Topband: W5SUS on air again

[Stan Stockton]

Those who have been active on 160M for 20-30 years or more may be 
interested in this.  Others may just want to skip it.

Hopefully if nothing has gone wrong in the last few days, John, W5SUS, is 
on the air.  He had told me in December that he expected to be on the air 
by mid January.  I called this past Monday to see what the situation was 
and the lady who stays with him said that he had sent his rig off to be 
repaired and they had returned it saying there was nothing wrong.  She said 
he had been working night and day to try to make it work with no results.

For those who don't know, John is 95 years old, originally licensed as 
W9GDH, then W0GDH before retiring to Arkansas about 35 years ago and 
obtaining W5SUS.  I have known him for that length of time and he is the 
one who got me interested in working 160M around 1970.  He obtained DXCC 
#23 on 160M from Arkansas in 1982 and now lives in Florida in a highly 
antenna-restricted retirement village near New Port Richey.

On Tuesday morning I flew to Tampa to see if I could help, stayed until 
Thursday morning and got him on the air.  If the place does not make him 
take it down (they threw an absolute fit when they saw what I started to 
do) he has a fiberglass pole bracketed to the back of his aluminum- sided 
house with a wire taped to the pole and then connected to the base of an 
old WA0RFF loading coil with a few feet of aluminum tubing above that.  The 
total height is probably 30 feet and exceeds by about 10 feet or more  what 
they told me I could do which was only 5 feet above the 
roofline.  Unfortunately the ground system only consists of a single 8 foot 
ground rod that I drove in the ground with a small carpenter's 
hammer.  (Where my station is you could not drive one in 4 feet with a 
sledge hammer)

I told him I would attempt to work him at 7:00PM EST on Sunday evening on 
1829.  He only has about 100W at best to this inefficient antenna but 
hopefully we will be able to work and hopefully some of the people who have 
known John over the years will give him a call when they hear him to keep 
his interest.

I went to sleep on the couch in the other room on Wednesday night about 
midnight with a smile on my face as I listened to the sound of his hearing 
aid whistle and the familiar thump of his straight key pounding out his 
callsign as he put out a call.  He told me the next morning that he had 
heard Sweden and CT3!

Stan, K5GO