SWR? Who Cares! by Kristen McIntyre K6WX. A BARC Zoom Presentation July 14, 2020

Kristen has been interested in radio since she was about 5 years old. When she was small, she built many radio kits, including her favorite: the one tube radio kit. Kristen started in Amateur Radio around 1979 while at MIT by getting her technician's license. She built a 2m repeater with an autopatch to use on campus at MIT. Somewhere in the middle of all this, life intervened, and her license lapsed. She has recently been re-licensed, getting her extra ticket. She recently held the call signs KG6OGQ and AE6KJ in rapid succession just before K6WX, a vanity call. She is now active on 2m, 1.2GHz, and is active on HF with an Elecraft K2 she built while visiting her mother. Kristen often does her HF-ing mobile with the K2 and a ham stick or from her apartment with a homebrew helical vertical dipole and an IC-7600 driving an AL-811H. These days she loves to chase DX using mostly CW and works contests from time to time.

Kristen is also licensed in Japan, her second home, as JI1IZZ.
Kristen has assumed the office of ARRL Pacific Division Director ARRL, The Technical Coordinator for the East Bay Section, and was president of the Palo Alto Amateur Radio Association for 2007, 2008, 2010. She is also a member of the following clubs: Palo Alto Amateur Radio Association, South Bay Amateur Radio Association, NCCC, USS Hornet Amateur Radio Club, Northern California DX Club, Northern California Contest Club, FISTS CW Club (10232), NAQCC, SKCC, and Young Ladies Radio League. Kristen is also net control twice a week (well, once a week for now since work is pressing) for the 9 am talk net:

http://www.9amtalk.net

Kristen is a long time denizen of Silicon Valley and has worked at or consulted for many of the usual suspects.

Kristen's work bio:

Kristen McIntyre is currently a senior software engineer at Apple working on OS X and iOS. She recently came back from being an entrepreneur in Japan. Previously she was a researcher at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where she was researching robustness and emergent properties of large distributed computer systems. Her career has spanned many diverse areas. She started in the early '80s designing high power linear amplifiers. She then spent about 5 years in Japan architecting and designing precision analog test systems and learning the Japanese language and culture. Upon returning to the states, Kristen joined Adobe Systems. She became one of the architects of PostScript Level 2 and its RTOS underpinnings and the principal architect of AppleTalk networking for PostScript printers. In the early 90's she became a consultant and later founded an internet service provider and a network consulting firm. In 1999 Kristen decided to hang up her entrepreneur's hat and landed at Sun, tried the startup thing again only to land at Apple, where she's been since. Kristen holds a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.