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About Me
From 1961 to 1964 went to Chicago Vocational High School. It was a vocational school so in our junior year we had to decide, college or vocation. I elected to take machine shop my first semester for my father was a machinist but moved into electronics for the rest on my junior year and all of my senior year. I graduated in 1964 with a major noted on my diploma for Electronics. I also had early joined the Marine Corps and was welcomed into boot camp September of 64, if you want to call it that!
Upon graduation from boot camp I was given a MOS of 2851 which was Communication Electronics Technician. Stayed in San Diego another year going to electronics class 6 hours a day 5 days a week.
After graduation I got the best duty station in the Marine Corps, Cherry Point Air Station North Carolina! Around 75% of my tour we became the first section to get TRANSISTORS. It was way cool, we had our own G12 factory rep, air conditioned work area and a whole new learning curve. What our radios did was provide control station voice to pilots flying missions. It was great and very neat looking. All radios and finders were placed in these air conditioned toppers that wend on the back of military pickups. And there was no shortage of colored lights, seemed to be a light for everything ;-) We even had a blow up radar center and one unique radio that used an oscilloscope screen to pinpoint what direction the transmissions were coming from. The receiver antenna was connected to a dipole that was encased and rotated about 400 rpms. When an aircraft would key up it would distort the circle and give us the direction(somewhat) it was coming from. I enjoyed my 4years of service in the USMC, came out a Sargent and went out looking for work almost immediately.
I got hired by Motorola and I believe because of my service, rank and training I progressed very rapidly. Within 6months I was a group leader and was first in line for a supervisor position. We use to test the modules that made up the car phone, or police radios and some dtmf stuff. But even with my knowledge in electronics and speed of getting things done, it wasn't meant to be. One day this VP of field operations called me up for n interview. Their offices where on the second floor of Motorola Schaumburg. He was asking me questions that didn't seem to fit my experience so I figured it was a waste of time, well I was way wrong. He called me back, told me to buy a suit and tie because I was to be the customer complaint manager for the Midwest region. Company car, salary the whole program. My job was to investigate every problem that came in from customers and determine if it was a customer, engineering or sales problem. In my year at that position it came down to 5% design, 12% customer education and 83% sales. You can almost merge the customer portion into sales for they just didn't take the time to educate their customer on how to use the equipment. The one complaint that stuck out with me was Motorola's siren product. We got complaints that the police were getting annoyed at the sound and related it to a squealing pig. And in the late 60's early 70's the police didn't want to be called pigs! I picked up a field tech and off we went to the Cicero police department. We setup on a major street and had the pd do lights and siren up and down the street. We also had them come up behind our enclosed car with our air and radio on! It was terrible, it did sound like a baby pig crying for its mother!
The technician and I took a siren to make sure it was in spec and also modified the oscillator bringing the frequency down with lower tones at the bottom. To use it was great but not to the engineers. Their answer was Federal, our siren competition, had the patent on the frequencies and the power amps couldn't handle the lower tones. Even after explaining to them that lower frequencies penetrated our vehicle better and from a much greater distance. Needless to say they weren't going to give in so I made my first call to the CEO of Motorola at his home in Barrington. I was very nervous for it was like jumping the chain of command and right to the top. He was very concerned and asked what it would take to solve the complaint and I blurted out," I would take back the sirens and buy them Federals until engineering could design a new one. To my surprise he said "DOIT"! The police were happy, Motorola did the right thing and eventually the engineers came up with a solution.
Prior to leaving Motorola I spent a great deal of time with the antenna site administrator visiting places like the roof of John Handcock, Lake Point Towers and any other super high buildings that Motorola had their repeaters and antennas on. The I got a promotion, if you want to call it that? The FCC wanted ALL licenses to be accurate as to where the antennas of our customers were located at. No longer could we just use a street address, that wanted exact. So I was put in charge of a group of 10 people that would re-license every one of our 50,000 customers in the Midwest. This was before hand help gps so we got coordinates off a map for each and every customer. We got it done in just under a year and well under budget so I was expecting the new job that was the result of this. Well that didn't happen, mainly because I wasn't the type of person to wine and dine the FCC just to get problems fixed. So the liaison job went to a salesman instead. So I quit and moved on.
I did a lot of things between then and now so I won't bore you with details just list them as they were.
- Real Estate Broker Illinois
- Devry Institute Salesman Illinois
- Bank Promotion salesman Illinois
- Massachusetts Indemnity Insurance Investigator Illinois
- Maintenance Repair Georgia
- Painter Georgia
- Hardware store MGR. Wisconsin
- Refrigeration and Heating (own business) Wisconsin
- Professional Photographer ( own business 35 years ) Wisconsin
- Web Designer (own business current ) Wisconsin
- Retired Wisconsin
Hobbies
- Amateur Radio
- Wood Working
- Welding
- 9mm and .243 reloading
- Shooting
- Fly Fishing
- Drone Flying
And just enjoying the heck out of life.