Get ready to welcome FARA honorary member Samir Durakovic T99S (ex-T94ON), who will be visiting New England this month from Sarajevo.
Many FARA members know Samir from his work during the war in Bosnia, when he was passing messages in and out of besieged Sarajevo. Trying to survive in unimaginably difficult circumstances -- Sarajevo was under constant shelling and sniper fire, with food, water, heating sources and electricity cut off by Serb nationalist forces choking the city -- Samir nevertheless managed to stay on the air.
He and Danny T93M now also N1ZPE -- also a FARA member, now living in New Hampshire and designing antennas for Cushcraft -- were able to get messages to and from people who had no other way of communications (phone lines were cut and mail service impossible). Samir recounted some of those experiences in QST (``Heroes Under Siege,'' October, 1995). He and Danny managed to get T9 on the air during major DX contests, despite the lack of electricity (they often ran on homemade generators) and the fact that putting up large antennas would attract shellfire from the surrounding hills.
Thankfully, two years after the Dayton peace agreement formally ended the war, conditions are much different now in Sarajevo. We expect Samir to drop by our April meeting, where we hope to prevail on him to talk about ham radio today in post-war Bosnia. He should also be audible from time to time on the repeater as W1/T99S.
Adding to FARA's T9 flavor, we want to give a warm (if belated) welcome to FARA member Kamenko Pajic T91EXA, also originally from Sarajevo and now living in Braintree with his wife Vesna Toukalek. They moved to the States last fall, and Kamenko is not yet active on the air here.
Kamenko was president of his university radio club before the war, and quite active at YU4EXA (contest call YZ4Z). An extremely talented computer professional, Kamenko is currently quite busy as MIS Manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge. We hope he'll eventually have time to enjoy ham radio again. You can find out more about him and Vesna at their Web site, http://www.fcl-us.net/~vesna/.