Delmar Strung a Wire Between Two Pines

Delmar’s garage light was on at ten past five, so I walked over.

He had headphones on and didn’t hear the door. He was bent over a black box about as big as a hardback book, writing on a pad. Then a finger came up without him turning around, so he’d known I was there the whole time.

He said a string of letters into the microphone, then sat back.

“Slovenia,” he said. “Retired schoolteacher. His grandson just got a dog.”

There’s a wire running through the trees behind his house. I’d been looking at it for a year and figured it had something to do with his internet.

I had this filed under two headings, and both were wrong.

One was truckers hollering at each other on a CB. The other was men in basements waiting for the world to end, stacking cans.

Delmar isn’t either. He’s a retired county road engineer who wanted something to do that his knees couldn’t take away from him.

What he found is a thing that runs on curiosity and patience and almost no money.

The box on his bench runs a hundred watts. The wire in the pines does the rest. When the sun and the upper atmosphere cooperate, that signal bounces and comes down on the far side of an ocean.

Nobody is paying for that. No company owns it, no account gets billed, and nothing about it lands in anybody’s records.

I asked him what a person does with it once the novelty wears off. He counted four things on his fingers.

▸ He chases distance. Early morning and late evening are when the long paths open up. He keeps a logbook and a paper map with pins in it, and the pins are the whole scoreboard.
▸ He works the satellites. There are amateur satellites overhead on a schedule, and a pass runs seven or eight minutes. He stands in the driveway with a handheld and an antenna that looks like a TV aerial from 1974.
▸ He runs the weather net. Tuesday nights, a roll call of the whole county. Half of it is genuine spotting and half is men checking that the other men are still there.
▸ He drags the gear outdoors. A battery, a rod, a wire in a tree. He operates off a picnic table in a state park until the coffee runs out.

The picnic table surprised me most. He’s outside more now than he was in the ten years before he started.

There are three licenses. Technician, General and Extra, in that order.

Technician is the front door, and it’s a thirty-five-question exam. It gets you everything above thirty megahertz and a little slice of the shortwave bands. General is another thirty-five questions. The ARRL says it opens all the amateur bands and all the modes, and that’s the one that reaches other continents. Extra runs fifty questions.

Then I read the rules and laughed out loud.

They publish every question and every answer in advance, free. The pool has to hold at least ten times what any one exam will ask.

It’s an open-book test where they hand you the book.

The Technician pool turned over this past July and runs through the middle of 2030, so anybody starting now is on the fresh one.

And there’s no Morse code anymore. The FCC dropped that requirement back in 2007. Delmar is learning it anyway, which is Delmar all over.

Now the thing nobody says out loud at a club meeting.

This isn’t a growing hobby. The ARRL keeps a running count off the FCC database, and as of last Saturday there were 729,522 licensed amateurs in this country.

Sounds like a lot. Now hold it next to the other number. At the end of 2014 the ARRL reported a record 726,275.

Twelve years, and the whole thing is up by about three thousand people.

Here’s the more useful split. Of that total, 358,178 hold a Technician, which is just about half of everybody. General and Extra together come to a little under 342,000.

So half the people who bother to get licensed never sit the second test. Delmar sat both the same morning, and the one fee covered it. He says that’s the best piece of advice he’s got.

You’re joining something flat, and at the one gathering Delmar walked me into I’d have been on the young end. No sense dressing that up. If what you want is a crowd, this isn’t it.

Instead, it’s seven hundred thousand people who all agreed to keep a strange old thing running because they like it. There are worse clubs.

These are his receipts, not a price list. He went slow on purpose and bought used where he could.

▸ The government’s share, $35. That’s the FCC application fee, and it’s the only fixed number in this list. It’s been $35 since April 2022, it covers a new license for ten years, and upgrading later doesn’t cost another one.
▸ The exam session, $15. That’s the ARRL’s 2026 fee, and it buys one attempt at each of the three elements. A club runs the session and volunteers grade it. He sat Technician and General the same morning and paid it once.
▸ The study, nothing. He used the free published pool and a library book. He passed both on the first try at sixty-six years old.
▸ A used radio, $310. Bought from a widow in the club who was clearing out a basement. He says that’s where the deals are and I believe him.
▸ The antenna, about $60 of wire and rope. That’s everything hanging in those pines. Forty minutes and a stepladder.
▸ A power supply and odds and ends, $140. Cables, a meter, a cheap key for the Morse he’s teaching himself.

Call it five hundred and sixty dollars to talk to Slovenia before breakfast, and most of that was the radio.

You can spend twenty times that. Plenty do. But the ten-year license and the wire in the tree are the same for everybody, and the wire is the part that does the work.

Here’s what I keep circling back to.

Everything else we do to reach people runs through somebody’s company. The phone, the email, the videos of the grandkids. Somebody owns the pipe and can decide tomorrow how it works.

This one doesn’t.

It’s a man, a box, a piece of copper and the sky. Nobody in the middle, and nobody to ask.

And it can’t be scrolled. You can’t rush it, you can’t search it, and you have no idea who’s going to answer. Some mornings it’s dead quiet for an hour and that’s the deal you made.

Delmar’s version is plainer. It’s the only thing left in his day that he can’t hurry along by getting annoyed about it.

Before I left that morning I picked up the pad he’d been writing on.

It wasn’t technical. It was a date, a time, a call sign, and then, in his engineer’s printing: schoolteacher, 41 yrs in the job, grandson got a beagle.

He does that for every one. Eleven hundred of them since he started.

I asked whether he ever goes back and reads them. He said not often. He writes them anyway, he said, so that somebody wrote it down.

That wire has been in his trees the whole year I’ve been walking past it. I had a whole story about what it was for, and I never once asked him.

Eleven hundred strangers got asked. His neighbor didn’t.

— Walter