Looking for more adventure, I upgraded my Novice license to Technician, and dropped the "N" to became K2GVL. I began operating on 6 meters after building a Heathkit Sixer (Benton Harbor Lunchbox). The Sixer was lots of fun, but eventually, the ads in QST got my eyeballs rolling and after some cajoling, my parents bought me a Gonset Communicator III (Gooney Box). Six meters offered lots of opportunity to experiment with antennas, and I tried about everything I could put on the roof of our apartment building: dipoles, halos, ground planes, and small beams which I made from TV antenna parts and stuff I would find in the surplus parts bins on radio-row near the Battery. In the late fifties, TVI on Six meters was a serious problem. I bought filters and installed them on my neighbors TV sets and fixed a lot of frayed antenna wiring, but eventually I had to settle into operating late at night, early in the morning or during non-prime time hours to keep TVI problems manageable. My foray into microwaves was short and unspectacular. Using a surplus 726A Klystron, I built a polaplexer from an article in QST but I abandoned the idea of doing any serious communications when I couldn't find anyone willing to build a second one. The polaplexer did work though. I was able to hear the signal as it bounced back from the blades of a whirling electric fan. So my microwave record remains at something under 50 feet. I never sent myself a QSL card so it's my word against my word.

After graduating from CCNY in early 1964, Ham radio took a back seat where it would remain for many years. I started my Army career and got married. We moved quite a bit at first and my interest in Ham radio waned. I kept dabbling in electronics, building stuff mainly from electronics magazines that at least seemed at the first reading to be a great idea. In 1967 our daughter was born followed by our son in 1971. The following year I completed an MS in Nuclear Engineering at NC State and we moved to the northern Virginia for a utilization assignment at the Pentagon. At the Pentagon, I was introduced to a roomful of machinery known as an IBM-360 and after a short introduction wading through some boring and largely incomprehensible manuals, I started to program the thing. I was actually assigned as a strategic analyst, but I quickly learned in that assignment if you couldn't program a computer to fill up reams of paper with tables then you got no data to analyze. That also was in the days of punched card machines, card sorters, batch processing, and of course plenty of free chad, and ketchup. Batch processing generally meant that if the first job failed, so did all the others behind it. The card sorters helped put a deck back together after the box of punched cards was unceremoniously dropped. The punched card machines created chad. The chad piled up on the floor and ketchup sometimes hardened on a tape making it somewhat less than unreadable. I hated hamburgers with ketchup for some time.