A short story about David C. Packard

David C. Packard - K1RZW
October 2, 1917 - April 28, 1994

David C. Packard was a government employee that worked for the U.S. embassy in several countries. He held callsigns K1RZW, YN1TAT, KZ5DP, TI2TAT, HK0HCA, HR0DP, XV5CQ.

Here is a short story about David Packard in Vietnam by K8MFO:
David Packard had the "gift for gab" and claimed that he had "verbal permission" to use XV5CQ on the ham bands. He used to make the cocktail party rounds with the Vietnamese officials. This is probably how he got his verbal permission. This was around 1969 when Vietnam was on the banned country list. Military personal in Vietnam were not allowed on the ham bands at this time. He did have a lot of guts. He installed a 4 element quad on top of an apartment building in the same general area where I was stationed. In fact I was there for the antenna raising. It was a real comedy of errors with the language differences between David and the Vietnamese antenna crew. I was invited over to David's apartment a few times and used that XV5CQ call on CW only. David operated SSB only, but he did have one of those old Waters CODAX keyers, the same kind that Don Miller used on his DXpeditions! There were other "operations" on the air from this region at this time as well! Mr. Packard did get into trouble over ownership of some radio equipment. He was then sent to a South American location. Last I heard David had suffered a bad stroke. He bacame a SK in April 1994.