Steve,

Great story and funny, too.  Shoot, on CW over the years, I have often been
asked if I were a YL because they thought Phil might be short for Phylis.
For awhile, I tried using Fil as sort of a nick name and that backfired for
the same reason.  On phone, and on two meters around Denver, the guys laugh
at me because whenever I say my name to someone who doesn't know me, I say,
my name is Phil as in Philadelphia and not bill like in Billings.  You would
not believe how many hundreds of times they come back and say, Ok Bill, it
is nice to meet you.  Speaking of tuning 5 or 6 KHz off your crystal
frequency, the guy who gave me my novice test over 40 years ago said that
when he was a novice, he had a crystal for 37 46 and this was, of course,
when the novice band on 80 meters was 3700 to 37 50 KHz.  He was tuning the
novice band one night when he heard a Canadian calling CQ down on about 37
04 or 05 but my friend had no crystals for the low end of the novice band.
So he started calling him any, a good 40 KHz up the band.  Dad gum it if the
V E didn't tune the whole novice band, heard my friend calling him and
answered him.  talk about cross band.  I used to love it when the general
class guys would offer to go up into the phone band and talk to me as a
novice on CW.  After I got my general, I did that dozens of times with
novices and had a blast doing it.  It has bothered me, however, for many
years that I rarely find anybody younger than I am on the band and I am 54
years old now.  When I was a novice, you couldn't hardly find anybody who
was above 17 years of age.  When I got my general, we had so many teenagers
on the Nebraska side band net, we started our own teen traffic net on the
same frequency and started getting check ins from all over the midwest.

Phil.
K0NX