 4:That is not the right question and shut down yep, absolutely all right, ray, I think, uh, I think we're certainly appreciative of look at this. We said we were going to do a half hour. We're at an hour and a half and I think we'll, uh, like, like I said, I think we'll take you up on your offer at some point on the tech support story time, because that I think would be excellent. But certainly thanks for spending your time at Oshkosh out here on Internet land with us.
Speaker 2:All right guys.
Speaker 4:I think we'll look for you at Hamcation. That'll be probably where we have the chance of seeing each other again.
Speaker 2:All right, jim and James at hamcation, that'll be probably where we have the chance of seeing each other again. All right, jimmy james. Although there's although huntsville is a big youtubers uh convention, they go out to one of the state parks and do poda stuff and the timing on it doesn't work for me.
Speaker 4:This year I I actually glanced at that and uh, but huntsville is on my list of that. One wouldn't be too hard to do geographically, so we'll see what happens next year.
Speaker 2:For sure, All right, guys. Yeah well, there's some pretty bad ones that are there too.
Speaker 3:So there we go.
Speaker 2:Well, I've already received it. I've already been invited back to Friedrichshafen for next year. We can have some fun.
Speaker 3:Oh man, I have a blast doing this stuff nope, I just said, like I said already, uh gave ray some thanks and just taking a chance on a brand new uh channel here with the everyday ham. We always appreciate uh, you, uh reaching out and saying, hey, I like what you guys are doing and i'd'd love to support you in what it is and hope to have you back sometime in the future here and I'm sure that there'll be lots more to say and do, but looking forward to shaking your hand in person and also maybe finding a way to chat with you on the air at some point here, maybe even at the W9W station, now that I know where to look for it. So, yeah, thanks a lot.
Speaker 2:Thursday where to look for it?
Speaker 3:So yeah, thanks a lot. Thursday morning I'm going to call in sick. Okay, I like it there you go.
Speaker 2:So Thursday we're usually somewhere around 14, 250.
Speaker 3:All right, I'll point the radio in that direction, looking forward to it. I will ask you if you can hang out for a little bit after we hit the stop button. It takes just a second for us to upload all the footage here to make sure it gets to Riverside.
