Dick and I took our ham license tests a month apart, in May and June 2006. His ham callsign was KC9JLU and mine KC9JPA. We decided to become hams mostly from talking to his friend and our colleague Matt Link, also a ham, and because he wanted to know "where the weather was" well before it got to us, after a bad windstorm in 2006 did a lot of damage to properties in Bloomington. After a lot of research, he bought a Yaesu VX-6R handie-talkie transceiver as his first radio. I trusted his research, so, after a brief investigation of my own, I too bought the same radio. We spent a bunch of time testing our radios in both simplex and repeater modes, which was a lot of fun. He quickly joined the local Bloomington Amateur Radio Club (BARC) and the Indiana University Amateur Radio Club. Another aspect of ham radio that really appealed to Dick was participation in local emergency response. In a disaster, cell phone is the first to go (as shown by Katrina and numerous smaller disasters), and hams become indispensable in providing reliable communications to public safety and emergency management agencies. One popular ham t-shirt puts it aptly - a picture of a ham radio and the words, "When all else fails". Very soon after he became a ham, Dick started learning about the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS), a way to transmit one's location digitally via radio, which anyone can follow on the internet. And, as we all know, once Dick learned something, it stayed learned. He told me afterward, "I can really get into this APRS thing". Once decided, got in is exactly what he did. Thrifty though he was, he still purchased the needed equipment and had fun putting it all together and playing with it. Next he decided to take the big plunge and get a serious mobile rig. Because of his love of APRS, he decided to buy the most expensive and the best - a Kenwood TM-D700A, the only mobile radio that came equipped with APRS at the time. He had a lot of fun working with Matt drilling a hole in the roof of his truck for an antenna and building a simple, custom mounting system that involved a piece of wood and some velcro. Dick's ingenuity and thrift always amazed me. Dick and I became members of the local Amateur Radio Emergency Services (ARES), participating religiously in the Monday night ARES net at 7:30pm, and of the Radio Amateur Emergency Service (RACES), a formal, Dept. of Homeland Security organization that can be called on in an emergency to provide communications support. He took these pretty seriously and shared how cool it was to have to take a really long oath in front of other BARC members to be sworn into RACES. Since (thankfully) we do not have too many emergencies, BARC provides communications support for many local events, mostly races and bike rides, as practice for real emergencies. (Without this support these events would be difficult or impossible - some of the race/ride routes go through areas without any cell coverage, and ham radio provides an open circuit where everyone can hear everyone else, unlike the point to point nature of cellular phones.) Dick really enjoyed this activity, and participated without fail if he was in Bloomington. We often paired up, and spent the day sitting around, doing our ham duties and shooting the breeze about life, university, and everything. His most favorite event was the Hilly Hundred bike ride in early October. In addition to providing just static stations at rest stops, BARC began to use APRS in SAG vehicles to allow net control to see in real time the location of these vehicles. This allowed the race coordinator to dispatch vehicles where they were needed based on proximity, without having to figure out via tedious radio communications where the vehicle was at the time. Always ready to apply his enormous intellect to any problem, Dick decided to do a project where he used the digipeter data from test drives on the route to create maps showing holes in the coverage. Using these plots BARC was able to locate portable digipeters that allowed APRS equipped vehicles to be seen along the entire route. Dick and I drove out together to many hamfests in the area - Bedford, Spencer, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, and the biggest one in the world - Dayton Hamvention (which we did three years in a row, from 2008-2010). These were very fun trips, with Dick always wanting to set up APRS in the vehicle on the longer trips (Dayton and Ft. Wayne). He helped out with the set up for the Monroe-Owen County Hamfest in Spencer every August, and was excited when he won the "Antenna Handbook" one year and then the "Building Simple Antennas" the next year. He showed mock disappointment not to win anything this year. Dick was unhappy from the lack of digipeter coverage along highways from the trips he took, and wanted to come up with a way to help hams figure out which digipeters were nearby, in case they wanted to do APRS messaging. He started working on a project he called "APRS e-Directory". He set up a Google code page for the project which states: "APRS eDirectory is intended to be used like an amateur radio repeater directory. It queries the OpenAPRS on-line database of recent APRS packets, and it creates a table of results and a gpx waypoint file of results. Queries can be for voice repeaters, IRLP nodes, EchoLink nodes, Winlink 2000 RMS stations, and digipeaters that are close to a location, within a lat/long bounding box, or within a given distance of a route that is defined in a gpx route file. The first version of the APRS eDirectory will be a command-line program. The second version will offer a graphical user interface." He was also working on a project he called "NetCheckIn" with his good friend Corey Shields KB9JHU. According to the Google code page, "This application will allow you to create a database of known amateur radio station locations and place them into the APRS network with a click of the button using the Xastir APRS program (see xastir.org). The idea behind the application is simple: If you want to track a large group of fixed stations in APRS who do not have APRS positioning setup, this application will allow you to add their locations to Xastir easily, like when they check in to a net. By pre-populating the NetCheckIn database, you could quickly and easily keep up with the flow of checkins on a voice net. This could be helpful during a Skywarn or ARES emergency/disaster net. The voice net could then be simulcast to APRS by means of APRS users in the area. By using APRS objects during such a net, data from the net can be logged and easily shared with other APRS users, neighboring nets, and the world." Just before his passing, Dick was working on upgrading his ham license from Technician to General. Alas, the short waves will never hear Dick's voice nor his packets, nor benefit from numerous ingenious projects he would doubtlessly have come up to improve the lives of hams. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine that I'd have to announce to the ham community that Dick Repasky, KC9JLU, became a silent key on October 22, 2010. My hope is that he is still monitoring the ham frequencies in the ether somewhere! We love you Dick.