{"id":311,"date":"2026-08-13T23:55:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T23:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/?page_id=311"},"modified":"2026-08-14T13:14:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:14:37","slug":"oral-history-andrew-musselman-ki6uoc","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/home\/oral-histories\/oral-history-andrew-musselman-ki6uoc\/","title":{"rendered":"Oral History: Andrew Musselman, KI6UOC"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-cover 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=\"836\" class=\"wp-block-cover__image-background wp-image-240 size-full\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Andrew-Musselman.jpg\" style=\"object-position:52% 17%\" data-object-fit=\"cover\" data-object-position=\"52% 17%\" srcset=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Andrew-Musselman.jpg 1013w, https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Andrew-Musselman-300x248.jpg 300w, https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Andrew-Musselman-768x634.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\" style=\"background-color:#a4a68f\"><\/span><div class=\"wp-block-cover__inner-container has-global-padding is-layout-constrained wp-block-cover-is-layout-constrained\">\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-large-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Andrew-Musselman-KI6UOC.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My name is Andrew Musselman. My call sign is Kilo India 6 Uniform Oscar Charlie. Kernighan invented six Unix-operated computers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was in college, and someone in the computer science lab, the CSL, was like, hey, come check out the clubhouse we have on the campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There&#8217;s a little room buried deep inside this courtyard in the EE building. You couldn&#8217;t get to it from inside the building, but you could get to it outside the building. W6BHZ clubhouse, so he showed me this HF radio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I didn&#8217;t know what it was at the time. He spun the dial, and I was like, you could listen to anything you want! And, you know, apparently, yeah, we&#8217;re doing this test session coming up. I remember reading up just to study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was like, okay, well, I&#8217;ve done physics, so I&#8217;m just going to go read all of Part 97 in a night. And I did that, and took my technician test, got licensed. It was pretty straightforward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I joke that I still remember one of the questions on my technician test was, if you hear a new operator on the air, should you A, try to help them out, or B, immediately report them to the FCC? So I did that, got my General while I was in college. We did some Field Day stuff. We did a bunch of a lot of event comm stuff when I was in college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Again, I&#8217;m talking about a completely different club here, W6BHZ, down in the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. But, yeah, and then I just sort of stuck with it after that.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m out on the Wildflower Triathlon, and we&#8217;re stopped. We&#8217;re supposed to get somewhere to see what&#8217;s going on. We stopped, and a woman had gone down, crashed, right as we were getting there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And Highway Patrol&#8217;s on there assessing her for head injury. And we&#8217;re the people who&#8217;s like, you know what? I&#8217;m going to run. The Highway Patrolman&#8217;s like, you know what? Why don&#8217;t you call the EMS? I&#8217;m going to be busy with the patient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We ran back. We use our dispatch to call EMS because our people, our dispatch had a public service dispatcher in there, and we had ambulances dedicated to the event. So we were able to roll that faster than the CHP guy was able to contact us, contact through his communication channels because, again, we were dialed into the event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Why do I keep coming back to this hobby?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I mean, I love that it&#8217;s such a diverse hobby, that you have people who are just in it for the social element. That&#8217;s me to some extent. There&#8217;s people who are in it because they want to push the bounds of technology and build crazy things, the W6JTs of the world \u2013 the guy who built the FT8 and all that kind of stuff, there&#8217;s some really groundbreaking signals processing work in that. The people who just like building stuff. Yeah, it&#8217;s been done before, but I&#8217;m going to build mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All the hand-built Go boxes and stuff floating around and everything about that. Event comms. I don&#8217;t do enough of it these days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m trying to work this into my schedule, but I think that&#8217;s some of the most fun you can have below 50 MHz. Going out and having a mission of, oh hey, even if it is most of the time, aid station 3 needs more bananas. You&#8217;re out there, you&#8217;re serving a useful goal using all this stuff you get to build and play around with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think just having this general technical understanding of a part of the world that a lot of people don&#8217;t see. I keep forgetting that lay people don&#8217;t see antennas everywhere the way we do and stuff like that.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don&#8217;t have a lot of frustration with it, but I&#8217;m also not super active. There&#8217;s all of this world of old technology built on old technology built on old technology, and we&#8217;re here because we&#8217;re here because we&#8217;re here, and we can&#8217;t really get beyond that. We can&#8217;t do it properly, even if we had the engineering wherewithal to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We probably do in the broader ham radio community just because&#8230; And again, this is broadly a good thing that there&#8217;s so many different things out there, but it also can lead to the problem of standards that there&#8217;s so many to choose from.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What is the popular conception of ham radio? Because, I mean, the stereotype of the old guy in the shack talking to a bunch of his buddies on the 80 meters has some truth to it. That definitely does exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think the misconception is that&#8217;s the only thing in the hobby, that it is such a diverse hobby in terms of just areas of operating interest out there. Yeah, there&#8217;s people out there who just have their friends that they want to talk to in the area or across the world, right? But that&#8217;s not the only thing going on.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Have you ever wondered about the invisible infrastructure that makes cell phones, makes commercial radios, makes public safety dispatch, that makes so many things in the modern world work? Like, I get it, there&#8217;s parts of the ham radio culture that may or may not appeal to you, but this whole world is sort of a window into that part of the built world that not everybody gets to see. And I think that&#8217;s pretty cool. And this is like when you can, you sort of, a bunch of the knowledge of how this stuff works rubs off on you just being around it and working with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I remember getting, after getting my license, I started seeing antennas everywhere because I was looking for them, and I had not noticed them before, but of course, there&#8217;s antennas in plain sight in every, everyday life. Oh yeah, that cell site&#8217;s got a bunch of sector antennas covering this thing. Oh hey, look, there&#8217;s a random Yagi on top of that building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I wonder what that&#8217;s for. Like HF, I wonder what that&#8217;s going to.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like I said, I&#8217;m missing Jan and his talk about when he came out and was helping people work on radios. I wish I&#8217;d gotten more done while he was still doing that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Recorded on June 27, 2026 @ Field Day in Novato, CA<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My name is Andrew Musselman. My call sign is Kilo India 6 Uniform Oscar Charlie. Kernighan invented six Unix-operated computers. It was in college, and someone in the computer science lab, the CSL, was like, hey, come check out the clubhouse we have on the campus. There&#8217;s a little room buried deep inside this courtyard [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":139,"menu_order":12,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"oral-history","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-311","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/311","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=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/311\/revisions\/313"}],"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=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}