Hello

I’m Christine Rial from Moon Twp, PA, USA. A version of the website has been online for over 30 years now. I have also been an ham radio operator for even longer. I have several activity’s that I have love during my life. One of the first was my love of the outdoor which started at a very early age. Another activity is ham radio which is something that my father encourage me to do since I had a great interest in electronics. Then one of my most interesting hobby is high power rocketry. Down below I will go into more details of each of these loves of my life.

OUTDOORS:

I think I was age 5 when the family went camping for the first time. What an adventure getting to explore new places and worlds. Getting to swim it the old swimming hole was fun thing to do and then sitting around the camp fire listening to all the stories. That first time was camping just off the road heading to Westline, PA. Along the Kinzua Creek. If you ever been to Westline it is a small town in the Allegheny National forest off a dead end road. From there I had join several different groups that let me camp and hike all over Western Pennsylvania. I have hiked the Baker Trail and the Laurel Highland Trails. I’ve gotten to canoe the Allegheny and Clairton rivers.

ELECTRONICS & HAM RADIO

My father had always encourage my interest in electronics and radio. I would love building kit and he even bought me an early Heathkit 4 function calculator that back then cost over 80 dollars. He also encourage me to get an ham radio license but back then you had to know morse code which with my dyslexia I could never get. Once the No Code license came out for ham radio I took the test which I easily passed. With encouragement and taking a course from another operator I passed the five work a minute code test. I have been an ham now for over 30 years and I have passed the Extra Test and because an VE. I love combining my hobby I like getting out into the woods and operating POTA {Parks on the Air} or hiking to top of mountains to do SOTA {Summits on the Air}. One of the things I liked to do was the early digital packet network that were on the air. Would would be be able to chat with your friends keyboard to keyboard long before AOL ever came out. One of the many things I learn was AMPRNet which was the internet TCP/IP over the ham radio packet network. So I was Pinging, FTP, Telnetting and all the over protocols long before I got on the internet.

INTERNET

Getting on line started with a company called CompuServe and the Dow Jones Stock exchange services. Which I connected early on with an 300 baud modem hooked to an TRS-80 model 2. I keep those connection all the way though to the early PC years. Finally an ham radio friend told me about a company here in Pittsburgh called Telerama. Telerama was the third private ISP {Internet Service Provider} in the whole country. The year was 1994 and I finally had direct access to the internet. I got on the net a whole month before Netscape {One of the first real web browsers}. Getting on the internet was easy for me since I had all that networking background from the ham radio digital packet radio work.

ROCKETY

This is one that get most people interested with my hobbies. I am into high power rocket which had an interesting start. I had a weekend that I had nothing to do so I did some searching on the net and found out about a local rocket launch with the NAR organization called “Pittsburgh Space Command” I did this first in rocket club in high school and when I attended the launch I was impressed with the organization. Then someone left a catalog on my front seat – I was then hooked. My rockets kept getting bigger and bigger with motors size going above the “D” hobby motors. I then join the Tripoli group that was into even bigger rockets and research in motor design. This hobby let me meet some very interesting people with the same interest as myself. It has also let me travel getting to launch all over the world. I have flown in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Texas, Ohio, Maryland, and Tennessee. I have even travel to Switzerland which was a ton of fun listening to all the rocket talk in different languages. I even held leadership positions in the local and national organizations.

73…