A chance meeting at a North Carolina beach brings together two hams for a week of Amateur Radio fun...and a lasting friendship.

One of the aims of ham radio is to make friends through the hobby. I recently learned how enriching that pleasure can be.

In the Autumn of 2003, our family went to stay at a cottage in Salvo, on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. On the third day, I was walking back from the beach with my wife when a woman coming the other way stopped us and asked if I was a ham.

"I sure am," I answered with pride.

"Well, my husband is looking for you," she said.

It turned out that they had seen our car's license plate with my wife's call sign on it. When I got back to the cottage, a man was on the porch looking over my antenna. I thought it a bit odd at first, but I soon realized that it's as natural as the sun coming up for fellow hams to seek each other out. We instantly fell into a conversation about--what else!--ham radio and we discovered that we both had our Elecraft K2 radios along on the trip. We spent almost an hour there on the deck, talking like two excited schoolboys about our favorite hobby. Our wives gave up and went back to their cottages!

Barry Lazar, K3NDM, is an electrical engineer from Annapolis, so he knows this stuff inside and out. And since I'm still a rank amateur at being an amateur, I plied him with questions. He willingly shared all sorts of fascinating details with me. I can still remember him grinning as he described antenna construction and propagation; he was in his element. It's nice to make contacts when you're on a holiday; but there's something special about an "eyeball QSO" and we were both feeling that excitement when we got together to talk.

He told me he had spent about an hour rigging up a delta loop on his back porch. He was really interested in my little vertical, Super-Antenna's MP-1, that I had used in years past on my motorcycle trips out West. If he could get it to radiate without much loss over his delta loop, he wanted to get one for himself and save a lot of setup time on future trips. Of course, I urged him to come and get it from the porch any time he wanted to use it, whether I was there or not. But you never know if someone will really take you up on using your stuff like that; only a true friend would consider it. So it tickled me that he came by and got it one day while I was gone. It worked remarkably well; he made some long-range contacts with it and was satisfied that it would do the job for him. And it made me feel good to know that there was a trust like that between us.

Barry Lazar, K3NDM (left), and Charles Vogan, KD5KA, operate portable on the Outer Banks of North Carolina using Lazar's radio and Vogan's antenna. The two new friends met by chance at the beach and, as hams are wont to do, fell into familiar conversations of radios and operating. [photo courtesy Charles Vogan, KD5KA]

I found myself looking for Barry every day. Yes, it was good to get away to the beach for a while with my family, but this was an unexpected pleasure--sharing friendship with someone I had never met before, over something we both loved. We talked about radios, about antennas, about contacts we had made. I went to his cottage and helped him connect my MP-1 antenna to his K2 and compare it with his delta loop. While we were working on this, he made a sideband contact with someone in South Africa!

Barry's enthusiasm was infectious. He wanted to try my MP-1 out on the beach. Our schedules didn't always match, with my family going in and out, but soon after he headed out there I went out to see what he was doing. There he was, sitting under his beach umbrella with his battery-powered K2 hooked up to my MP-1, plying the airwaves for contacts. I plopped down beside him and enjoyed watching an expert at work. He was receiving several stations, but nothing he could easily break into. Just when he was about to shut down, he got someone in Slovenia! That settled it--as soon as he got back home, he was going to get an antenna like mine.

I was sorry to see him go. He and his wife couldn't stay more than a week, and I was staying a second week and getting more family in. I got a chance to introduce him to some of the kids when he came in to say goodbye. But I don't think my family understood the uncommon bond that formed between us in this short time. To them, Dad was just playing radio with another ham. To me, it was an unforgettable experience, a lasting friendship formed over a few days. The next time I see him, it will be like old friends getting together again.

Charles Vogan, KD5KA, has been a ham since 2000, but has enjoyed radio for many years before that. "My call sign from growing up near Pittsburgh and listening to KDKA," he said. A minister in Weyers Cave, Virginia, Vogan favors operating QRP CW and has also completed all three levels of the ARRL Emergency Communications Course. He is also a Volunteer Examiner and QST author. Vogan can be reached via e-mail at cvogan@shentel.net.

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