{"id":324,"date":"2026-08-14T00:12:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T00:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/?page_id=324"},"modified":"2026-08-14T13:14:55","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:14:55","slug":"oral-history-jim-saltzgaber-km6wwy","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/home\/oral-histories\/oral-history-jim-saltzgaber-km6wwy\/","title":{"rendered":"Oral History: Jim Saltzgaber, KM6WWY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-cover 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-249 size-full\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jim-Saltzgaber-KM6WWY.jpeg\" style=\"object-position:53% 18%\" data-object-fit=\"cover\" data-object-position=\"53% 18%\" srcset=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jim-Saltzgaber-KM6WWY.jpeg 1013w, https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jim-Saltzgaber-KM6WWY-300x248.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jim-Saltzgaber-KM6WWY-768x634.jpeg 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:#756a66\"><\/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\/Jim-Saltzgaber-KM6WWY.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My name is Jim [Saltzgaber]. My ham call sign is KM6WWI, also known as Kilo Mike Six, Whiskey Whiskey Yankee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I got started with ham radio way back, when I was a preteen. A church that we attended \u2013 one of the ladies who kind of ran a lot of the programs there had her children, and she had one of the old classic window Volkswagen buses that we all rode around in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, we spent a lot of time at her house, and her father was a ham, and he had set her up with a great ham shack with a big tower and a rotating beam, and we would sit in when she would make calls to her father. And it was all there just so she could contact her family back east, and so all the kids, we got to talk on it. And following that, there were some other teenagers that were a little older than me that did have Novice ham radio licenses, and we actually ended up, they did, I was just kind of a looky-loo for a while, setting up a ham radio station at one of the classrooms in the church during the summer school break, and then I ended up building a shortwave receiver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And my grandfather was an early radio guy. He built crystal radios and did a little ham radio before I came about. But then other things, I got involved with music at school and girls and motorcycles, and that was the end of ham radio for quite some time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I was a midshipman at California Maritime Academy, we were on cruise out in the middle of the ocean, and the first mate, which was also the academy executive officer, was an avid ham, and he had a really nice radio station set up in this little steel room out in the middle of the deck. And at nighttime, when we weren&#8217;t doing any classes or anything, and propagation was really good, he would do phone patches for all of the midshipmen and the other officers and crew of the ship. So it kind of saved the day for everybody to be able to call home without paying outrageous overseas phone costs at the time.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 2019, I needed to get a hobby that would keep me going and learning and using my brain and meeting new people once I retired. I went and took my Technician\u2019s license. And I met, right off the bat on the air, a couple of people from the Marin Amateur Radio Club immediately \u2013 and it was one of the first contacts I made after I put the radio in my truck. They invited me to the Marin Amateur Radio Society&#8217;s monthly meeting in Mill Valley, which actually happened to be the next night. And so I showed up and I was already meeting people. And so that solved one of my major goals for becoming a ham radio operator was to meet people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As time went on and I got to be on the air more, I got involved in the public service events that the Marin Amateur Radio Club sponsors to help a lot of the nonprofits with their bicycling and hiking and running events in the county here. And that was quite nice because they have a habit of teaching people how to do it the way they like to have it done, which is the way that it works. And it was able to be done with a pretty basic radio setup. I didn&#8217;t have to have a 50-foot-tall antenna. I could carry it all around in a briefcase in a bag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And since everybody works together, twos and threes on stations, it was a good way to get around and meet a lot of new people. Plus, I met the runners, I met people that were bicyclists, hikers, and got to know several other groups of people doing it that way. And that just kept growing and I got involved in the club.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And early on, I asked my wife Joanne if she would like to come down with me, and she did. And she really wasn&#8217;t all that keen on talking on the radio, but she liked going out on the weekends when we did those. She liked cheering people on while they were doing their sport. And she really liked meeting those people, liked meeting the people in the club. But that helped me really become convinced that this was a good hobby to be in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Oh, a couple of things frustrate me about ham radio. When I got back and got into it for real and got a license, I wasn&#8217;t aware of the amount of infrastructure it took to set up a really proficient and efficient station. I have a couple of antennas, and I&#8217;m still trying to figure out something that&#8217;ll work because I live out in the narrow valley of Fairfax. That&#8217;s a big frustration. I tend to use other people&#8217;s radios or just find things that work for me. And the other frustration, I guess, is that I don&#8217;t have enough money to buy a house on a hill with a couple of big towers so I can talk around the world.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There&#8217;s a couple of things I would say to encourage people who are interested. One, find some hams. It&#8217;s easy to find them. They give all kinds of things that they invite people to. You can find them on the web or other places. Find a ham club. Go to the meetings. Ask questions. They&#8217;ll answer the questions. And then ask them, can you show me your station? Can you help me see what it&#8217;s like to get on the air? And just realize that you&#8217;re going to probably meet people who have been doing this for a long time, have spent a lot of time and money and effort learning how to make it work as well as it does for them and that you&#8217;re not going to land in that place out of the box.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the second thing would be to go ahead \u2013 study for the license. The basic license is very easy to study for and get. It costs you $15 to take the test, $35 to pay the FCC for the license. It&#8217;s good for 10 years. So you can even get the license and sit on it for a while and not have to go buy a radio. It&#8217;s not going to expire next year and you&#8217;re going to have to renew it or take another test. So it&#8217;s easy to get into, probably a lot harder to get out once you get started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the side stories I&#8217;d like to pass on is that a ham is considered someone who talks, someone who talks a lot. And I have no problem talking a lot. Everybody that knows me knows that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But as I got going into the ham radio process, a couple of years in, I think it was around 2020, I had a second neck surgery that was, the first one was 10, 20 years before that. But I had a second neck surgery that ended up damaging my vocal cords. The damage had been done 10, 15 years before, but then this exacerbated it. And I lost my voice. I completely lost my voice. I could not make sounds. I could not talk. And I&#8217;m going, how am I going to be a ham radio? How am I going to do anything? I&#8217;m going to end up texting on my iPhone for the rest of my life. Be like one of the Marx Brothers with a little horn. So fortunately, I met an ear, nose, and throat doctor who was fairly persistent and got together with another doctor. Both of those were Kaiser doctors here in the Bay Area. And they agreed and got approved for a rather experimental or not often used procedure. I won&#8217;t go into it very deeply, but they ended up doing a two-surgeon process with a camera down my throat, needles through the outside of my throat, and pumped my vocal cords back up. And the voice is not, it&#8217;s not a silver-tongued devil here, but it gets me by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the other things that I like about where I&#8217;m at with the ham radio is being in a club, there&#8217;s a lot of things that the club has to do to maintain itself. And I&#8217;ve gotten quite involved with that, secretary on the board of directors for a couple of terms. It&#8217;s a good way to do service and feel that you&#8217;re of service and learn more about the people, learn more about the club, and also be able to keep my management skills polished and honed. I was the manager almost all of my working life. And I found right off the bat after I retired that I wasn&#8217;t going to be managing my wife. And so a bunch of old guys that like to talk on the radio are a lot easier to manage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was impressed with the way that the hams that I met who were giving the exams, the exams for the licenses are given by volunteers who are ham radio operators who work through a larger organization, in our case it&#8217;s the American Radio Relay League, which is a ham radio advocacy group that&#8217;s national. They are set up as a surrogate for the FCC because the government agencies don&#8217;t do their own testing anymore. So they encourage and solicit volunteers to be examiners who actually do the testing in the field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I got my Extra license. And at that time, it was during COVID. And we were having to take tests outside in parking lots with easy ups and TV trays and folding chairs. And in the interim during COVID I had begun helping the V.E. team that was doing those up at the Novato Hospital. I enjoyed helping get the equipment together and come up with a method that worked outdoors because that was totally new to everyone. And in doing that, several of the other examiners asked me and encouraged me to go ahead and become a volunteer examiner. And I did. And you get to meet people firsthand. They all have questions about the license and whatnot, particularly the new guys. It&#8217;s another way to meet people and learn to find out what other hams are doing and why.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And when the Marin Amateur Radio Society began their testing towards the end of COVID, we moved back indoors and I got involved with that program and was asked to be the second in command on that. Then the guy in charge wanted to step back. So I&#8217;m now the team leader for the Mars VE testing program. And we have a very good group. We have about 12 volunteer examiners that are available. It makes it really nice to work with people who want to volunteer, want to do something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another thing that I like about the VE testing program is that I get to meet all of the people who test with us personally. Some of them I already know because they&#8217;re upgrading a license. But all of the new ones and sometimes we get them from a ways away from our local area. But I get to meet all of the new hams or prospective hams and talk with them about what they want to do and give them a little spiel about the club. It&#8217;s been quite successful in recruiting new club members \u2013 and that\u2019s a contribution I enjoy giving to the club.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Recorded on July 24, 2026 in Mill Valley, CA<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My name is Jim [Saltzgaber]. My ham call sign is KM6WWI, also known as Kilo Mike Six, Whiskey Whiskey Yankee. I got started with ham radio way back, when I was a preteen. A church that we attended \u2013 one of the ladies who kind of ran a lot of the programs there had her [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":139,"menu_order":16,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"oral-history","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-324","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/324","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=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":326,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/324\/revisions\/326"}],"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=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}