Wanted: Information about Richard Davis, W9HQ (SK)

Hello all,

Early this year, I began searching form information about the original holder of W9HQ. Alas, I found the news that Mr. Davis had died just a few days before. I had missed the opportunity to correspond with him.

I am in correspondence with his family, but they are not able to share very many details about his ham radio activities. If anyone knows anything about Richard Davis, please share the details with me. If anyone has a QSL card from W9HQ, please let me know how I could get a scan of it for my blog.

I've put up a tribute to Richard Davis on my blog: http://w9hq.blogspot.com

Please help me add to it. 73,

David

 

I'm afraid that I can't give you any information about Mr. Davis, but I do want to say that it's great that you are looking into the history of your callsign.

Just out of curiousity, I did a search of the online archives of QST, and didn't find any articles written by him. Unfortunately, they do not have full-text searching available.

However, I have discovered that there are a smattering of old QST's that are available on Google Books. These are issues that some bookseller happens to have for sale. You can't view the full text, but you can view a small snippet where the search word appears.

Just go to http://books.google.com and search. If it's a callsign that might be mistaken for a word, then you can add the word "QST" or perhaps some other word to the search.

For example, I found the following ad from a 1942 issue:

Since Mr. Davis appears to have lived in Indiana, this is probably a holder of the callsign prior to him, and it appears to be one John N. Becker! I bet you'll find the following tidbits interesting:

The previous holder of my callsign changed his call to N0EL in late 1976 or early 1977, and is since a silent key. I never did get the chance to meet him in person or work him on the air, but we did exchange a few letters. He wrote an article for QST in 1972 which needs to be updated, so I think I'll take on the task.