A personal note:  I've been involved in many aspects of amateur radio over the 65 years I've been licensed.  It's been fun.  I did some of the earliest portable e.m.e. (moonbounce) work--in places ranging from Alaska to the Utah-Nevada border.  Early on I found out I liked radio contests and also building things for the VHF, UHF and microwave bands.  In the 1960s I discovered that "mountaintopping" made it easier to win the VHF/UHF contests that are sponsored four times a year by ARRL, the national association for amateur radio.  By 1980, I had finished #1 nationally in the single operator category of 12 VHF or UHF contests--all while operating in a parked van or camper on various mountaintops from coast to coast.  That resulted in several scoring records  that were never broken under the section multiplier scoring system.  (In the 1980s latitude and longitude-based grid squares replaced ARRL sections as multipliers and then more categories were added, including the rover, high power, low power and QRP categories).  Under the new system I won another 26 contests nationally as a rover and seven in the QRP portable category, setting scoring records for the January, June and September VHF contests and the August UHF contest.  I've now won at least an ARRL division leader certificate in a VHF contest in SEVEN decades:  the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and now the 2020s, with at least one #1 score nationally in six of those decades. 
     The Tehachapi Mountain antenna farm (shown above) was the realization of a longtime dream:  to have a good non-portable station on a mountaintop.  Building the buildings and putting up the towers was a lot of work, but when the weather was bad it was a luxury to operate inside a building on a good mountaintop, not in a car (until the fire, see above). 
    Portable VHF contesting prompted me to look for better and simpler antennas.  With the help of Will Anderson, AA6DD, I designed the Quagi antenna on a backyard antenna range in 1972.  That led to the ARRL Technical Excellence Award in 1977 and helped me win the Radio Amateur of the Year award at Dayton in 1980.  I also received the John Chambers Memorial Award of the Central States VHF Society in 1978 and again 37 years later in 2015.
    I served four terms as an elected ARRL vice director in the 1980s and early 1990s and was chairman of the ARRL Contest Advisory Committee during the 1970s.  I've also done some writing about amateur radio, including a number of articles for QST, CQ and Ham Radio magazines.  I co-authored a book about amateur radio with Jim Steffen, KC6A,  Computer Programs for Amateur Radio (Hayden Book Co., 1984).  I also wrote several college textbooks, including 20 editions of Major Principles of Media Law, and was a university professor for 37 years, mostly at California State University, Fullerton.  I hold Ph.D. and J.D. degrees and have been a member of the California Bar since 1975 (now retired/inactive).