Back in 1975,  I was a young sailor stationed in Monterey, California, and the Citizen's Band craze was really hitting its stride. There was much to attract me to CB, so I applied for and received my license from the Federal Communications Commission (a rare occurrence at that time), and because KST9935, also known as "Grizzly Bear." My wife at the time was known as "Lady Grizzly." It makes me cringe when I think back to that time: CBs, polyester leisure suits, disco...<<shudder>>.

At any rate, as a young CBer, I joined a CB club at nearby Fort Ord (the Corral Breakers, if I remember correctly), and we did quite a few things together. We had a team in a local bowling league, we helped with communications support for races at Laguna Seca raceway, and other fun activities.

My CB experiences also piqued my interest in communications in general, and I looked into Amateur Radio. I was dissuaded by the complexity of qualifications for a license and the lack of a mentor (called an Elmer in Ham parlance) to help me understand the ins and outs of the hobby. But it always sat there in the back of my mind, especially as I ran into Hams who operated from our overseas duty stations.

Fast forward to 2001. My friend had been inviting me for years to go deer hunting with him in Pennsylvania, and I finally arrange my vacation schedule so I could go. As I thought about wandering through the woods looking for deer, it occurred to me that a GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) receiver could be useful, if only to find my way back to the truck! So I borrowed a GPS receiver from a friend (and ultimately bought it from him) and merrily wandered through the woods knowing exactly where I was, the truck was, etc.

After sitting alone in the woods through a couple of days of hunting, not knowing where any of my fellow hunters were, I thought about getting some kind of radio to stay in touch with each other. FRS (Family Radio Service) and GMRS (General Mobile Radio Service) radios were becoming very popular, and after looking into them, I decided that they could be very useful out there in the woods, especially with the higher power available to GMRS radios. I bought a couple of walkie-talkies (we call them "Handy Talkies" or "HTs" in the Ham world), got my GMRS license from the FCC, and it worked out great on our 2002 hunting trip. It was so cold that the earpiece nearly froze in my ear, but that's a different story.

Using the FRS/GMRS radios made me think back to my earlier interest in Amateur Radio, and I also conversed with some Hams who were active in Geocaching, a hobby involving searching for spots using a GPS receiver. It appeared that the qualifications for getting an Amateur Radio license were well within my grasp, so I order some books from the Amateur Radio Relay League, downloaded some Morse code training software, took sample tests on various Internet sites, and on February 22, 2003, I took and passed the tests for the Technician and General Amateur Radio licenses. I was officially licensed as KG4YQS on February 25, when my callsign appeared on the FCC web site. I immediately applied for my current call, N5CTI, while I was still on the FCC's site, then jumped over the the ARRL site to join their organization.