Ham Pros · Issue 01 · Interview
Margaret Holloway got her Novice ticket at fourteen, after her father, a Navy radioman, sat her down at the family Heathkit and told her to stop guessing the dits and dahs and start counting them. Fifty-three years later, from a sixty-foot tower above Bremerton, Washington, she has confirmed contacts with 334 of the 340 territorial entities on the DXCC list. The remaining six include North Korea and a sub-Antarctic rock that sees a serious expedition once a decade. We talked about patience, vintage gear, the sound of a band opening at three in the morning, and what it means to chase something you may never finish. Six left.
Most people would call 334 of 340 almost done. You don't. Walk me through what the gap actually looks like from where you're sitting.
Six isn't six. That's the first thing.
Six is a probability distribution stretched over the rest of my life. Bouvet Island has had four serious activations in my entire career. The next one is funded, maybe, possibly 2027. North Korea hasn't been on the air in any meaningful way since Ed, P5RS7, made a handful of contacts in 2002. Crozet requires a French research vessel to drop a licensed operator at a station for months at a time, and the operator has to be willing to spend a fraction of that time on the radio instead of doing actual science. Scarborough Reef is a contested rock in the South China Sea that nobody can land on without permission from a government that doesn't want to give it.
So when I say six, what I mean is: I have a list of things that may or may not happen, in an order I don't control, in windows of hours when both the propagation and the politics line up, and I have to be at the radio when they do.
Almost-done is the wrong frame. It's not a finish line I'm walking toward. It's a set of doors that might open. I want to be standing at the door when one of them does.
Take me back to the Heathkit. You were fourteen. What was the moment it stopped being your father's hobby and started being yours?
I was on twenty meters one Saturday in 1973, fumbling through CW. I'd been licensed about six months. A station in Argentina came back to my CQ. LU something. I forget the suffix now, which embarrasses me.
I worked him at maybe fifteen words per minute. He was a teenager too. He sent his name and that his father was a baker in Mendoza. I sent that mine was a chief radioman on a destroyer in Bremerton, Washington. We talked about the weather, what we'd eaten for dinner. The whole thing lasted maybe twelve minutes.
When I unkeyed for the last time, my hands were shaking. Not from nerves. I'd been concentrating that hard. I had just talked to a person in South America using a piece of equipment my father and I had built from a box on the kitchen table.
That was the moment it became mine. The Heathkit was my father's project. Argentina was my contact. Nothing he did or said could give me Argentina. I had to go get it.
I sent his QSL card to Mendoza three weeks later, and I still have his reply in a binder upstairs.
"Argentina was my contact. Nothing he did or said could give me Argentina."
Your station is a mix. A new Yaesu FT-DX10 next to a Heathkit SB-220 amplifier from the early seventies that you've rebuilt twice. Most operators end up on one side of the line or the other. Why both?
Because they do different things.
The Yaesu hears better than I ever will. Its digital signal processing, its noise reduction, its filtering, all of it pulls signals out of the mud that my ears in 1985 would have walked past. When I'm chasing a weak DXpedition through a thousand-station pile-up, that radio is a scalpel. I would not give it up.
The SB-220 is a different relationship. It's two 3-500Z tubes that glow orange in a dark shack, and when I key it down on twenty meters at midnight, I can hear the relays click and the fan come up. It feels like driving a manual transmission. I am aware of what is happening inside the machine. I had to rebuild it because the bandswitch contacts wore down and the high voltage capacitors finally let go after forty years, and rebuilding it forced me to understand it.
I can't tell you the Yaesu is better than the SB-220 because they aren't trying to be the same thing. One is a precision instrument. The other is a conversation with my father, who couldn't afford to buy a kilowatt amplifier when he was alive and would have loved this one.
FT8 changed the hobby. Some people say it gutted it. You can work a hundred countries in a weekend without ever saying a word. Some operators count those contacts. Some refuse to. Where are you on it?
I count them. I also don't enjoy them.
FT8 is a tool. Joe Taylor designed it to extract signals from below the noise floor, and it does that brilliantly. When the bands are dead and you need to confirm Burkina Faso for the Honor Roll, FT8 will get you there when CW and SSB won't. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't matter.
But there's a flatness to a digital contact that I find hard to describe to people who didn't operate before it existed. When I work a CW operator in Mongolia, I can hear his fist. The rhythm of his sending, the slight hesitation before his callsign, whether he's running a key or a paddle. That's a person. I know almost nothing about him, but I know he is there, at a key, paying attention.
FT8 is two computers exchanging tokens. The operators may be asleep. They often are. The contact is real in the sense that it counts. It is not real in the sense that meant something to me when I started.
I worked Glorioso on FT8 in 2018. It's in my log. I am grateful. I would trade it for a thirty-second SSB contact with a real human voice from the same island, and I am not going to get that trade.
You've been operating across five and a half solar cycles. The sun decides when ten meters opens. You don't. What has chasing propagation taught you that you don't think you would have learned any other way?
That you can be ready or you can be lucky, and ready is a posture you have to hold for years before it pays off.
Solar Cycle 21 was the cycle of my twenties. The bands were on fire. You could throw a wet noodle out the window and work Europe on ten meters. I worked half my early DXCC count in that cycle without trying very hard. I thought I was good. I wasn't. The sun was good.
Cycle 24, in my fifties, was a different story. Weak peak, short window, the bands closed early in the evening for a decade. I sat in front of a quiet radio for hours and hours. Most of the time, nothing happened. Some of the time, something rare popped up and I had ninety seconds to work it.
What chasing propagation teaches you is that the work is done before the opening, not during it. By the time the band opens, your antenna is either pointed at the right azimuth or it isn't. You either know what frequency the station is operating on or you don't. You either have the rig warmed up or you don't.
The opening is short. The preparation is the hobby.
"The opening is short. The preparation is the hobby."
You're a woman in a hobby that's still about 85 percent men. You started when that number was probably closer to 97. What changed, what hasn't, and what do you wish people would stop asking you about it?
What's changed is that I no longer get asked, in 2026, whether my husband is the actual operator and I'm just keeping the log for him. That used to happen on the air. People would hear my voice, do the math, and decide that K7HOL must really be Mr. Holloway. I would have to gently correct them, and they would apologize in the way men apologize when they realize they've stepped on something they didn't know was there. I do not miss that.
What hasn't changed is how few of us there are. Field Day weekends, conventions, club meetings. I am usually one of three women in a room of forty. The young women I do meet in the hobby are wonderful and small in number.
What I wish people would stop asking is whether I think the hobby should be doing more to recruit women. I think the hobby should be doing more to be a hobby people want to be part of, full stop. The women will come if the hobby is interesting and the room is welcoming. The room being welcoming is a much harder problem than putting a picture of a woman on a recruiting brochure, and it has very little to do with gender. It has to do with whether the person next to you at the club meeting wants to hear what you have to say.
Tell me about a contact that broke your heart. One that got away.
3Y0Z. Bouvet Island. February 2018.
A team had been planning that expedition for years. They got within sight of the island, and the weather and a mechanical problem with the vessel forced them to abort before they ever set foot on the ground. They went home without making a single contact. I was up at three in the morning Pacific time for two weeks waiting for them to fire up. They never did.
I cried at the kitchen table the morning I read the announcement. Not because of Bouvet specifically. Because I knew what that team had spent. Years of fundraising, equipment, time away from their families. They had done everything right and the planet had said no.
And I knew, sitting there, that the next attempt might be a decade out. That I would be in my late sixties when it happened, if it happened. That my hearing might be different by then, my reflexes slower in a pile-up. That the chase doesn't wait for you to be ready.
I have a printed photo of the 3Y0Z team standing on the deck of their ship, taken before they left. It's pinned above my logbook. It is a reminder that you can do everything right and not get the contact, and that this is the hobby, and that the only response is to be at the radio for the next one.
And one that made you cry the other way. A contact that you'll carry to the end.
1A0C. Sovereign Military Order of Malta. November 2012.
It's a small operation that gets activated rarely, run out of a building in Rome that has its own postal system and is technically a separate sovereignty for DXCC purposes. The operator that night was a man I had worked years before from another rare entity. I recognized his fist before I copied his call. He was a slow, deliberate CW operator with a slight pause between the last two characters of his send. Unmistakable.
I called him on the second try. He came back. He sent my call correctly, gave me a signal report, and then, instead of moving on to the next station in the pile-up, he sent: HI MAGGIE LONG TIME 73.
I had not given him my name. He remembered it from years before. From one previous thirty-second contact.
I sat in my chair and cried with the headphones still on. The next station in the pile-up was calling and I couldn't move my hand to the key. My husband came in to ask what was wrong and I couldn't explain it.
That is what the hobby is, when it's working. A person on the other side of the world, in a building most people have never heard of, remembered my name from a contact a decade earlier and took ten extra seconds to use it. There is no algorithm that produces that. There is only one human and another human and a piece of wire stretched between two trees.
"There is no algorithm that produces that. There is only one human and another human and a piece of wire stretched between two trees."
Field Day. Contesting. The competitive side of the hobby. Some operators live for it. Some refuse it. What does it do for you, if anything?
I contest because it forces me to be a better operator.
A contest weekend is forty-eight hours of compressed problem solving. You're managing your antennas, your bands, the propagation, your fatigue, your operating efficiency. You're making decisions every twelve seconds. By the end of a major contest, I am a sharper operator than I was at the start of it. That carries over to DX chasing for the next several months.
I don't care about winning. My station isn't competitive at the top level and I know it. I'm a single operator running a hundred watts most of the time, with one tower and a modest antenna farm. The plaque winners are running multi-operator, multi-transmitter, multi-tower stations with stacked beams and amplifiers I will never own.
What I care about is the discipline. Field Day, ARRL DX, CQ World Wide, those weekends are calisthenics. They keep me ready for the openings I actually care about, when a rare DXpedition is on and I need to make the contact in one call.
The competition is the means. The readiness is the end.
The hobby is shrinking. The average ham in the US is past sixty. Fewer kids are coming in. People say it's dying. You've been here long enough to have heard that for several decades. Is it actually different now?
It's different and it's not.
I heard the hobby was dying when I got my license in 1973. The old timers told me that CB had ruined it, that the kids were all going to be on twenty-seven megahertz with their truckers, and that ham radio would be a memory by the millennium. I was that kid. I was supposed to be on CB. I wasn't.
What is different is the structural pull. When I was fourteen, building a Heathkit was how a curious kid encountered electronics. There was no other on-ramp. The internet, microcontrollers, software-defined radio kits, all the things that have made it easier to learn electronics have also made it less necessary to come through the door of amateur radio to get to them. The hobby used to be the gateway. Now it's one option among many.
So I don't think the hobby is dying. I think it's becoming what it probably always should have been: a smaller community of people who specifically want what it offers, which is the experience of putting a signal in the air and having another human, who you don't know and don't have to know, answer it.
That has never stopped being interesting to a certain kind of person. There are still fourteen-year-olds who would be hooked if someone sat them down at a radio. There just aren't as many adults willing to be the someone.
What would you tell a fourteen-year-old today who walked up to you and said they wanted in?
I would tell them the truth, which is that it is going to be slow.
I would tell them that they are going to spend a lot of hours at a radio that is doing nothing interesting. That the rewards are not on a schedule. That the hobby does not give you a notification when something good is about to happen. That they will sit in front of a quiet receiver more than they will work a rare station.
And then I would tell them that the slowness is the point. That in a life that is being optimized in every direction for friction-free reward delivery, there is something specific and durable about a hobby that won't be optimized. The sun decides. The other operator decides. The ionosphere decides. You decide whether to be in the chair.
Then I would put them in the chair. I would tune to a frequency where I knew someone was working DX, hand them the headphones, and let them listen until they heard a callsign they couldn't identify. That moment is the moment. Either it grabs them or it doesn't, and there is nothing I can say that will make it grab them. The radio does that or it doesn't.
I would also lend them a key and tell them to learn the code. They will hate me for the first three months and write me a thank-you letter at year five.
If you could put one thing in a time capsule for the operator who will be sitting at your station in fifty years, knowing nothing of you except your callsign in their logbook from a contact you made tonight, what would you leave them?
My logbook. The paper one, with the dates and the calls and the signal reports and the names, in my handwriting, from 1973 to whenever I stop.
Not because the contacts matter, although some of them do. Because the act of writing them down by hand for fifty years is a record of a person paying attention. There is something in the physical accumulation of those pages that no digital log captures. The ink fades in different places. The handwriting changes. Some entries are in my father's hand from the nights he and I operated together before he died.
If you sit at the radio in fifty years and pull that logbook off the shelf, you will not learn anything useful about DXCC or about how to operate. You will learn that someone, in a particular house, in a particular town, in a particular set of decades, sat at this position and chose to do this thing carefully and consistently for most of her adult life.
That's the thing I'd want the next operator to know. That somebody was here. That they took it seriously. That the radio was on.
Elsewhere
Margaret Holloway, K7HOL, operates from Bremerton, Washington. She retired in 2018 from a thirty-five-year career as a structural engineer designing bridges for the Washington State Department of Transportation. She does not maintain a website. The best place to find her is on twenty meter CW around 14.025 MHz, most evenings between sunset and local midnight.
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