Brad Bradfield, W5CGH
(Formerly WN0CGH, 1970)

My personal interest in amateur radio goes back to about 1960 when I was in 7th grade, but being basically lazy, I just never stuck with the code long enough to learn it.

Finally in 1970, I was telling my college room mate about ham radio and he expressed interested in getting a license, so we proceeded to teach each other the code. We took the code test from Ade Weiss, W0RSP, the publisher of "The Milliwatt" QRP journal, and later the long time QRP editor for CQ magazine. We took the written test the night before Field Day that year, but unfortunately, my room mate missed one too many questions and was not licensed at the time. In mid-July I left for Navy Electronics Technician school at Great Lakes, IL, and in August my WN0CGH license came. Great Lakes had a very active club station at the time, K9NBH, and being single and living on base, I tended to spend about every night at the club station. For novice use they had an SX-101A and a homebrewed transmitter and I made a lot of contacts there as a Novice

In December 1970 I went to Long Beach, CA assigned to the USS Kansas City (AOR-3). There was a club station on the base, WB6GUI, and they needed someone to run it, so another guy from my ship and I took that job on and again, I tended to be up there operating most every night.

In January or February of 1971 I went to the FCC office in downtown Los Angeles and took the tests for both the General and Advanced license and then became WB0CGH. I kept that call even after moving to Texas in 1980, and finally changed calls to W5CGH when the vanity calls again became available in the mid-1990's.

Oh, yeah, my ex-room mate was also finally licensed, and is KC0JK today.

Brad Bradfield, W5CGH