Elmer, Phil Woodard, W5KRZ (1900-1973)
(photo unavailable)

Phil deserves a large writeup.  Mentioned in Hubbard Tornado, 1973 March 10.

In summer 1971, my family moved again, a hundred miles away to Hubbard, Texas.  Rob and I stayed in touch by mail and, at some point both had the idea to get into amateur radio to stay in touch and "save postage."  (Keep in mind, it was a different era.)  We each wrote the other about this idea cold and crossed in the mail!  He was elmered by A. Peters, W5LHX, and first licensed WN5FID in September 1971 (part of the old Taylor High School club, where Rob's brother Ted had gotten started) while and I studied a friend from church, Phil Woodard, W5KRZ,  licensed WN5GRZ in March 1972.  Around a year after that, we had our first QSO (amateur radio contact).  We were in very regular contact through high school, college, and into the early 80s while our lives, careers, and amateur radio interests diverged otherwise.  We did Field Days '81, '82, '83, and '86 together and I returned to Taylor July 4th, 1992 to play organ at Rob's wedding.

Upgraded through General, Advanced, and Extra before leaving for college.  These exams make other interesting stories, particularly the 20 WPM Code test.

Rob and I tried working into Ft. Worth (34/94) from the roof of the church with an extension chord run down into the attic.  Had one mid-day minimums QSO.

Was briefly (figurehead) President of the Mid-Texas Amateur Radio Club.  Trustee was Bud Webb, K5QVI (see next) in Hillsboro.  Repeater was 04/64.

Baylor University, Waco, Texas, 1974 - 1978

Was a Piano Performance Major.

Freshman:  Brought my GE Progress Line converted taxi-cab radio to 511 Brooks (dormitory).  (Conversions were sponsored by K5QVI in nearby Hillsboro.)  Lugged the main unit, 25 feet of control cable, the control head, and a car battery up five flights of stairs to set up in our attic - gables room.  The rig had 34/94 (closest was Ft. Worth, 100 miles north) 28/88 (local in Waco), 52/52, and 04/64 (Hillsboro, 30 miles north).  Did not get much use.  The other six guys in the room didn't want to listen to it.

Sophomore:  No amateur radio involvement, nearly dropped out entirely.  This was long before Baylor had an engineering school or WA5BU.

Junior:  Ran a QRPp Micro-Mountaineer built by Bill Cox, W5JRM (another ham from Hubbard) to thirty feet of wire out of a second floor dormitory window (Kokernot).  Made a few contacts.  Used the same rig as a minimalist in Borger, Texas at my grandfather's house using his old A.M. aeriel for an antenna.

Senior.  Burning out on music.  Worked as a DJ at KEFC (95.5 FM, later KNFO later gone) local Christian FM station.  Got a Second Phone Commercial license to do this.  Built a Heathkit 2036 (synthesized FM radio) in the first three days of spring break.  Bought an Argonaut 509 with 405 50-watt linear and operated a 100 foot longwire above Knotty Pines apartments.  Interfered with the guy's stereo upstairs and TVs for blocks.  (Local hams called on two meters to complain!)  Participated in Heart of Texas ARC Field Day, WD5IAF ('Idiots And Fools').

Dallas, Texas, 1978 - 1980

Married Viann Owens, a nursing student at Baylor (now WD5EHM) and lived in apartments near Baylor Medical Center and Love Field.  Operated minimally with the Argonaut.  Interfered with new neighbors.  Worked at Balch Springs Police Department as a dispatcher.  Upgraded to First Phone and got a job at the Channel 39, KXTX transmitter (where the tower later collapsed in, I think, 1993).  Later moved into the Ch. 39 studios north of downtown on Harry Hines and worked as a video tape editor and operator.

Tomball, Texas, 1980 - 1984

Used the Argonaut 509 / 405 with a 300 foot long wire and tuner.  Built up a budget satellite station from kits with the antennas remoted to the middle of the 5 acres property with surplus cables.  Collaborated with W0RPK to produce the AMS-81 satellite tracking software (see W0RPK below).  Worked as an installer for Houston Cable TV (Warner).

Suffered the loss of AMSAT's Phase III-A spacecraft, and the operational but damaged AO-10, as recounted here:

Monday, May 23, 2005  is the 25th Anniversary of what is known around AMSAT as "Black Friday".  This is the day that the first Phase III (highly elliptical orbit) satellite was launched on the second Ariane IV launcher.

It was Memorial Day weekend and most of the AMSAT die-hards who had real jobs (and how could you be an AMSAT die-hard without having a real job?) had arranged to take a four day weekend, beginning on that Friday.  Launch from Korou was late in the afternoon, mid-afternoon in the U.S.

I had a brand new job at Houston Cable TV (a subsidiary of Warner) as an installer/technician.  We had just moved from Dallas (where I had worked as a video-tape editor at KXTX, Ch. 39, part of Pat Robertson's empire) to the northwest Houston area to help take care of my father-in-law and his five acre place near Tomball.  So, with one month on the job, I had no time off and went to work in the warm humidity that day in anxious anticipation.  There was no local coverage on VHF and no opportunity to for me to listen anyway, as I drove around in Unit #10 servicing irate customers, drilling holes in their walls, digging trenches in their yards, so I was really ready for quitting time, for getting home, perhaps during Orbit #0 to listen to what would now be called "AMSAT Launch Information Network" on 80 meters, and maybe OSCAR-9 beacons from geosynchronous transfer space on 2....

(My father-in-law died in June and the following year, after making elaborate Field Day '81 plans, I quit that job at Houston Cable in a little spat over who would take call that weekend.  The network was not well built out, there had been acquisitions, and these combined with new construction throughout that corner of the county meant that being on call typically meant working a 40 hour weekend.  On Field Day?  Are you kidding?  Anyway, I was tired of being accused by non-subscriber neighbors of bringing porn into their neighborhoods with this new-fangled cable TV thing anyway and, at any rate, couldn't get the service myself because I didn't live in our service area.)

Phase III A had had it's own rough winter.  Late in testing, for example, they had discovered that the harness for the two meter tripole actually caused it to be left hand circularly polarized rather than right handed.  Word had been put out on the nets immediately, but this had meant lots of devout supporters climbing towers in the dead of winter and bringing down hand-built antennas to make hard switches.  (This was long before M² or Hygain caught on to any potential market.)  Jan, W3GEY was heard to say that designing, building, and loading a tripole to do what you thought it would was ... "tricky".

Keep in mind that, up to that time, all the ham satellites had been LEO.  Oscars 7 and 8 were still working.  OSCAR 7 alternated between Mode B and Mode A with a 432 MHz beacon.  (That beacon had required a waiver, as the 435 - 438 MHz satellite band did not yet exist and 432 was not anywhere part of the Amateur Satellite Service.  It also had an S-Band beacon which they had never been able to get authorization to turn on, although it was seen to accidentally false on once in a while as they lost control late in AO-7s first life.  The beacon was never copied, only seen to be powered from telemetry.)  AO-8, a side-gig by the ARRL, actually to bridge the gap between Phase II and Phase III (OSCAR 7 was getting old) had modes A, J, and AJ, and, of course "off / recharge" which was UTC Wednesdays, which is why all the HF nets were on Tuesday evening.

My rig was the Argonaut 509 (with 405 "linear").  Using the receiver from my second ham station, a Hallicrafter's SX-111 and later a second Argonaut 515, I was building up a satellite station from converters, mostly Hamtronics kits.  So far, I had 10 to 2 for transmitting and a PA that went to something like 25 watts.  I had homebrewed a 2 meter ten element (five in each plane) yagi and a 70 cm helix and had them on a telephone pole with rotators.  (Later all this would be remoted to the middle of a pasture 300 feet from the shack with everything including local battery power and a full up ten meter turnstile, but that's a different story).  I was making contacts on Mode A, had finished a 2 meter receive converter and had monitored mode B.  I had a 70 cm receive converter working and had monitored the OSCAR 7 beacon on that new helix too.  On launch day I was still soldering on the 70 cm transmit converter but was ready to throw a switch and listen to the OSCAR-9 beacon.

P3A was going to be Mode B only, but that was fine.  It had a solid fuel kick motor and so probably would have been the only amateur satellite propulsion system to have worked correctly, had it had the chance.  There was enough ISP to get from 5 degrees to 57 degrees inclination, near the Molniya point which would have favored the northern hemisphere at first then drifted around to the southern if it lasted enough years.  This would not be sun-synchronous.  Those long periods of availability into Europe or wherever would be distributed throughout the day and night as the seasons passed.

I tell this long story to give some idea of the worldwide anticipation on May 23, 1980, as I experienced it in my own small way.  Amateur Radio was about to move into a new era, one of routine, (if irregular) intercontinental, long period access on VHF and UHF. Jan King was particularly happy that it was all over.  There is a picture in an AMSAT magazine of the period showing him on the phone from Korou talking to somebody back in the states (maybe his poor, long suffering wife).  The satellite was all closed out and buttoned up, never to be touched again.  He had a new job lined up working on a magnetometer for the space shuttle.  The one condition of that new job was "no AMSAT".  He, his employer, and his family couldn't have been happier and it showed on his face in that picture.  It was like a long ordeal was over.  He said it was very much like having a baby.

So, finally I was off work that Friday and got home about dark.  It was going to be a great weekend of listening carefully for that weak beacon signal from way way out there.  The normal nets and frequencies had been active from late afternoon and into the evening to cover the news of the day as close to live as possible.  All we had was a telephone hookup to Korou.  I plugged in the soldering iron, tuned on the Argonaut to 3840 and started rummaging for my 70 cm transmit converter parts.  Within five minutes, the news was repeated.  There was no OSCAR 9.  I unplugged the soldering iron. (Eventually I finished that kit, but the 30 watt shoes for it is under my workbench at home to this day.)

There had been a launch window of something like 90 minutes.  After dealing with some problems, with about 30 seconds remaining, they thought they were ready and the launch had been approved.  The rocket didn't "sound right" nearly from liftoff, however.  It underperformed significantly and went into the ocean nearby off the coast.

Later it was learned that unanticipated acoustic resonances had occurred in the firing chamber of one of the first stage Vulcain engines causing unexpectedly rapid and therefore "catastrophic" erosion.  (The fix for this was to manufacturer those chambers to somewhat higher tolerance.)  The net effect was that power output was far below spec.  By the time that (parts of) the rocket cleared the beach it was in serious trouble.  Everything went into the sea somewhere on the way to Devil's Island, including the three solar cells that I had sponsored for $10 each (out of my $5.11 / hour income!).

A search was conducted.  Observers in helicopters saw cannisters of another payload, "Firewheel" floating in the water.  (Firewheel was supposed spray some florescent stuff into the Van Allen belts so we could see them in color at night.)  Karl Meinzer speculated that the Phase III A satellite was much less mechanically robust and much smaller.  There was little chance that anything would be seen and none that anything would be recovered.

Well, our lives all took different turns then.  There was some sort of partial insurance settlement involving Ariane and AMSAT that was used to fund another try at a Phase III.  Jan backed out of his STS job and was hired by AMSAT for two years with some of that money. Work on Phase III B soon commenced.  This would ultimately be OSCAR 10, which we still use today, though it had it's own long history of problems.  Due in part to those problems (which were partially blamed on being bumped by the upper stage after deployment) there was yet another settlement leading to Phase III C, OSCAR 13, which was fine until it dug a trench somewhere off South America.

Brand new AMSAT President Tom Clark, W3IWI and his right-hand-man Vern Riportello, WB2LQQ, dealt with hundreds of pieces of mail offering condolences or misguided offers of help or suggestions on how to proceed.  Tom, probably the longest standing member of the AMSAT BoD today, still claims credit for "saving" the institution from this disaster.  Rip (who appointed me AMSAT VP Operations just before resigning over some silly liability insurance thing) died of a massive heart attack a few years ago, 1998 I think.

And the OSCAR - 9 designator went to UO-9, the first satellite out of the University of Surrey, a new paradigm in itself being mostly about science and engineering rather than communications.

But, as we all know all too well, everybody who works in this business goes through this once in a while.  It's not much fun, work or play.

Today, of course, it is a different world, partly as a result.  For my own misguided offering, I took time off (which I finally did have) and flew to Baltimore-Washington in November to spend the weekend at Jan's house.  Met his son Ian who was about ten months younger than ... OSCAR 7 and his wife Donna who was nearly due with their daughter Nadia.  (Something about the water in Korou was the joke around the office.)  I toured the "fishbowl" the AMSAT lab at Goddard, and talked seriously with Jan and Tom and Dick Daniels and Rich Zwirko and others about working for AMSAT on the P III B project.  I saw S-100 based graphic tracking programs, kick motor test masses, Phase III space frames, and all sorts of other neat stuff.

Well, as a piano major with TV and Cable TV experience, I was not qualified.

So, that spring, I enrolled in engineering school at the U. of Houston from which I coop'd at JSC and eventually graduated, Summa Cum Laude, with Honors, with a thesis about micro-metrology instrumentation in IC manufacturing.  Everybody thought I was doing this for the money, but I always thought I was doing it for the hobby.  When I got my first real engineering job (at an upstart run by the guy who had been my boss at JSC), I seriously underbid it, to his great surprise.  Up to that point, I had no idea what the economics of the engineering profession were like.

And, although that U of H GPA got my resume in the door at JPL, it was an AMSAT project, the AMS-81 tracking program for the Sinclair ZX-81 computer (yes...) that was one of the two or three main resume/interview items that ultimately landed me a job at JPL.  Larry Young did not want another post-doc who was interested in their own minute part of navigation research, earth atmosphere loading, or solid earth tides, or mysterious forces in the outer solar system, or third order ionospheric scintillation effects over equatorial regions, things that other people in 335 do, he wanted someone who could and would write zeroth or first order navigation software for an embedded system, the Rogue Receiver.

And, so, here we are today, Black Friday now being eligible for QCWA.

And, so, It is with mixed emotions, as always, that I wish you all a happier remembrance of a dark day that was a big turning point for amateur radio, and for me, actually, in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

End of Phase III A story, continuing with biography:

Under the management of then AMSAT Vice President - Operations, Ralph Wallio, W0RPK, I wrote a full up (but slow to execute) tabular satellite tracking program for the Sinclair ZX-81 computer.  These $100 hobbyist systems had 16K RAM and were programmed in Basic.  We had a system that did visibility predictions and near-real-time antenna aiming calculations (the antennas then had to be aimed manually by the operator).  At 110 baud, it took five minutes to load or save into the little Z-80 system from a cassette tape recorder.  That was the last time I used Basic seriously.

Houston, Texas, 1984 - 1987

Lived in an apartment near the Astrodome to which we brought home our first baby, Viannah (now KG6GXW).  Did FD-85 QRP from the apartment with a short 30 guage "long" wire, interfering with the upstairs neighbors "touch" lights.  Bought an IC-02AT, IC-3AT, IC-4AT and made extensive use of all of them.

Got a second bachelor's degree, in Electrical Engineering with Honors at University of Houston, 1986.  Worked as a Coop at Johnson Space Center, as a small businessman collaborating with MTS in Cypress, and for Microlink making paging transmitter controllers in Webster.

Moved to Prestonwood (back northwest towards Tomball) with the new baby and started setting up a "real" satellite station (IC-27A/471A).  Got started in packet radio, worked on the HouSat amateur satellite upstart.

I wrote an article Power Budget and Eclipse Considerations for PTSE-H which is more broadly applicable than to just PTSE-H.  That entire edition of the AMSAT Technical Journal V. 1. No. 1, is available here.  An even better and more useful article, dispelling some of the presumptions that beginners have about communications through low earth orbit assets, is in the next edition, A Method for Evaluating Antennas for a Low Earth Orbit Mission, here.  This paper has been cited in at least one PhD dissertation!

Had our second daughter, Katherine, now KG6HUI.

La Canada, California, 1987 - present

Work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, first in high precision scientific GPS systems, later on the Space Interferometry Mission, and now as a navigation software and autonomous spacecraft navigations system developer.  Was AMSAT Vice President for Operations from 1988 - 1991 and am an ongoing member of the JPL ARC, W6VIO.  Have participated in several Field Days, Sweep Stakes, Top Band, VHF/UHF and other on the air operating activities and am currently getting involved in software defined radios from the DSP-10 platform.  See n5bf/6 ham radio page.

Ultimately, I plan an AMSAT autobiography page, a subset similar to this one.  For now, here's a paper about the AMSAT Microsats (I was in charge of AO-16) that I collaborated on.

And, this is interesting.  Here is an assembly code listing of a program that I wrote to provide an interface between computer satellite tracking programs and antennas that wanted to point at the satellites in the sky.  This was for use between InstanTrack, a PC-XT or AT graphic satellite position tracking program and an interface board, the WB5IPM rotator drive control.  The program itself is a "TSR" (Terminate and Stay Resident).  I know that I once had the skill to write these programs and that I actually did such things professionally (at MicroLink, on paging transmitters), and I remember doing this work, but don't remember a thing about the details of it, save what I can make out from the comments.  And, the code itself is Greek to me.  I haven't assembled anything in over a dozen years.

Had our third child, John, now KG6HCO.  Did FD 2002 with him (see FD 2002 (How I Broke My Arm)).

Current interests are construction and software projects and operating events to test the results.  Per my own analysis quoted by W2FS above, I strive to find the proper balance between being a builder and an operator, but really want to be a builder.

Collaborator, Ralph Wallio, W0RPK
My predecessor as AMSAT V.P. of Operations, elmer and friend, Ralph has been involved in virtually every aspect of amateur radio over a long and fruitfull amateur radio career.  We've done many projects together such as:

- AMS-81, a Timex/Sinclair computer port of W3IWI's BASIC TRACK program for earth satellite tracking.  (1981-3)
- Modified Ralph's Swan-Mark II for 160 meters.  (c. 1998)
- Drove across the U.S. and back making the navigation trace seen at spring 2004 trip link  Ralph provided the APRS support.