At about four years of age I found myself fascinated by radio, telephones, and light bulbs. Somewhere around age seven I found a simple softcover book at the local Safeway grocery store in my home town that showed how to make light bulbs illuminate using batteries with small knife switches; series and parallel circuits. By sixth grade I had graduated to examining (and sometimes damaging) telephone company apparatus in my home and the homes of friends. I spent a lot of time reading electronics books at the public library and making electronics projects that occasionally worked. At age 15 I received my first amateur radio (ham radio) license (Novice class) and a few months later upgraded my ham license. A few years after that also received a first class radio telephone license and second class radio telegraph license with radar endorsement. In the early 1980s, after college, I moved to the Jersey Shore and became engrossed with connecting microcomputers to ham radio systems. Fast forwarding to present time, I’m a member of the Garden State Amateur Radio Association based in Tinton Falls NJ (GSARA.club) where I assist with maintaining the club’s two Winlink servers (HF and VHF), as well as our VHF Yaesu System Fusion repeater, Yaesu WiresX link, HF RemoteHams station and VHF Echolink.
I’m more of a radio and microcontroller experimenter and tinkerer rather than a radio operator. Most my hobby time is spent at my workbench developing circuits and writing microcontroller programs. You can see more about my current projects at my ham radio website, www.ad7i.net and my GitHub page, www.github.com/microPaul
As for my work life, I had the very good fortune when I was in high school and college to work four summers in the central office of a small but technologically progressive independent telephone company, and then two summers (end of sophomore and junior college years) as a toll test board technician for General Telephone of the NW (which later became part of Verizon). At these telco jobs I worked on systems as mundane as DC alarm current-loops and as interesting as MTS/ IMTS radio-telephone systems, multi-channel SSB muxed FM microwave radio systems (six different paths, several included passive reflectors) and T1 carrier (it was the 70s) – plus Plain Old Telephone Service, POTS. I learned a lot about electronics troubleshooting from the people I worked with during those summer jobs. After college (BSEL Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo; MS-ECE Univ of Michigan, Ann Arbor) most of my professional engineering career was at Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ where I designed analog and digital communications equipment, DC to UHF. I’m named inventor on nine U.S. utility patents. Although I’m now retired, I’m still currently licensed as a Professional Engineer by the State of New Jersey.