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On The Cover: September 2002 |
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“I’ve pretty much made contesting my life,” says Longmont, Colorado’s Chuck Cullian, KØRF. Chuck has been a ham since 1957 and a contester since 1960, when, as he explains, “One day, I came home from school on a Friday, turned on the rig to 20 CW, and the band was full of Europeans.” (He was living in California at the time, so that was somewhat unusual. – ed.) “I asked my dad —who was then K6TSY and is now K6RF—what was going on, and he said, ‘It must be a contest.’ I went back and started working them and having a wonderful time.” What really turned Chuck into a contester, however, was … other contesters. “One of the locals, Roger Mace, W6RW, heard me on and invited me to operate with his group,” Chuck continued, noting that he operated with Roger for several years. “Then I operated with Dale Hoppe, W6VSS (now K6UA), for a while, then set up my own multi-multi station. In the mid-60s, I placed second in the CQ World-Wide phone, behind Jim Lawson, W2PV. I moved to Colorado in ’78 and built a multi-op station here, and I’ve been doing multis ever since.” Chuck—who is also a jazz musician, fly-fisherman, and competitive volleyball player—says his most consistent contesting partner is George Schultz, WØUA, but for some of the bigger contests he gathers a bigger group. In 2001 there were 11 ops altogether at KØRF for the CQ World-Wide CW Contest, and while they placed first in their call area for multi-multi, Chuck says poor band conditions made it impossible to achieve their pre-contest goal of breaking the all-time WØ multi-multi record. Maybe this year, Chuck! (Cover photo by Larry Mulvehill, WB2ZPI)
Click here to return to the September Highlights page. ________________ © Copyright 2002, CQ Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced or republished, including posting to a website, in part or in whole, by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher, CQ Communications, Inc. Hyperlinks to this page are permitted.
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