When choosing a vanity callsign, it is usually desirable to have shorter callsigns or a callsign that resembles a meaningful word, or maybe you want it to be your name or contain your initials. So why did I choose the seemingly random callsign KA7BVS as my vanity call?

To be honest, KA7BVS is a random callsign; it was randomly assigned to my great-uncle Arthur David Almgren when he first got his amateur radio license sometime on or before March 15, 1985. He peacefully passed away at his home on April 22, 2013, and it is my honor to now hold his former callsign.

Uncle David, as he was known to his many nephews, nieces, grand-nieces, and grand-nephews, was a life-long bachelor and always the “cool” uncle. He was the man with the toys, a seemingly limitless capacity for new hobbies, and an equally limitless capacity for teaching others with compassion. He had a juke box loaded with 45s and a pool table in his family room. Woodworking, metalworking, boating, sailing, motorcycles, airplanes, classic cars, electronics, steam engines, and BB guns – Just to name a few, not to mention amateur radio!

Here’s a link to his obituary on the National Silent Key Register if you’re interested:
http://www.silentkeyhq.com/main.php?p=bin/NSKALookup.php&dlnk=&call=KA7BVS&uid=0031524630383021

Sadly I wasn’t very interested in amateur radio until after he had passed away, so I never got to discuss that particular topic with him in any detail. While I inherited a number of his books and woodworking tools, I’m not entirely sure what became of his radios. He may have sold them some time before he died, so I am not likely to ever know what kind they were – my childhood memory has them as being large and grey, which doesn’t really narrow it down much.

The one radio-related thing I inherited (which got me started with this hobby) was his Vibroplex Bug, serial number 384469. After some tuning, it works very well and my goal is to one day learn Morse Code well enough to be able to use the Vibroplex to have on-air QSOs.