Always start at the beginning, so alright the beginning for me was 51 years ago in Moncton New Brunswick where I was born to parents Lionel and Jean. My father worked for Sears and we remained in Riverview, just outside of Monston for 6 years, then on to Cornwall for a year and then to Orillia Ontario where my interst in radio began.

At age 13 years I was employed by radio station CFOR as an operator, I can remember dodging out the back door when the dept of labor came in to check up, I was underage.The chief engineer at the station was Peter Rowe (VE3EQA), Peter helped me erect an aerial so I could listen to my first ham receiver, I think it was a Halicrafter s-85.I also remeber helping Peter build a 2 meter mobile, yes I can still see the scars from the flycutter when it broke loose cutting the speaker opening in the chassis! While in highschol in Orillia I had a job in the cadets teaching morse code to fellow cadets, thus the seeds were planted for ham radio.

In 1963 My parents moved to Kitchener and I came along, my mother still did my laundry and cooked for me so what choice did I have ? While going to highschool I was employed part time and full time at CKKW radio and CKCO-TV. While mainly in operations, other duties included maintenance, television audio, remotes for radio and tv and eventually even doing an on air stint as radio announcer. It was at CKCO that I first met our president Paul Cassel. It was many years later when we met up again thanks to ham radio. After highschool it was off to London and Fanshaw College to study electronics then moving to Conestoga College for their first year of operation. One part of this pleased me, I got to build Conestoga Colleges first broadcast studio and control room, so I was student and staff which did not please some of the instructors. After college, Westinghouse in Brantford hired a bunch of us to work in the radio and tv plant. My first job was to sort out the stereo multiplex light on console radios, it didn't work after the engineers designed it. Somebody drew a mirror image of the transistor and it was put in backwards! Hey does anybody remember transistors?

I wasn't cut out for production work so in 1963 we opened "Dave's Auto Radio" and resigned from Westinghouse who closed the plant shortly after I left hmmm..

It was a ball in the car radio business, 8 track and cb radio were the rage then came " fuzzbusters" stereo cassette, power amps and even cruise

controls, very fast moving times and exciting. Still no ham radio for me. In 1982 we moved on to the car business and opened a Jaguar and Suzuki dealership, largely because of the exposure received while autoracing, it attracted the factory's interest. I raced for 11 years, 1 year winning the Ontario Driving Champsionship, Canadian BSR Champioship and Ontario BSR Championship, driving one of Bobby Rahals cars. We turned pro , so to speak, after that and raced for three years in the Can-Am series. We are getting closer to ham radio.

After retiring from racing, flying became my next goal, so I got my pilots licence and moved on up through the rating and planes until tadah...I met VE3DYY Gerry Orobko and starting getting re-introduced to ham radio. You see my next adventure was to sail a boat away for a year and a ham licence would be just the thing to keep in touch with everyone back home. If I had not spent so much money on ham equipment I could have got a bigger boat, a ,lot bigger.

My lovely wife Brenda who endured hours of dit dah dit dah while getting my code back up to speed, joined me on our boat for a years cruise. I think what she remembers most of the cruise is the absolute quiet at 7am in the morning when Fred VA3ERF would call me for our morning QSO, I always wore headsets so the noise would not waken her except I would yell into the mike " VA3ERF this is VA3MRJ HOW COPY FRED" ....oops, she is awake now.

Dave VA3MRJ

For more information email info@kwarc.org

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