In his free time, Martin Jue enjoys nothing more than casting his line, waiting for a bite. When he’s lucky, he reels them in from all around the world, using only his ham radio operator’s license and outgoing personality as bait. “Ham radio is not about talking to someone specific, it’s about fishing. It’s about getting on the air and calling ‘CQ, CQ,’ trying to catch someone you’ve never talked to before,” Jue explained.
Jue, who has been a licensed ham for 50 years, is as comfortable using Morse code abbreviations in conversation as other people are with slang. He explained that to a ham, CQ translates into seek you and is usually followed by the seeker’s call sign, given in phonetics. In his case, that’s K5FLU or kilo5-foxtrot-lima-united; funny-looking-underwear in his personal, humorous phonetics. “That tends to catch people’s attention a little better,” he added with a grin. No one can argue with that logic. His office contains thousands of QSL cards he has received from hams all around the world, each one confirming a transmission and friendly conversation between two hobbyists who might never meet in person. Jue first discovered amateur radio when he was 8 years old. He built a crystal radio from a Cub Scout handbook and says that he knew then that he was going to be an electrical engineer. “Using the radio I built, I started picking signals out of the air and it was like magic. You could just hear things,” Jue said. “Years later, I built a transistor radio and one night, I was lying in bed listening to my little radio when all of a sudden, someone came on the air and started talking. It turned out to be a local TV repairman. I got curious, so I went to see him and found out all about the world of ham radio.” Ham, or amateur, radio is a noncommercial, worldwide network of independent operators who use specialized equipment to communicate wirelessly. This hobby allowed Jue to reach far beyond his home in the small Delta town of Hollandale. While in high school, he turned the attic at his family’s grocery store into a workspace where he could explore his hobby. “To earn a little money, I would fix amplifiers for area blues bands using parts I salvaged from old radios and televisions,” Jue said. “That allowed me to buy a few special electronic parts, but almost all of my ham equipment was homemade.”
Bagley College of Engineering
Momentum
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