YB Land DX Club DX-ing Is Our Life
The Herald-Tribune reports that on the off chance it would be of interest, 91-year-old radio amateur Bill Sexton N1IN submitted his three-page obituary in advance
On receipt of the advance obituary Herald-Tribune reporter Billy Cox wrote a story about Bill Sexton:
His favorite uncle Hale was a ham operator in Owensboro, Kentucky.
Hale had boorish neighbors who would play their radio so loudly through the open windows at night, the noise imposed on everybody. So Hale built a transmitter that generated static, targeted whatever frequency the boors tuned into, and repeatedly drove them crazy with static buzz.
“Just think,” Sexton ruminates. “Perhaps my uncle was the creator of cyber warfare.”
Sexton became a ham operator as soon as he retired from newspapers in 1990, back when learning Morse Code was still a licensing requirement.
He joined MARS [Military Auxiliary Radio System] the following year, before retiring in 2019 “when I felt incapable of handling the encryption. I guess you could say the computer finally got the best of me.”
He keeps his equipment stored in a shack in the back yard. With help from his wife Bonnie, he hoists himself onto his walker and shows it all off: the power supply, the transmitter, the microphone, Morse key — all that stuff still works. He dons the baseball cap bearing his civilian radio handle, N1IN, as well as his MARS identity, AAA9PA.
Hanging framed on a wall back in the house is a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award from 2017, in “grateful recognition … for National and Community Service.”
Read the full Herald-Tribune story at
https://www.heraldtribune.com/news/20200106/man-who-saw-future-talks-up-radio
In 2014 the ARRL wrote about the Korean War veteran saying “Sexton has an impressive and extensive journalism background, having served for 13 years with United Press International in Raleigh and Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as in Detroit, New York, and London. He also logged 20 years with Newsday, 7 of them as editorial page editor of the Long Island daily and nearly that long as a foreign correspondent covering Asia. He also served 3 years as associate director of the American Press Institute at Columbia University.”
Read the ARRL story at
http://www.arrl.org/news/army-mars-public-affairs-officer-bill-sexton-n1in-aar1fp-retires
