23/09/2026
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THE LAST QSO
One signal fading. Another just beginning.
He was 82 years old and had been a ham for 66 years.
His tower still stood outside, but he hadn’t climbed it in years. His hands weren’t as steady anymore, his hearing wasn’t quite as sharp, and many of the voices he once knew on the bands now belonged to Silent Keys.
His wife had been gone six years.
There was a time when she’d stand at the top of the basement stairs and yell down:
“Are you coming up anytime tonight?”
His answer was almost always the same.
“One more contact!”
She knew what that meant.
One contact might be five minutes. It might be three hours.
Tonight, nobody was waiting upstairs.
The kids had grown and had families of their own. The grandchildren visited when they could. The house that had once been filled with noise was now mostly quiet.
That’s one thing nobody tells you about getting old.
Eventually, the house gets quiet.
So he walked downstairs and turned on the radio.
The glow from the screen filled the shack.
Around him were the remains of a lifetime in ham radio: old QSL cards, contest plaques, DXCC certificates, photographs of towers he’d built and pictures of friends who were no longer here.
There were thousands upon thousands of contacts in those old logbooks.
Japan. Australia. Africa. Europe. Islands he’d once stayed up all night trying to work.
There had been a time when every new country seemed incredibly important.
Tonight, none of it seemed very important.
He slowly tuned across 20 meters.
Then he heard something down in the noise.
“CQ… CQ… this is…”
Gone.
A few seconds later, the weak voice returned.
“CQ… CQ…”
He stopped tuning.
It was a young voice.
The kid called again.
Nobody answered.
He called again.
Still nothing.
The old man smiled.
He remembered that feeling.
Sixty-six years earlier, he’d been the kid sitting in front of a radio wondering if his signal was actually going anywhere.
So he reached for the microphone.
His hand shook slightly as he pressed the button.
“Station calling CQ, this is Wh***ey Two…”
Almost immediately the kid came back.
“WH***EY TWO! WH***EY TWO! I GOT YOU!”
The old man laughed.
A real laugh.
The kind that hadn’t echoed through that basement in a long time.
The kid was 14 years old. He’d been licensed for three weeks. He had a used radio, 100 watts and a piece of wire his father had helped him throw into a tree.
This was his seventh contact.
The questions started immediately.
“How long have you been a ham?”
“What was your first radio?”
“Have you talked to people all over the world?”
“Did you ever build antennas?”
“Did you climb towers?”
The old man looked at a photograph on the wall of himself standing on a tower many decades earlier.
“Yeah, kid. I’ve climbed a few.”
They talked for nearly an hour.
He told the boy about vacuum tubes and paper logs. About waiting months for QSL cards. About staying awake until three in the morning because some rare DX station had finally appeared.
He told him about antennas that worked beautifully and antennas that should have worked but somehow didn’t.
And then he told him about the friends.
That was the part he talked about the longest.
Friends he’d first met as nothing more than a callsign coming through a speaker.
Some eventually stood beside him at weddings. Some came to the hospital. Some drove hundreds of miles to help put up a tower.
And some he had spoken with almost every night for decades.
Now many of their callsigns hadn’t been heard in years.
Finally, the boy asked him a simple question.
“What was the best contact you ever made?”
The old man didn’t answer right away.
He looked around the shack.
He’d worked rare countries. Huge pileups. DXpeditions thousands of operators desperately wanted in their logs.
But strangely, at 82 years old, he couldn’t remember most of the signal reports anymore.
He couldn’t remember who was number 250 or number 300.
What he remembered were the people.
The nights.
The laughter.
And suddenly, more than anything, he remembered his wife standing at the top of those basement stairs.
“Are you coming up anytime tonight?”
He would have given every QSL card on those walls to hear her ask him that one more time.
The frequency went quiet.
Then the boy asked:
“You still there?”
The old man swallowed hard.
“Yeah, kid. I’m still here.”
They talked a few more minutes before the boy finally said he had to go. It was getting late and he had school the next morning.
Then the kid said something the old man wasn’t prepared for.
“I hope I’m still doing ham radio when I’m your age.”
The old man looked around his shack one more time.
Sixty-six years.
Thousands of contacts.
Radios had come and gone.
Antennas had gone up and come down.
Friends had become Silent Keys.
Children had grown up.
And the woman who spent a lifetime waiting for him to finish “one more contact” was no longer waiting upstairs.
He pressed the microphone.
“Kid, I hope you are too.”
Then he paused.
“And I’m going to tell you something that took me 66 years to figure out.”
The frequency was completely quiet.
“All these years, we thought we were collecting countries.”
He looked at the QSL cards covering the wall.
“We weren’t.”
His voice cracked slightly.
“We were collecting moments.”
There was silence for a few seconds.
Then the boy answered softly.
“73.”
The old man smiled.
“73, kid.”
He released the microphone and sat there watching signals move across the screen.
Signals appeared.
Signals disappeared.
Just like they always had.
Just like people do.
Finally, he reached forward and turned off the radio.
The shack went dark.
But upstairs, hundreds of miles away, a 14-year-old boy was probably telling his father about the old ham he’d just worked.
Tomorrow that boy might make his eighth contact.
Then his ninth.
Someday his hundredth.
Maybe someday his ten-thousandth.
He’ll buy radios. Build antennas. Chase DX. Stay awake much too late. Meet people he’d never have known existed.
Some of them may become lifelong friends.
And if he’s lucky, he’ll grow old doing it.
Maybe 60 years from now, he’ll sit down in a quiet shack of his own. There may be photographs on his wall of people who aren’t around anymore.
He’ll turn on an old radio.
He’ll tune across the band.
And somewhere, barely above the noise, he may hear a nervous young voice:
“CQ… CQ… is anybody out there?”
Maybe he’ll smile.
Maybe he’ll remember an old man he worked when he was 14.
And maybe he’ll reach for the microphone and answer.
Because that’s how this hobby survives.
Not through expensive radios.
Not through towers.
Not through awards.
Through people.
One generation answering the next.
One human voice traveling through the darkness and telling another:
I hear you.
You’re not alone.
Maybe that’s what calling CQ has really meant all along.
We’re asking the world:
“Is anybody out there?”
And every once in a while, through the static, somebody answers:
“I’m here.”
#73
