{"id":383,"date":"2026-08-20T10:04:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T10:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/?page_id=383"},"modified":"2026-08-20T11:09:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T11:09:09","slug":"oral-history-jerry-foster-wa6bxv","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/home\/oral-histories\/oral-history-jerry-foster-wa6bxv\/","title":{"rendered":"Oral History: Jerry Foster, WA6BXV"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-cover has-custom-content-position is-position-bottom-center\" style=\"min-height:650px;aspect-ratio:unset;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-block-cover__image-background wp-image-384 size-full\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jerry-Foster-WA6BXV.jpeg\" style=\"object-position:53% 21%\" data-object-fit=\"cover\" data-object-position=\"53% 21%\"\/><span aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-cover__background has-background-dim-0 has-background-dim\" style=\"background-color:#665c62\"><\/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\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jerry-Foster-WA6BXV.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My name is Jerry Foster, WA6BXV, is my ham call.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Been a ham for 67 years. My dad on my, I think, 11th birthday brought me a military receiver home, a BC-342N. The 342 was a receiver used on the B-17 bombers. It was a shortwave receiver and I used to tune and listen to Radio Moscow, BBC, Voice of America, the world on that radio. And then all of a sudden I kept hearing da-da, dit-da, da-dit, da-da, you know. I said, this is intriguing, what&#8217;s that? My dad said, well, that&#8217;s Morse code. And I was in Boy Scouts then, and so I started learning, you know, A through Z, A, da-da, and you know, numbers. So with this BC-342, I was fascinated. Then all of a sudden I had built a crystal radio. And the crystal radio, you know, you could hear the AM band.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And all of a sudden there was KCBS, the only station on my crystal radio as a Boy Scout. I said, well, I really like this military radio because I could really hear a lot more people all over the world. And then I tuned in my first ham operator, a guy talking, and I said, and I would listen to this guy who happened to live, you know, a mile away in Fresno, California. So I would listen to his conversation, and I could hear the other guy on the other side. And I said, you know, this is fascinating. I think I wanna do this. So my dad, I was telling him, he was a colonel, by the way, in the Air Force, a pilot. He had his communications officer who was a lieutenant, who was a ham operator. And he said, hey, Jerry, I hear you&#8217;re interested in amateur radio. Would you like to get your ham radio licensed? He said, well, it&#8217;s five words a minute in Morse code and about, you know, 32 question Novice test. So I remember he came over and my dad and I were having a beer talking about military stuff. So he said, okay, Jerry, I&#8217;ve got the paperwork from the FCC, and I&#8217;m going to give you your test. Are you ready? And here you are, 12, 13 years old. Oh, yes, sir. So I took the code test first. That was the priority. Aced it. And he was impressed. And so I took the&nbsp; test, and he actually graded and said, oh, you passed. So we&#8217;re going to send all the paperwork in. So about a month later in the mail, I get from the Federal Communications Commission&#8217;s WV6BXB. Wow, I am really a licensed novice amateur radio operator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So this lieutenant says, now that you got your Novice, I&#8217;m going to put together an old military ARC-5 transmitter system. But back in those days, it was crystal controlled single frequency. And it was an ARC-5 was a radio used on the B-17 bombers, wow. So here I&#8217;ve got this military BC-342 receiver, military, you know, with all these knobs and things. And so he modified this for 40 meters CW with a few little crystals I can get on different frequencies. He brought it over and helped me put up an antenna.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I made my first contact. I couldn&#8217;t send, I couldn&#8217;t touch the key because I was so, but I, you know, you get used to it. Like any language, you have to talk it, you have to use it, you have to experience Russian and German and French, Morse code, it\u2019s a language. So when I started making contacts, it became easier and easier, but I still wanted to get on voice. You know, that was, you know, that&#8217;s part of the thrill. And then to get a General, you have to learn 13 words a minute and Extra, this is back in the day, 20 words a minute for Extra class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the 13 words a minute came, as a young 13 year old kid, I just aced that 13 words a minute. Third test was a little tougher. Some heavy electronics, Pinto tubes, filament tubes, and plate grid. I think I flunked it the first time, but I said, well, I&#8217;m gonna get it the next time. So I went in, got my General, cause you have to go to the Federal Communications Commission in San Francisco, 555 Battery Street. We went on the bus to San Francisco from Novato. So I remember going up to the FCC and you go in this room and here&#8217;s this archaic tube code machine, probably made by Marconi back in, looked like probably 1920\/30 code sender. So we all put on our earphones and the FCC guy could see everybody is, you know, very nervous. So he goes over and opens up the window to get some fresh air in that room. And all of a sudden, out in the street out there, you hear, and I&#8217;m trying to copy. Everybody&#8217;s laughing, you know, we&#8217;re, this is funny. You know, he even says, oh, I&#8217;m sorry, I&#8217;m sorry. After everybody relaxed, he closed the window, restarted the code, I aced the code right away. And I took my third test and passed. So the Extra was probably 1961, maybe, yeah.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I was in the Navy, we had the Collins radio equipment aboard our submarine. You know, it&#8217;s a stack-mounted radio, beautiful radio, 500-watt amplifier, nice receiver. Matter of fact, when I was on watch every day, I would go in there and tune around and listen to the hams talk. But I couldn&#8217;t say anything, obviously, on a submarine. So the captain walks in and he says, Jerry, as you know, my wife&#8217;s pregnant back in New Haven, Connecticut. And he says, could you run me a phone patch? And I go, oh, we hams can do that. He said, I know we&#8217;re out in the middle of the Atlantic. Now this is the captain of our submarine. Jerry, I will send in a message to COMSUBFLOT-Atlantic to get permission to run ham radio on our submarine. And I said, oh, that would be lots of fun.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So about, I don&#8217;t know, five or six days later, the comm officer came in and said, Jerry, here&#8217;s your permission from COMSUBFLOT-Atlantic. Because phone patches were very popular during Vietnam. The guys would run a lot of patches and stuff for the families. So I get up on with this beautiful Collins radio and I tune it to 21 megahertz \u2013 15 meter ham band. Looking for a station to run phone patch. The band was loud, a lot of stations, and I picked out this guy really loud and clear. So I get on and say, this is WA6BXV Maritime Mobile aboard the submarine. I had 10,000 people come back to me. They all wanted to talk to the submarine in the middle Atlantic. That&#8217;s when it hit me, wow, you are powerful, Jerry. So anyway, I picked this guy out on 15 meters and I said, by the way, CQ, I&#8217;m looking for someone to run a phone patch for the captain. The comm officer gets the captain and he comes and sits down like there and he, I said, captain, I&#8217;m telling the captain, captain, here&#8217;s the microphone. When you talk, just say, you know, what&#8217;s your, over. So I can key the transmitter off and on. So he&#8217;s talking to his wife and he&#8217;s got tears in his eyes.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Of course I ran other phone patches. We had one kid, his mother passed away and I ran a phone patch so he could talk to his brother. And then after the phone patches, the comm officer said, you know, Jerry, if you want to get on and make a few contacts. My chief petty officer was a chief of the boat, and was a ham operator from Maryland. He said, Jerry, let&#8217;s get some QSL cards made up with WA6BXV and a picture of our submarine, which I still have. And I thought CQ, WA6BXV, we\u2019re aboard submarine USS Blenny and I\u2019d have hundreds of guys come back \u2013 and that was thrilling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;ve always liked the emergency social events \u2013 Dipsea races, Fondo races, you know, the biking and running. Those have always been fascinating because I&#8217;ve had places where I had a guy with a compound fracture \u2013 radioed in. He was so bad EMTs had to fly chopper and pick him up. We instigated the emergency call. Hey, that&#8217;s what we do!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I remember Peter Otis and I, we were at Muir Beach one time and this runner came by and he was just soaked with blood. He had blood just all over. We sat him down and we had to put our gloves on and before the EMT guys got in. What&#8217;s wrong with this guy? Where&#8217;s this blood coming from? Peter Otis&#8217;s chair, his brand new chair was destroyed by all the blood. I mean, this is what we did, we do, we have done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, I&#8217;m a CW fan. I find talking to thousands of foreign amateurs that Morse code is a simple, easy language. A lot of Russians speak very little English, the French speak a little, little English, but they know the code OP \u2013 what&#8217;s your name, QTH \u2013 what town do you live in? So we can use the ham radio language and make pretty, pretty fair conversations. And that&#8217;s what&#8217;s unique about CW. I think that&#8217;s what turned me on because remember my old BC-342 receiver where I could hear those stations? Now I could talk to them, this is thrilling. I did it on CW probably 90% of the time. And then I got a microphone like a Shure mic or something where I could plug in and make sideband conversations.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By the way, I am happy and glad that the FCC finally said, you know, let&#8217;s do away with the code requirement because it just gives people who can&#8217;t copy. And that brought the population of ham radio back up. Dramatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You know every club I&#8217;ve been in \u2013 fishing club, gun club, radio club, the Marin Radio Club \u2013 has got politics. But to run any organization, you have to have the president, the vice president to make decisions. So I was on the board of directors of the Marin Radio Club for a few years. And I just said I don&#8217;t want to argue with people about simple, stupid things.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Years ago when we did social events like bike-a-thons, walk-a-thons radio communications was paramount for emergency communication. And it was important that the operators learn emergency traffic handling, emergency communications. What I see today, these guys want to be too commercial. They want to use these programs on their cell phones to send their traffic. What they&#8217;re not doing is letting the people send the message by voice because when there&#8217;s a real disaster, cell phone&#8217;s not going to be there. The walkie talkie, the ham radio is going to be. And I have many examples, I&#8217;ve been through earthquake emergency drills, floods \u2013 two meters, voice. There was no internet connection or anything like that. Well, you&#8217;re getting away from what originally is to teach people how to radio communicate. Not, you&#8217;ve got a program that you type out this stuff and burst it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To inspire a new ham, I think you just have to give them one of those cheap radios and let them listen to our repeaters and all the emergency comms we do. Tune in and say, oh, you know, I think I&#8217;d like to get a license and like anybody, you don&#8217;t want to push it down their throats. You just want to kind of show them what it&#8217;s about. And then if there&#8217;s an interest there, they&#8217;ll come.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Since I was in the submarine service, I knew about the submarine Pampanito museum in San Francisco. One of my ham friends was also in the submarine service. He was actually in World War II. And I just loved talking to him, you know, and he said, Jerry, would you like to come down to Pier 45 and be on the submarine Pampanito and operate? What? Oh, yeah! I had never gone on the museum tour and I wanted to, so I went down and somebody donated a Yaesu transceiver. I put it on CW and started working guys on it. And actually the museum manager thought it was so cool to hear Morse code coming out of that radio room. Cause as the visitors would come by, they would listen to the Morse code. And I said, well, I&#8217;m, I&#8217;m adding an attraction. And the other guy says, well, geez, they were CW people. So we&#8217;ll, we&#8217;ll just operate more CW.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the radio room is a TBL-8. It&#8217;s the original 1940 transmitter. A thousand pounds of total metal, six feet tall. You can open up a window. It looks like a light, a light bulb tube in there that power this too. And I said, wow, wouldn&#8217;t this be cool to fire up, you know, to actually get to operate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I ran into some other guys who were also World War II radio buffs or Vietnam or Korean war radio enthusiasts. And I said, Hey, is there anybody out there that knows anything about this TBL-8 and three guys from the East Bay said \u2013 Oh yeah, Jerry, I know about the Pampanito\u2019s. Let&#8217;s fire it up. Let&#8217;s get it going. So we spent months down in the pump room,where they have big generators, cooling systems for the air conditioning and stuff. But here&#8217;s our TBL motor generator. That&#8217;s been sitting there probably hadn&#8217;t been fired up for 40 years, 30 years. So we actually took it apart and ohm-ed it out and zoom-ed it out. It takes like 230 volts DC. Remember on a submarine \u2013 it&#8217;s a hybrid \u2013 a battery and a diesel electric and it used to have 250, two volt batteries in the forward compartment and about 173 batteries in the aft compartment. Each cell is 1000 pounds, but it&#8217;s two volts. It&#8217;s a solid 1000 pound cell, two volts. So if you have 187, that&#8217;s 187,000 pounds of batteries on a submarine. So that 250 volts DC would power that motor generator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So we all said, we can&#8217;t power the motor generator. So the museum somehow confiscated or stole from Mare Island when they were closing down \u2013 one of the portable power regulator systems. As you know, it was a lot of submarines that go in there for repair and all that. And they would pull up at the pier. At the end of the pier, they had all these regulated power supplies that the city power could power them and run the submarine without batteries. We got one, we got a power supply. Neat! So finally the electricians, the city museum wired it up and we got 250 volts DC to turn on the motor generator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We finally powered the motor generator up and \u2013 it really sounded pretty impressive. And we tuned up the radio, we had all the voltages, the currents look good. The filaments of all these old tubes light up. And I got on 40 meters CW. My first contact was a guy in Washington state with that big World War 2 TBL-8 transmitter. Wow, how many people get to operate a radio off a submarine?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I probably have about 25 different radios that I&#8217;ve collected \u2013 military radios. For example, the Navajo Indian code talkers \u2013 they had this thing called a TBY that they carried on their back. And the Navajos learned to talk their code \u2013 Navajo language. And the Japanese could never understand Navajo. So that&#8217;s why it was so unique in the Pacific.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So that TBY, I found one kind of not working on eBay. I said, oh, I got to get this thing. So I took it home and put new capacitors in it. And there was an Italian ham operator who actually made a custom power supply for that TBY. I mean, go think. He made a lot of custom things for old military radios. I said, this guy&#8217;s perfect because in all these radios I have sitting up here, I can actually get going because he was selling the power supply for 80 bucks, a hundred bucks. I bought a few of his power supplies. And now I have that TBY, not a TBL like the submarine, but the TBY and it works. I think it works like on the CB band, the frequency of the 27 megahertz, but it works.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The World War II walkie talkies, our first cell phone, you know, it was a kind of a long thing. You pull out the antenna where they&#8217;re airborne, First Airborne, they had a pouch that when they jumped, they had it sit on their belly when they would parachute out these little handy talkies. But I love repairing those and they work. So that&#8217;s one of my hobbies within a hobby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My name is Jerry Foster, WA6BXV, is my ham call.\u00a0 Been a ham for 67 years. My dad on my, I think, 11th birthday brought me a military receiver home, a BC-342N. The 342 was a receiver used on the B-17 bombers. It was a shortwave receiver and I used to tune and listen to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":139,"menu_order":18,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"oral-history","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-383","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/383","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=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401,"href":"https:\/\/w6sg.net\/site_2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/383\/revisions\/401"}],"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=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}