Charlie Wells K4SKI

I just ran across your pictures of the twelve element 15m beam at K4SKI back in 1971. Actually, Charlie put that thing up in about 1963. Charlie and I were really good friends back then, and did a lot of DXing together. I noticed the picture is from a 1971 magazine, and there is a rooftop in partial view. When Charlie first put it up, he lived in a mobile home on the outskirts of Greenville, NC. so the antenna must have been relocated at some point. Charlie ran a BC-610 on 15m AM, and we converted the final to run a 304TH instead of the 250TH. We didn't have wattmeters in those days, so I have no idea how much power it would run, but it was a lot! At the time, I had seven elements on 15m, and ran a homebrew pair of 4-400s on AM. As I said, we did a lot of Dxing together, and back in those days there weren't any 2m local repeaters and that sort of thing, so whenever one of us worked a rare station we'd call the other on the phone and let him know. One day I got home from work and my wife met me at the door, saying the old (B&W) TV was broken. I took the back off and saw one of the tuner tubes, a 6U8, wasn't lit. Since I didn't have a spare, and the TV/radio shop was closed for the day, I called Charlie on the phone. I said "Hey Charlie, you got a 6U8?" He quickly answered, "No! What frequency is he on?"!!! I haven't heard from him since I left Greenville in 1966 to work at RTP near Raleigh. I wrote him a couple of times years ago, but I don't think Charlie was much for writing letters. Charlie was the classic old-timer, builder-experimenter, hard-working, stay-up-all-night DXing kind of guy. I'd like to shake his hand and tell him I enjoyed knowing him and being his friend.
Phil Chambley, Sr. k4dpk

Magazine article courtesy of WO4LF
Info courtesy of K4DPK