{"id":258,"date":"2026-08-13T22:33:32","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T22:33:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/?page_id=258"},"modified":"2026-08-14T13:14:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:14:09","slug":"oral-history-doug-kaye-k6drk","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/home\/oral-histories\/oral-history-doug-kaye-k6drk\/","title":{"rendered":"Oral History: Doug Kaye, K6DRK"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-cover alignwide is-light has-custom-content-position is-position-bottom-center\" style=\"min-height:650px;aspect-ratio:unset;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1013\" height=\"838\" class=\"wp-block-cover__image-background wp-image-232\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Doug-Kaye-K6DRK.jpg\" style=\"object-position:49% 55%\" data-object-fit=\"cover\" data-object-position=\"49% 55%\" srcset=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Doug-Kaye-K6DRK.jpg 1013w, https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Doug-Kaye-K6DRK-300x248.jpg 300w, https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Doug-Kaye-K6DRK-768x635.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1013px) 100vw, 1013px\" \/><span aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-cover__background has-background-dim-0 has-background-dim\"><\/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\/Doug-Kaye-K6DRK.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hi, my name&#8217;s Doug Kaye. My call sign&#8217;s K6DRK, K-6-Delta-Romeo-Kilo.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, I was in middle school, junior high school in San Francisco. And there was a weekend, an after school program at Polytechnic High School called Lux Lab. And they taught electronics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And somehow I ended up, I forget how it got started, but I went to Lux Lab and learned electronics as an 11-year-old. And they had a ham radio room, a shack, with beautiful Collins gear and teletype and everything. So I got totally wrapped up with that and ended up getting my novice license and building my first transmitter, a Heathkit DX40.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And yeah, then I went on, got the General, then the Advanced, then the Extra Class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Did all that.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I was doing that since I was 11. And I did that through high school. My high school had a ham radio club also with more Collins gear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was very impressive in San Francisco. And then I stayed with that through college. And I had stuff in my apartments and things like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My wife and I moved to New York. And I did a little bit of ham radio then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But when my son was born, I stopped. And I stayed out of ham radio. I did a little bit of ham radio for 40 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I got back into it. It&#8217;s a long story. But I got suckered into a visit to KPH out in Point Reyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And that got me encouraged to get back into ham radio. So I got back in. I decided there must be an amateur radio club in Marin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I googled \u201cMarin Amateur Radio Club\u201d. And sure enough, there was one.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And what I found in ham radio is that I really like public service. It&#8217;s the thing that really attracts me, more so than Field Day and things like that. Contests don&#8217;t interest me that much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I love public service. It&#8217;s fun. It&#8217;s great to get outdoors and be with people and interact in that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So that&#8217;s my favorite part of it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What frustrates me are my own deficiencies. I&#8217;m trying to always build gear and design new gear and things like that. And what frustrates me is when I can&#8217;t get it quite right and it takes me hours and hours to figure things out. That&#8217;s what frustrates me.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think the one misconception I bump into all the time is people who think that it&#8217;s a bunch of people doing CW and that we&#8217;re all sitting there late into the night and we&#8217;re sitting there going, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And CQ, CQ, and CW. And they don&#8217;t realize that it&#8217;s gone way beyond that. I don&#8217;t think people realize the breadth of the technologies that hams use, everything from satellites to moon bounce and all this stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">People tend to think it&#8217;s an old thing that&#8217;s mostly gone away. And they don&#8217;t realize how active it is.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was doing public service events, and I realized that at NetControl, they were struggling trying to keep track of where people were. And it was all done with voice. And so decided to ramp up the APRS coverage. We had a bit of it in the County, but very, very little. And of course, APRS requires that you have receivers and repeaters in specific good locations to cover a course like the Dipsea, which is seven miles over rough terrain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so I was just intrigued with the technology. I was already building my own gear and things like that. So I decided to dive into APRS hardware and discovered a whole world of what APRS was all about. And it hasn&#8217;t changed since. I mean, even this morning before I came over here, I was doing APRS stuff.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Why not come and observe a public service event? Come to NetControl sometime just to see what goes on. We&#8217;ve got this great comm truck with a big antenna.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We&#8217;ve got a big monitor. We&#8217;re pretty good into the public relations world of ham radio. And at almost every event, we have people who come by who say: What is this? What&#8217;s going on? How can I get involved? And we tend to sign up at least one person every time we do a public service event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Something that people might not know is I started and ran a software company for 18 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then I sold it, and decided to work my way down the corporate ladder. And I was the chief technology officer for four startups over four years. The last one went public and helped fund my retirement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I retired, actually, at age 50 in the year 2000. And I did many things, but one of the things I did was get involved in podcasting. And in fact, if you go to the Wikipedia page for the history of podcasting, it will say that Doug Kaye did the very first podcast, which is arguable, but I&#8217;ll take the credit. Why not?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so I did a lot of podcasting and wrote a lot of software for podcasting in the early stages, and started a nonprofit podcasting network. And to this day, I&#8217;m still doing some of that kind of work. But that&#8217;s sort of one of the things that a lot of people don&#8217;t know about me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I&#8217;m very proud of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Recorded on April 8, 2026 in Mill Valley<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi, my name&#8217;s Doug Kaye. My call sign&#8217;s K6DRK, K-6-Delta-Romeo-Kilo.\u00a0 Well, I was in middle school, junior high school in San Francisco. And there was a weekend, an after school program at Polytechnic High School called Lux Lab. And they taught electronics. And somehow I ended up, I forget how it got started, but I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":139,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"oral-history","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-258","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/258","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=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":280,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/258\/revisions\/280"}],"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=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}