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My Brief Radio History:
Thank you for visiting the KF6GIU homepage. My name is Ben Totanes. My interest in radios
started back in 1981 when a bunch of my friends in the Philippines introduced me to Citizens
Band. I still remember staying up late until the wee hours of the morning chatting away on a
borrowed rig and a homebrewed 3-element yagi which I had mounted on a 20-foot 2-inch water pipe.
Now it's the nineties. Many things have changed yet some have remained as they were. For one thing, the friends who introduced me to CB sixteen years ago are the same friends who introduced me to Amateur Radio. They founded the Magellan Amateur Radio Repeater Network (MARRN) , a group comprised of Filipino-Americans with extreme dedication to the hobby -- which I am a member of. The 1.2 GHz-band network stretches from our base in Los Angeles to San Diego in the south, east to Las Vegas and reaches north to the San Francisco bay-area. Currently, I have a Technician-Plus class license and hope to upgrade to General Class soon.
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My Setup: My current radio is a Yaesu FT-900AT compact HF transceiver connected to a G5RV dipole (see column on the right for details). I will upgrade to a Yagi or a Quad beam mounted on a tower towards the end of this year.
On 70cm/23cm, I have an Icom IC-X2A HT and a Yaesu 6200 dual-band mobile radio, these I both use to hang out on 23cm (1.285.700). I'm currently saving "dinero" for a tri-band to extend my coverage to two-meters. My Opinion About the HAM Market: I'm simply amazed at how smaller operations dominate and how major mass electronics retailers haven't caught on this nice market niche. Retailers such as HRO need more competition. In my opinion, they've been complacent and need that "jolt" to get them off their butts. As an example, they close every weekday by 5:30PM and are closed every Sunday. I remember my first reaction to this was: "Whoa?!, not even banks do this anymore, they're enjoying near-monopoly in my area, they need competition". Just think about it. What other electronics shop enjoy such hours? Anyone who has any capital, contact me, I have a marketing plan for you. |
My Line of Work: I'm a Marketing Manager for a computer firm in Fremont, CA. I've been with the computer industry for fifteen years though I started toying with programming
and electronics even before the word "IBM PC" became a household name. Currently,
I have my three systems at home Ethernet-networked using a Pentium Pro server running Windows
NT 3.51. I've received a copy of Intranetware from Novell, needless to say, I will be experimenting on this new version very soon.
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Email1: [email protected]
Email2: [email protected] Email3: [email protected] Website1: Family Webpage Website2: REC.MUSIC.FILIPINO You are visitor FREE software! Visit my FTP site to download freeware versions of Eudora, WS-FTP, WinVN, LView Pro and others! |
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