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MY BACKGROUND: I was born in 1949 and except for short periods of time while I was in college and in the Army Reserve, I have lived in the same house in Knoxville, IL all my life.
MY EDUCATION: I attended St. Joseph's Academy in Galesburg through grade 6 and then switched to Knoxville Junior High. I graduated from Knoxville High School in 1968 and from Western Illinois University in 1972 with a BS degree in Physics and with minors in mathematics and education.
MY WORK: After graduation from college, I went to work for a Lindstrom't TV in Galesburg, IL. Charlie Brown, a high school friend was the service manager there. In 1983, Charlie and his wife Pat started a store in Knoxville and I started Johnson Video Service, a VCR service business within their TV & Satellite service business. After a few more years, they moved their store to Galesburg and after about a half year with them in the big city, I moved my VCR business to its present location in my home town Knoxville.
PART TIME WORK: I teach evening classes in electronics at Carl Sandburg College, the local Community College and attempt to write programs for Macintosh computers. Lately my programming has been limited to web page creation. If you follow some of my links you will see several examples of my web pages.
AMATEUR RADIO: I was first licensed in 1970 as a Novice. My call was WN9DDF and my "Elmer" was "Hap" Barret, W9JAH, who was one of my Physics instructors. I upgraded to Advanced in 1972 and to Extra in 1976. My Physics background made the written exams seem easy but it took me two tries to get the 20WPM CW test passed. This was under the FCC's old rules. I had to take a train to Chicago (the arm pit of Illinois) and walk to the Federal building just to take the test. There were no multiple choice or fill in the blank code tests. Applicants had to get one minute of solid copy at 20WPM.
CLUB TRUSTEE: Since I was one of the few hams in the area who was willing to put up with all it took to get an Extra class license, I was asked to become the license trustee for W9GFD, the club station for Prairie Amateur Radio Club. A few years later the club changed its name to the Knox County Amateur Radio Club, but the club call is still the same and I am still the trustee. The club operates a repeater on 147.000 (-600) now until recently operated a club station in the Red Cross building. The Red Cross has recently moved to a smaller building and we are looking for a new location for a club station.