I consider myself a physicist/astrophysicist who was led into my profession by my involvement in Amateur Radio since 1960. My whole career however has been spent outside science working in technology in one way or another. Among other things, I worked for SGC and was the person you’d be handed to for technical problems with antennas, feed lines, propagation, HF digital operation, or any other issues related to HF technology and operation.

I learned to do mathematical modeling back when slide rules were the standard way to do calculations. When I was introduced to my first computer and FORTRAN II, I fell in love and immediately started modeling. I took every course I could find that had anything to do with modeling and numerical analysis. I hired myself out around campus doing models for many departments such as the nuclear model I made for one professor studying trans-uranium elements. I worked with physics, education, chemistry, and other departments who wanted to get something done and learned more and more about modeling. That stood me in good stead in grad school where my thesis was built around a computer model of atomic scattering.