Orv W6BI

Orv W6BI lives in Simi Valley, California.  He's a retired Linux system administrator, an ARRL Santa Barbara Section Technical Specialist and an AREDN Ambassador.

He was first licensed as WN6WEY in 1967.  He's been into digital ham radio all his life, starting with CW.  He worked his way up through RTTY, PACTOR, packet radio and PSK31, and started messing around with ham radio networking in 2014. He helped deploy the initial network network nodes and backbone buildout in Ventura County and western Los Angeles County. He currently administers several dozen of them.

He's also active in coordinating the build-out and maintenance of the wider Southern California ham radio network, which now spans from Paso Robles in central California south to the Mexican border and east to Las Vegas, comprising over 450 nodes, both hilltop and ground-level, including hospitals, police departments and EOCs.

As an AREDN Ambassador he's given over 60 presentations about ham radio networking using AREDN software over the last five years and Elmered many hams worldwide on ham radio networking.  He's active in AREDN groups in Facebook, Slack, Telegram, and Discord, and monitors the forums on the AREDN website.