{"id":213,"date":"2026-08-06T23:48:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T23:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/?page_id=213"},"modified":"2026-08-14T13:14:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:14:05","slug":"oral-history-steve-wilson-w6sdy","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/home\/oral-histories\/oral-history-steve-wilson-w6sdy\/","title":{"rendered":"Oral History: Steve Wilson, W6SDY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-cover aligncenter has-custom-content-position is-position-bottom-center\" style=\"min-height:650px;aspect-ratio:unset;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1010\" height=\"838\" class=\"wp-block-cover__image-background wp-image-212 size-full\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Steve-Wilson-W6SDY.jpeg\" style=\"object-position:58% 31%\" data-object-fit=\"cover\" data-object-position=\"58% 31%\" srcset=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Steve-Wilson-W6SDY.jpeg 1010w, https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Steve-Wilson-W6SDY-300x249.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Steve-Wilson-W6SDY-768x637.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1010px) 100vw, 1010px\" \/><span aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-cover__background has-background-dim-0 has-background-dim\" style=\"background-color:#6d5b5f\"><\/span><div class=\"wp-block-cover__inner-container has-global-padding is-layout-constrained wp-block-cover-is-layout-constrained\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio aligncenter\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Steve-Wilson-W6SDY.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group is-nowrap is-layout-flex wp-container-core-group-is-layout-3a88641f wp-block-group-is-layout-flex\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group is-nowrap is-layout-flex wp-container-core-group-is-layout-3a88641f wp-block-group-is-layout-flex\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My name is Steve Wilson, and my call sign is W6SDY.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I got started with ham radio probably in sixth grade, even though it wasn&#8217;t radio. But by the time I got to junior high, I had my Novice license, and we had one of my classmates&#8217; uncles, I think it was, showed us 40 meters in CW, and I&#8217;ve never forgotten it since then. So that was 1952.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, I had some other friends in high school and junior high over the years that were also hams, and we visited each other&#8217;s locations and met on-the-air all the time. That helped. And I guess somehow or other, I&#8217;m not sure how it worked, but there was a Denver Astronomical Society that I was also a part of, and there were some hams in that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then we got more organized and went into a RACES and MARS group, and we met out at Stapleton Air Force Base. It&#8217;s no longer there. And then the RACES group would get active.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was either RACES or MARS, and I can&#8217;t remember anymore. But we would be going out. I remember one night we were out on a dam just north of Denver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was an earth-filled dam, and it had developed a big crack in it. And they were afraid that if it broke, they&#8217;d have to evacuate thousands of people downstream from it. And so we were out there overnight keeping an eye on it and had people stationed along the top of the dam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We had a comm van that was going back and talking to the police and the evacuation crew or whatever it was on the other end. And we spent a whole night being scared that the damn dam might break, but it didn&#8217;t\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">During Katrina, they had evacuated everybody to the big stadium in New Orleans, and they had somebody there from the Saturn Network. That&#8217;s the Salvation Army&#8217;s emergency radio network. There were people there, and they were trying to make contact with people in Tulsa, Oklahoma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And they were calling back and forth, and I could hear them both just fine out here because the skip was such that the radio signals ended up in California instead of where they needed to go. And so I volunteered to just relay messages from the stadium where they were asking for water and blankets and beds and things to the Red Cross that was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I guess they got them together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The other time was after another storm. I can&#8217;t remember the name of it, but it was the one that hit Puerto Rico and wiped it out not long ago. And there was a ham on there, KP4DX.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And he was asking for information, and I got a hold of him on code. And he was asking for weather information to find out whether the hurricane had gone on and left him alone. But they had rumors that there was another one coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so I got onto the weather service online and got the information and was able to relay it back to them because he had no power and very little information, no communication. So I was able to kind of fill in a missing piece. It was kind of nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, I&#8217;ve got ham friends that have done all sorts of things. During the Prague Spring, they were talking to UN4UN who was a ham that was on top of the, I guess, the governmental building in Prague, and they were relaying information out trying to get it to the United States. They got ahold of my friend who was here in the Bay Area, and he got ahold of Washington and put Washington together with the people in Prague so they could talk and coordinate and whatever else they did. But that was kind of fun.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, not really, not like a spy, but I did meet the UN4UN on the air years later. I worked him as a DX station, which is DX.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don&#8217;t know if anybody&#8217;s going to know, but DX in ham lingo stands for distance. And part of the original sport of ham radio was to see how far you could talk, see if you could talk to the other side of the world with your little flea-watt radio. And you could if you did it right, and you still can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s just people can do that with their cell phone now, so it&#8217;s not as magical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, you have a million satellites and a million pieces of hardware and software and a million or way more than a million lines of code and a million things that can go wrong. But it works most of the time. But if it quits, then there&#8217;s ham radio, and we still do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s still around as an emergency backup to when the Internet quits or the other emergency radio systems quit. And it doesn&#8217;t take long. In the Loma Prieta earthquake, it took about 30 seconds for all of the emergency systems, all the communication to fall to the ground and die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It just quit. And it was because the towers got shaken, and the dish antennas that are on the towers that have to be aimed like flashlights at each other got twisted, and they were pointing at the sky or the worms and didn&#8217;t work anymore. And it took weeks to put it all back together again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But ham radio was right there, right then, and was able to get the information out and coordinate. They put hams in various police stations, city offices, and, you know, fire departments and any place else that needed it, and they were able to coordinate, stop, and get them through the earthquake. And we&#8217;re standing by here in Marin with the ability to do the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We have hams we can deploy pretty much anywhere in the county and get information back to the emergency operations center or wherever the center of operations might be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I love that ham radio is just always there, and it&#8217;s always been a companion, and it got me through a lot of, I guess, dark nights. I had three sisters, and when they were screaming and yelling at each other, I could go up and put on the earphones and talk to somebody in Morse code and get in another world. And when I was commuting, I used to teach up in Chico and live down here in the Bay Area, and it was a three- or four-hour commute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And as I was going up and down Highway 5, I had a key strapped to the side of my leg, and I could send Morse code and drive. And it was routine to be able to talk to, oh, Japan was hard to not talk to at the time because conditions were such. But you could talk all over the place, and it kept me interested on the long and lonesome ride home from work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019m frustrated that I don&#8217;t do ham radio more often. It&#8217;s kind of lost major public interest, I guess. There are not a whole lot of people who want to get involved in that technology because the technology has gone along and evolved since I was in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the 50s, ham radio was about the highest technology you could access as a student. And so I enjoyed that, and it just stayed there. It got me by in other ways too because I got the commercial license in addition to the ham license.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was able to engineer radio stations in the AM market in Denver, and I worked on a bunch of those for about six years and put my wife and myself through college using radio engineering. And so it paid for itself in the way over then some.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I worked on a radio station that had four 300-foot towers, and I was the engineer for it. And I had a disc jockey show that went from midnight until 6 in the morning or 8 in the morning, depending. And then I would be the engineer the rest of the weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I worked a 40-hour shift straight through. And my job as an engineer was mostly making sure the transmitter transmitted. And I&#8217;d go around and read meters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They had a whole bunch of meters. We had a great big sheet. They had about 25 meter readings you had to do every half hour to make sure that the transmitter was behaving and do that, and then anything else that came along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But we ended up having to paint the towers, the red and white towers, and the steeplejack came and was working up there. And somehow I got volunteered into it. And I was up on this 300-foot tower on a Boson&#8217;s chair, painting away on both sides of this triangular steel tower and working our way down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the guy said, you know, don&#8217;t worry about it after 100 feet up. You don&#8217;t have to worry about it. If you fall, you won&#8217;t even know. You know, forget it. You might live if you fall off under 100 feet. So that kind of was part of the adventure, I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We were out in the middle of the night. Somebody had quit, I guess, as an engineer or somebody for the radio station had quit. And the transmitter had a whole bunch of phasing controls that had to go out to the four different towers to create a kind of a four-leaf clover pattern that protected stations in four different directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like there was one in Arizona, another one in Washington, Oregon. I don&#8217;t know. But somebody cranked all the knobs, thinking it would help wind it up and make it better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And they screwed up the pattern. So we spent a month or two on winter nights with people in the doghouses at the base of each tower, trying to get a little crank here on a coil, a little bit here on a capacitor, and trying to get everything back where it was supposed to go. And you had to be measured out in the field with a field strength meter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And you had people driving around in the night. We were in these little shacks, freezing our butts off. But we had little heaters that were propane, not propane, but kerosene heaters, like smudge pods. And it&#8217;s a wonder we didn&#8217;t all die of carbon monoxide, because we got pretty dizzy a couple of times. But that was kind of a weird adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, imagine having the ability to talk to someone else without moving your mouth. You can do it with your fingers. And there are a lot of people who got into ham radio because they were deaf or, you know, otherwise impaired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And we had groups here where we would take a loudspeaker and put it in a box so the cone was facing straight up, and you could put your finger on the cone, and as a tone would play, it&#8217;d go bzzz, and it&#8217;d buzz your finger. And so you could hear the Morse code with your finger, and you could turn it around with a key next to it and send Morse code. So we had deaf people and blind people that were able to use ham radio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the Morse code part of it is pretty much available to anybody. And then people on their deathbed were able to signify with their hands. They were able to send Morse code with the end of their finger to the nurse or the person who was listening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They could ask for things. They could say things. They could, you know, tell their family goodbye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Things like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If we could get more people involved, it would be wonderful, because it&#8217;s still a necessity in times of need that hasn&#8217;t gone away over time. It&#8217;s still just as valid now as it was 40 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We have a really interesting ham community here in Marin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s very vital. Not only is it a ham radio thing, but it&#8217;s a social club, I guess you&#8217;d call it, with the same idea of being of service to the community and being able to be there in time of need. And the rest of the time, they get together and have luncheons and dinners and events and practice using radio and make it all kind of exciting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And we&#8217;ve got a few younger people involved, and the more the better. And anybody interested should get a hold of the radio group. And if I can put in a plug, MarinRACES, all one word, <a href=\"http:\/\/marinraces.org\/\">MarinRACES.org<\/a> is one of our websites. And MarinRCV, Radio Communication Volunteers, is another group, <a href=\"http:\/\/marinrcv.org\/\">MarinRCV.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Recorded on March 20, 2026 in Mill Valley<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My name is Steve Wilson, and my call sign is W6SDY. I got started with ham radio probably in sixth grade, even though it wasn&#8217;t radio. But by the time I got to junior high, I had my Novice license, and we had one of my classmates&#8217; uncles, I think it was, showed us 40 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":139,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"oral-history","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-213","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/213\/revisions\/279"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}