Entering My Fourteenth Year writing With Varying Frequency

It was January 21st 2007 when the first post for this blog appeared – https://k9zw.wordpress.com/2007/01/21/ponderings-on-the-k9zw-shack/

My computer ran Windows XP, my main transceiver was a TenTec Pegasus, the antenna was a Gap Titan-DX, my software was MixW and N4PY Pegasus Control, and I was still using my original call sign KB9GPN as a General Class Ham.

The Blog project started as a dare from my then school aged sons – basically they told me about this new world of blogs and said I was “too old” to really understand.

Having cut my online teeth running a FIDO-net Node and BBS (do you remember Opus?) and other non-realtime packet switchstream experiments since the onset in the early 1980s, I thought the boys had underestimated me.

Hence “With Varying Frequency” was born.

Some statistics:

• Over 1700 posts have added to this blog, and the comment count just a bit less in the mid-1600s comments posted.
• I’ve post about every three days!
• About a thousand items of media have been posted!
• Nearly a million views over the period. (Actually the counters changed at least twice, so I do not have an accurate aggregate count.)

Among the first hams to leave comments were Jeff KE9V, Scott NE1RD and Mark W9MV.  All three have left their marks on the radio and electronics world, with Jeff KE9V podcasting and publishing, Scott NE1RD in publishing and doing some neat small scale dxpeditions, and if you have flow in a private plane W9MV has been providing the best of the in-plane intercoms since he started PS Engineering.  At about a 100 or so posts in the blog, Dale N6JSX joined the readership, and to this day I can count on N6JSX to check my math when I post it!

Again project started as a challenge from my young sons, who in their pre-teen/early teen years thought that their Dad could never do a blog.  I guess to their minds I would have appeared too-square and too-old to do something new.

The idea that I would be able to keep a long running set of station notes, and pick up peer review of what I was doing to help me better my operations, appealed in January 2007 and still does today as I start my 14th season of posting.

Welcome to With Varying Frequency’s 14th season of blog posts and thank you for being one of my readers! I’m humbled and flattered that are reading my words.

73

Steve
K9ZW