AEDC's Bill Shappley combines old and new technology to reach out globally

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  AEDC's Bill Shappley is the first to acknowledge he is more into technology than socializing, but his hobby has brought him into contact with people literally from all over the world, from Easter Island to Sweden, from Fiji to Israel.

As an electrical engineer with ATA, the Tracy City resident said a life-long fascination with electronics has played a major role in his life, leading to a college degree and a career.

Having a father and siblings who were engineers also helped pave the way for a science-oriented future.

Shappley's interest in all things electronic had always extended well beyond his job as a technical lead with ATA's control and data systems development branch at AEDC.

However, it was Jack Frazier, a friend and coworker at AEDC, who finally convinced Shappley to look into amateur radio as a hobby to pursue with the same conviction that led to an undergraduate degree from Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

"I had been fooling around with restoring tube-type audio amplifiers, stereo amps, those types of things," Shappley said. "And Jack said, 'You ought to get into ham radio,' and this was about 2003. I knew about ham radio and told him I wondered why I hadn't ever looked into that."

Shappley was particularly intrigued with using the minimum amount of power and equipment to reach the furthest distances.

"You can communicate with Morse code with a piece of wire and a car battery," he said. "You [can] go halfway across the world - you can talk to [someone in] Europe with a car battery and a 100-foot piece of wire strung up in the trees, [with] no [other] infrastructure required."

Shappley is quick to point out that he is not an advocate of only "old school" technologies. He has been the first to embrace the latest software and other advances in ham radio operations and equipment. He is also fascinated by the way meteors, the moon and even aircraft, or the ionized paths they leave behind, could be used, under the right conditions, to help propagate radio signals. He has enjoyed making the best use of a combination of the older and newer equipment. Another source of satisfaction for Shappley has been learning how innovative scientists have used techniques devised for other purposes to benefit amateur radio.

Before he could enter the world of ham radio, Shappley had to tackle the requirements.

"There are three main levels of licensing and I got the initial license in 2003," he said. "By 2004, I had gone ahead and gotten the Amateur Extra license, which is the top level."

He said that being an electrical engineer helped minimize the preparation necessary for taking the licensing exams, but a Morse code test (that is no longer required) proved more challenging.

"Now, I'm not great at Morse code," Shappley acknowledged. "I am comfortable with it and I still hear the individual letters, so I have to write them down. The people who are really great at it hear whole words, they just fly. They had a guy on Jay Leno about five or six years ago named Chip Margelli."

As he spoke about how Leno had Margelli and another "ham" pair up on a Morse code transmitter to compete with a couple of young people using text messaging to receive a short communication, Shappley's enthusiasm for amateur radio was hard to miss.

"I played the Jay Leno thing [program segment] back three times to hear what they were sending, they were sending so fast. But it was funny to see the look on that kid's face [when Margelli deciphered the message before his younger competitors]."

Frazier, a Jacobs Technology electrical engineer at AEDC who had been involved with amateur radio since 1960, recalled how his coworker got hooked on ham radio.

"Bill and I were working together on one of the control system upgrade projects not too long after I came to AEDC," Frazier said. "In a conversation, he mentioned that he was really into audio equipment, especially vacuum tube amplifiers and electronics in general as a hobby, but especially anything with tubes in it.

"I mentioned one day that I was an amateur radio operator and that there was still vintage equipment available that have vacuum tubes. I explained the basics and encouraged him to give it a look. That was all it took, and within a few months he was licensed and on the air."

Frazier pointed out that ham radio is more than just a hobby.

"It is not uncommon for a disaster to take out the total communications infrastructure in an area, and it can take days or weeks to get it back," he explained. "Many amateur radio operators are trained, knowledgeable [and] experienced communications experts and are organized so that they can rapidly deploy to an area and support the local or federal emergency teams by providing vital communications in the early stages."

Shappley said he is ready to help when and if the need arises to put his ham radio skills and equipment to use in case of an emergency.