ATCSguy1

I've lived in the northeast suburbs of the Twin Cities all my life. From an early age my father and I were HO modelers. I can still remember my first Sante Fe F unit with a rubber band drive. As my introduction in the Blog states, I also became interested in Ham Radio at a young age. At 14 I obtained my Ham license, complete with a 50’ tower and tri-band yagi in the back yard.

Years went by, with marriage and raising children, but I continued my 2 hobbies. The trains were still HO, but now I was scratch building the models. Several of them were 1st place winners at the Model Railroad Show at Har Mar Mall (for those of you that remember those days). Ham Radio got “bigger” too, the tower was now 70’ high and the next bigger size.

But a change occurred and move that spelled the end of Ham Radio, since moving into a townhouse prevented any type of tower installation. I did take all of the HO models with me, but I knew that I’d have to downsize. I’ve now got a 9’ shelf layout which is based upon the Osceola & Dresser, WI. area. I also collect modern brass diesels.

A friend of mine who lives in the Quad Cites (he drives UP trains for a living) put me onto ATCS Monitor. Like Nat, it caught my attention immediately. Hum…..radios & computers & trains. Could this be? I couldn’t believe that no one in the Twin Cites had attempted to get ATCS Monitor up and running. I knew Nat was “out there” from his posts on the Yahoo Group. So I decided to re-connect with some old Ham Radio friends whom I thought might be able to help. Sure enough, Joe Zwirn (he’s also a train buff) was interested. Joe, being retired from the 2-way radio business, had plenty of radios around. We tried one on the main protocol frequency. Wow! it revealed lots of data. In fact most of the BNSF Twin Cities track was coming in. So in May of 2007 Joe, Nat, and I put together the first ATCS Monitor feed for the TC area. As they say "the rest is history”.

For those of you using the ATCS Monitor feed, I hope you are enjoying it as much as I do. I’m currently working on setting up my mobile monitoring. So maybe I’ll run into some of you track side.

Don