VE3JER - William Stewart, Ontario Canada

Just wanted to post a note in remembrance of my dad. He would have loved this forum!

My dad passed away after a heroic battle with complications from diabetes and heart disease in 1999. He was a brilliant man, who built a repeater basically from scratch back in the 1980's. The repeater operated out of St. Thomas, Ontario. We were the only family on the block who had a 100 ft radio tower, painted white and red, in our backyard. He used to climb that tower (with all his cool climbing gear) to do maintenance. I was the only high school student I knew in the 1980's who had (and carried) her own handheld radio (long before the days of cell phones). We were a ham family, that's for sure.

He loved to teach others and was very patient. Thanks to my dad (and some morse code tutoring from my mom, VE3KSL), I got my ham ticket back in the early 1980's when I was all of 12! I was VE3MGS.

In honour of his memory, I assumed his callsign when he passed away. The registration folks goofed up the name swap. If you look in the books, VE3JER shows as William Sondra Marie. Which is OK with me, since he is always with me.

Sondra Stewart