Medal № 20
Richard Zwirko, first licensed as KN1HTV in 1958, has been continuously active in Amateur Radio using the callsign K1HTV for over 6 decades. He had a 48 year career in commercial and U.S government radio broadcasting. After 28 years of service at the Voice of America in Washington, DC, he retired in 2008 as senior Technical Support manager.
Rich, as a serious DXer, has worked DXCC on all 11 Amateur Radio bands between 160 and 6 Meters. He has 200 countries confirmed on 9 bands and over 300 countries confirmed on all 7 bands from 40 through 10 Meters. Rich is on the DXCC Honor Roll, only missing North Korea to achieve Honor Roll #1. All HF DXing has been done while running 100 Watts or less. He is an avid island chaser, working more than 1040 IOTAs.
His early interest in Sputnik and the first OSCAR satellites lead Rich to become Vice President of Operations and a member of the board of directors of AMSAT, the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation. He served between 1974 and 1984 during the launch of OSCARs 7 through 11 satellites.
Rich was heavily involved in the early days of Packet Radio, digi-peaters and packet bulletin boards in the Washington, DC area. He was instrumental in the establishment of the first NETROM node on the East Coast of the United States. He served as system operator for numerous NETROM packet radio nodes in the Washington, DC and Maryland area. Having high interest in VHF propagation, meteor scatter and VHf DXing, Rich became heavily involved in the use of WSJT software since its first release in 2001. In 2017, when the new FT8 mode was created, he started DXing using that mode, working over 240 DXCC countries with 75 Watts or less.
In 2018, with the explosion of popularity of this new FT8 digital mode, Rich was approached by some of his visually impaired Ham friends asking if there could be a way that would allow them to start using the FT8 mode. A number of requests were made to the WSJT-X Development Group reflector looking for a software developer who would work with Rich to produce such a program. The resulting software in conjunction with WSJT-X, gives blind Hams a way to easily make FT8 contacts. Recruiting a number of visually impaired Hams, Rich worked with them as beta testers of the software. The program called Quick Log, QLog for short, was developed by W2JDB, and is now in the early stages of being released. Because of these efforts, blind Radio Amateurs will be able to make worldwide contacts using the new FT8 and FT4 digital modes.
https://www.qrz.com/db/k1htv
Richard Zwirko, first licensed as KN1HTV in 1958, has been continuously active in Amateur Radio using the callsign K1HTV for over 6 decades. He had a 48 year career in commercial and U.S government radio broadcasting. After 28 years of service at the Voice of America in Washington, DC, he retired in 2008 as senior Technical Support manager.
Rich, as a serious DXer, has worked DXCC on all 11 Amateur Radio bands between 160 and 6 Meters. He has 200 countries confirmed on 9 bands and over 300 countries confirmed on all 7 bands from 40 through 10 Meters. Rich is on the DXCC Honor Roll, only missing North Korea to achieve Honor Roll #1. All HF DXing has been done while running 100 Watts or less. He is an avid island chaser, working more than 1040 IOTAs.
His early interest in Sputnik and the first OSCAR satellites lead Rich to become Vice President of Operations and a member of the board of directors of AMSAT, the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation. He served between 1974 and 1984 during the launch of OSCARs 7 through 11 satellites.
Rich was heavily involved in the early days of Packet Radio, digi-peaters and packet bulletin boards in the Washington, DC area. He was instrumental in the establishment of the first NETROM node on the East Coast of the United States. He served as system operator for numerous NETROM packet radio nodes in the Washington, DC and Maryland area. Having high interest in VHF propagation, meteor scatter and VHf DXing, Rich became heavily involved in the use of WSJT software since its first release in 2001. In 2017, when the new FT8 mode was created, he started DXing using that mode, working over 240 DXCC countries with 75 Watts or less.
In 2018, with the explosion of popularity of this new FT8 digital mode, Rich was approached by some of his visually impaired Ham friends asking if there could be a way that would allow them to start using the FT8 mode. A number of requests were made to the WSJT-X Development Group reflector looking for a software developer who would work with Rich to produce such a program. The resulting software in conjunction with WSJT-X, gives blind Hams a way to easily make FT8 contacts. Recruiting a number of visually impaired Hams, Rich worked with them as beta testers of the software. The program called Quick Log, QLog for short, was developed by W2JDB, and is now in the early stages of being released. Because of these efforts, blind Radio Amateurs will be able to make worldwide contacts using the new FT8 and FT4 digital modes.
https://www.qrz.com/db/k1htv
