David Kicinski  KD2HJZ

I am David Kicinski. KD2HJZ, from Earlville, New York, which is in the central part of the state. I want to thank everyone involved for awarding me your scholarship. I am a home school graduate, being home educated my entire school years. I have just started my Freshman year at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, accepted in their Honors Program and majoring in Biology. My thoughts for the future are to become a research biologist and possibly continuing with graduate school for a specific area of study. I became interested in Amateur Radio at 11 years old. My Dad and a few siblings are operators and they invited me to go to ARRL Field Day so I could operate on the “Get On The Air” Station. After that weekend, I was certain I wanted to become a ham. That October, I passed my Technician exam and obtained my license. In March of the next year, I also passed my General exam and was thrilled to have the upgrade so I could operate on a wider range of bands. During the past five years, I have contacted people all over the world, including Antarctica, which was the highlight of my being a ham. I have also participated in several special events, including the 13 Colonies, which I have done every year since becoming a ham. Overall, the hobby has been a very fun and useful part of my life and I will never regret getting my license, especially at such a young age. Another major part of my life is my health. Being born with four major heart defects, I needed open heart surgery when I was four years old. During that surgery, the doctors also put in a pacemaker. The surgery was very successful and improved my health to close to equal others without a heart issue. Since then, I have had annual checkups with the doctors who informed me of my heart’s steady improvement. Now, my heart can function without the help of the pacemaker and the pacemaker will soon be taken out with a simple surgery. The congenital heart defect that would otherwise have crippled me by my late teenage years has been corrected and I lead pretty much a typical and active life. Since 2009, my family and I have raised seven Labrador Retriever puppies for Freedom Guide Dogs (FGD), an organization devoted to raising guide dogs for the seeing impaired and veterans. I was the primary raiser for the most recent dog who went for his formal training last year. He was a yellow lab whom we named Hokey Pokey. We also have raised Wendi from puppyhood, a “breeder” for FGD who has given birth to a total of 39 other prospective guide dogs!

Tucker Dunham  KD2JPM

My name is Tucker Dunham, KD2JPM, from Washington, NJ. Thank you everyone involved for your kind consideration and generous award of the 10-10 Scholarship. I appreciate the time and energy that was invested reviewing everyone’s applications. I am grateful having been chosen to be a recipient. I am confident I will make the sponsors proud through my work in college. I am a 2019 graduate of the electronics program at Warren County Technical School in New Jersey and I was accepted to Rochester Institute of Technology where I will study microelectronics, fulfilling my goal to pursue an Electronics Technology career and hobby. I was originally licensed in October 2015, and then upgraded to General Class in June 2018. I am also an Associate Certified Electronics Technician. I am a member of the WC2FD and W3OK radio clubs and I enjoy participating in multiple events with each club. I am also a published author in the Radio Club of America 2019 Spring Proceedings detailing my patent pending invention, a solar powered amateur radio digipeater for emergency communication situations. As a Boy Scout, I have earned the Radio Merit Badge and I am proud to have achieved the Eagle Scout Award. I received the 2018 Radio Club of America Young Achiever Award and the 2018 ARRL Youth Leadership Award. Thanks, again for the 10-10 Scholarship.

Jonathan Doorn KG5CUK

My name is Jonathan Doorn, KG5CUK, a recent graduate of the Los Alamos High School in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This fall, I will be attending Purdue University to pursue a degree in Electrical Engineering, and then a career as an Electrical Engineer. My whole life, I have been interested in electronic gadgets, including radios. In elementary school, I remember putting together an AM/FM radio kit, and then a low power transmitter kit. My interest in this helped me find the world of Amateur Radio. In middle school, I decided to study for the licensing exam, and I went on to pass both the Technician and General tests in the same session. Since then, I have found joy in every aspect of the hobby. I enjoy contesting and DXing, having made QSOs with operators in all 50 states as well as over 70 countries. I also enjoy the service aspects of ham radio, using my license to provide communications support for mountain trail runs in locations where cell phones cannot reach. I am a very outdoors-oriented person, and I have been able to integrate my hobby of ham radio with my recreational activities. Living in the Rocky Mountain region of the US, I am surrounded by peaks surpassing 10,000ft, so I became familiar with Summits on the Air (SOTA) and started hiking up mountains with my ham radio. I usually made a few QSOs on voice whenever I summited, but I quickly found that most SOTA activity was on CW, which prompted me to learn morse code. I would not feel comfortable operating Field Day with it yet, but I can hammer out a crude contact from the top of a mountain with someone very patient on the other end. In addition to the communication aspects of ham radio, I have also exposed myself to the DIY fields. I have built most of my own antennas from 2 meter ground planes to 20 meter dipoles, and even an HF tunable vertical out of a tape measure. I have made various digital interfaces and an AX.25 modem on a breadboard to get started in Winlink and APRS. I chose Electrical Engineering as my academic and career path due to my joy for tinkering with electronics, which was fostered by my involvement in the amateur radio community. I am proud to be a part of this great community, and I will continue my participation in it at Purdue, where I will be a member of their radio club, W9YB. Thank you so much for awarding me one of the 10-10 Scholarships.

Jissell Jose KM6GKN

My name is Jissell Jose, KM6GKN, from San Jose, CA and I wanted to thank you for your support in helping me continue my education and supporting young amateur radio hobbyists. I greatly appreciate the scholarship and it will definitely be very helpful for me going forward. I am going into my senior year at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, California and I am working towards a degree in Electrical Engineering. After graduation I would like to go into the RF/communications field. I am spending my summer as a pre-sales engineering intern with Motorola Solutions and so far I am really enjoying it. My ham radio experience has definitely helped me on the job. I was first introduced to Ham Radio during my first year at Cal Poly. I got my Technician license in 2016 and upgraded to an Extra license in 2018. I have been an officer in the Cal Poly Amateur Radio Club (CPARC) for the past two years and I will be serving as the President of the club for the 2019-2020 school year. I hope to expose and teach more college students about the hobby and grow the membership of our club. I also serve as the test session manager and emergency response lead for the club. One of my favorite activities to do as a ham is to volunteer on communications teams at local events as both a radio operator and net control. I am a Laurel VE and I organize and host a yearly ham cram where we are able to teach the material for the technician exam and license about 50 people in an entire day. I have participated in some HF contests as well with the set up we have in the CPARC ham shack. I have also helped with some of the social events the club puts on including transmitter hunts, BBQ’s and club showcases at Cal Poly. Through the hobby I have met a lot of new friends as well as gained more confidence in myself. Thank you again for all of your support.

Collin Pike KJ4AXB

My name is Collin Pike KJ4AXB from Roanoke, Alabama, and I would like to thank 10-10 for awarding me your scholarship. My amateur radio career started many years ago. When I was seven, my dad gave me his amateur radio book, The World of Ham Radio, to study for the novice test. It was very similar to the books we have today, except the questions were at the back, which means the front was all the theory behind ham radio. After failing many tests, I made the book disappear in a fire and stopped studying at ten years of age.

In 2007, I attended my first Field Day in another attempt to get interested in ham radio.

When I attended the Randolph County Amateur Radio Club Field Day, I finally found the part of ham radio I liked, which was the hunt for stations on HF. Without using a phone, I found that I could communicate with ham operators worldwide and started my spiral into the World of Ham Radio. I began taking classes with the local radio club and passed my Technician test in December of 2007. At the age of thirteen, I started using my dad’s callsign to make contacts on the local repeater while waiting for my callsign to come from the FCC. I soon noticed that I was greatly limited to the contacts I could make. What does any teenager do when faced with a wall? I started studying and taking classes for the General Class test. I passed the General test in October of 2008; when I passed that test, I began looking for my first HF rig. I noticed that the equipment was costly, so I was forced to wait and continue looking for the right radio for me.

I found my tuner, AT-897, in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. I found it with an excellent Elmer, who gave me the tuner for about thirty dollars because he did not know if it would work after being in the salty atmosphere that came after the Hurricane. I found the radio, FT-897D, itself from a hamfest in north Georgia; when the guy heard my story, he lowered the price of the radio from somewhere in the around a thousand to, if I remember right, five hundred dollars with all the bells and whistles that come with the radio. I then found my antenna at the Cullman hamfest, a Buddipole. These guys and their generosity helped me begin to help with communications during tough times around the world. I remember listening and helping with the relief in Haiti, and when the earthquake hit Chile.

Since passing General, I have helped in many bike rides, helping with multiple causes such as Multiple Sclerosis and cancer. I have now helped with the Dayton Hamvention for three years with communication and golf carts to help people get around the convention. In 2011, I passed my Extra test to help with the volunteer examiners. In 2019, I successfully finished my Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering, and in 2020 I finished my Master’s in Cybersecurity, both from Auburn University. I have just started working for the U.S. Government. I am still very active with the ham radio community, and if you hear my callsign, please respond and I would be glad to speak to you.

Marty Sullaway NN1C

Marty Sullaway NN1C is a 19-year-old radio aficionado living in Waban, Massachusetts and is very grateful for being awarded the 10-10 Scholarship. A lover of all things technical, his time in amateur radio has been spent designing and selling station automation hardware, teaching licensing classes and pushing the limits in remote contesting. While he has a modest station at home consisting of various wire antennas, the majority of his operating happens at other stations. Marty has been extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to pilot many larger contest stations, both as a single operator and as part of multi-operator teams. He has operated at stations such as ZF1A, W1KM, KC1XX, K3LR, K1LZ, K1VR, K1IR, 4X6TT, and VY1AAA. Most operating recently has been with the KC1XX team, with some activity from ZF1A. Marty enjoys digital, CW, and SSB operations, and is a proud life member of CWOps, #2276.

His family is also involved in ham radio. His mother is KC1LDK and his sister is KC1IDH.

Recent contest success includes #1 Zone 8 in CQ WW SSB 2020 and winning both modes of ARRL DX and the IARU contest operating Single-Op Low Power Unlimited. Marty currently works in mmWave multi-static radar research and enjoys developing products for the amateur radio community. He currently sells SO2R Mini, a low-cost single op two radio control device, and has sold several hundred units (so2r.org).

Marty is a frequent digital content producer in amateur radio, acting as a frequent amateur radio club speaker, podcast guest, and has been published in The National Contest Journal as well as CQ Magazine, and various other media channels. Marty is currently a freshman at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, where he is pursuing a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering. In addition to the interests described, he is working toward his pilot’s license and does design work for Northeastern electric powered racing team.

Christopher Dix W3CJD

I am Christopher Dix, W3CJD from Denville, New Jersey. It is an honor to be chosen as a scholarship recipient from 10-10 International. I was very excited to learn that I was selected for this award, and I am writing to thank you for your generous financial support of my education. Over the past two years, I was able to start my college education through a dual-enrollment program offered at a local community college. I spent my junior and senior years of high school studying full-time at college while still taking Advanced Placement courses and managing two clubs at high school. This effort allowed me to complete my Associate’s degree alongside my high school graduation. My formal studies have been in Information Technology, more specifically focusing on Cybersecurity. I am currently enrolled in a program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology which will allow me to further advance my skill set and specialize

in Cybersecurity, bridging the gap between my current knowledge and the requirements for entering the industry.

The current lock-downs and restrictions worldwide due to COVID-19 have certainly had a severe impact on all of our careers, hobbies, and personal lives. Facing this obstacle at a key crossroads in my life, I am working to use this time to invest into myself, both professionally and personally. The world situation forced me to reevaluate and change my education plans, and I am very fortunate to currently be in an all-online program that is well-taught and managed, allowing me to take valuable knowledge and experience away from my formal schooling. This extra time at home has also allowed me to become more active in the amateur radio hobby. I earned my General license this summer and was able to get an HF station on the air this fall. Perhaps, schedule allowing, I will now be able to participate in some of 10-10’s nets and other activities. My first DX contacts were made on 10 meters using a portable station set up for Field Day in June, and, since then, I have been particularly interested in activity on that band. I was also able to get more involved in the public service aspects of amateur radio by devoting additional time to local ARES, RACES, and NTS groups, and by becoming a registered operator with Radio Relay International. We get more out of any endeavor by putting more effort into it, and this lock-down has given me the opportunity to devote more time to my various interests, letting me advance my knowledge and outreach.

Now more than ever, Cybersecurity is a crucially important aspect of every organization’s ability to carry out daily functions, and I thank you for investing in my education. Your contribution significantly reduces the financial burden which I face and will allow me

to focus on working towards the experience and certifications I need to launch my career. Thank you for seeing the potential in students like myself. In turn, I hope to use your support to help make myself a valuable member of both the Cybersecurity industry

and the amateur radio community.

Zechariah Lea WX4TVJ

My name is Zechariah Lea, WX4TVJ from Palm Coast, Florida and I would like to thank the 10-10 Scholarship Foundation for choosing me as a recipient of their scholarship. All my family members are hams; both my parents and my three sisters. I was first introduced to amateur radio at age 12 when my parents brought me to a local club station in 2014. I received my Technician license in early 2015 with the call KM4IBW, and by April the next year I had upgraded to Extra. I chose WX4TVJ because my dad is WX4TV, so I am WX4TV Jr.! At the 2015 Dayton Hamvention my sister Faith Hannah AE4FH and I did a presentation about antennas for VHF, a talk we would also give at the Old Dominion University open house in 2016. My family has a website called HamRadio.world, as well as a YouTube channel of the same name. Please check them out! In the home shack we have a Yaesu FT-897D all band transceiver and a Yaesu FT-2900 2M transceiver. We have a Hustler 5BTV vertical antenna and a True Ladder Line doublet antenna for HF. For VHF and UHF, we have an Arrow J-Pole antenna.

Since I earned my license, I have participated in many contests such as Field Day and CQWW. I have also done volunteer work for bike-a-thons such as Tour de Cure, and also helped with communications between shelters during hurricanes. During Hurricane Matthew I also helped run the ARES net.

Outside of the hobby, my main interest is aviation. I have stick time in over 30 aircraft of about 15 types, including a Skyship 600 blimp (I hold the unofficial world record as the youngest person to fly this type) and a UH-1B Huey. I am also knowledgeable in the history of many aircraft and have even found mistakes and inaccuracies in restored antique aircraft. I have a 54 year-old Guillows Trixter Beam, and an RC plane called the X4Z Dart., both controlled by 6 meters.  I also have a quadcopter given to me by John LeVous, KW4CR

My primary interest in ham radio is engineering. I have built many kits and have some experience with Arduino. I am currently in my freshman year (sophomore if you count my credit hours from Daytona State College) at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University pursuing a degree in computer engineering.

Xenia Berger ZL4YL

My name is Xenia Berger, ZL4YL, from New Zealand and I wanted to thank you very much for the generous scholarship you have given me. I am really grateful for being chosen as it will be very helpful for me going forward 

My family moved to New Zealand from Germany in 2009. Although I only got my license in 2015 at the age of 14, I have been involved in ham radio for all of my life. Both of my parents are licensed (ZL3IO and ZL2YL) so I have grown up helping build antennas and radio equipment. My sister is ZL2GQ. We live up in the Waimarama Heights on the east coast of the central North Island in sunny Hawke’s Bay. At our place we also host the contest station ZM4T 

In June 2017 we installed and commissioned a CW Skimmer based on a Red Pitaya. It feeds spots into the Reverse Beacon Network and via “CW Reporter” to PSK Reporter. Another Red Pitaya operating as an FT8 skimmer and sending spots to PSK Reporter was added in March 2019.  

My favourite aspect of ham radio is doing contests and DXing (257 DXCC) and I have taken part in many contests either with the ZM4T contest team or as ZL4YL. My preferred mode of operation is CW.  In 2018, I was able to partake in the WRTC (World Radiosport Team Championship) in Germany as part of the team Oceania 2. Our call was Y89N. It was an incredible experience where I met many amazing people. In 2019, I became the Youth Coordinator for NZART (our national organisation, like the ARRL). During this time we organised many youth activities like the participation in the IARU Region 1 driven youth activity month in December (2018 & 2019) making a few thousands contacts with a New Zealand wide team each year. We organized for youngsters to partake in some of the world largest contests from the ZM4T contest station (CQ WPX SSB 2019, CQ WWDX SSB 2019 & 2020), partook in our national conference with a booth and managed to send a small ZL team to Bulgaria for the international YOTA camp in 2019. I also wrote a column for the NZART magazine about the youth activities during this time. 

In addition to ham radio, I enjoy singing (having been part of several choirs in high school), reading and cooking. Growing up, I have always been interested in the sciences, especially biology. In February 2020 I moved to Auckland where I now study medicine at Auckland University.  In New Zealand we don’t have to do a whole undergraduate degree (although you can) to apply to med school. The favoured pathway is to do first year either health or biomedical science, after which you can apply to med. I did first year biomedical science last year and was then accepted into medical school. This requires my full focus. Therefore I stepped down from my position as youth officer. I’m still active on the radio bands hunting DX and doing CW contests via remote access to our home station. .

I was the Youth Officer of the NZART (our national organisation) in 2018/2019..