About Me - KB9ZRO

As a young man growing up in upstate New York, I always had an interest in radio and electronics.  I also had dreams of becoming a New York State Trooper and helping people.  My neighbors, my brother and myself were constantly playing cops and robbers.

Where did these interests come from?  Well my father was an electronics technician in the U. S. Navy before I was born and then he was a mechanic, the only one in town that the Troopers trusted with repairing their vehicles. My father repaired other peoples TV's also.  My mother was a waitress and waited on several of the NY Troopers.  As kids we got to know some of the Troopers and waved as we were out riding our bikes (our squads).  I developed a respect for these gentlemen.  On occasion they would pull over and show us how their radar worked.

My father bought a short-wave radio in my late teen years and I was fascinated by listening to the aircraft bands and hearing foreign languages.  Fascinated in part because we believed in UFO's at that time and would wonder if they could hear and talk on it too.

This was all in the 70's when CB's became the rage.  Friends in school had their CB license's and I longed to have one too.  Fortunately for me they did away with the license requirements and my brother won a pair of walkie-talkies that were on the channel 14 frequency of the CB band.  We then had radios for cops and robbers and drove the truck drivers nuts!

In high school I began to avidly read all I could about electronics.  At that time there were not a whole lot of books in the library and the ones they had were on tube theory and not the new solid state transistor theory that was rapidly developing then.

The first time I ever heard of ham radio was from a girl I dated when she was learning Morse code so she could get her license.  At that time I had little interest in ham radio because I didn't know a whole lot about it and I thought she was nuts because she was so passionate about it.  Oh by the way this girl's brother....he's now on Saturday Night Live, a show my brother and I would have died to be on, my brother as a comedian and myself as a musician.