From Puerto Rico to the Whole World and Beyond: A Tribute to Mady – G4WHV

From Puerto Rico to the Whole World and Beyond: A Tribute to Mady – G4WHV

I operated A52AA from Thimphu, Bhutan, earlier this month (December 2025), under difficult conditions with excessive, unidentified noise, the cause of which could not be established despite several tests. Only a disappointingly small number of stations were able to break through the S7-S9 noise levels that I had to contend with. On the very last day of operations from Bhutan, just before I took down the antennae, I was delighted to receive an unexpectedly clear call from G3MHV.

I immediately recognized the operator as Terry, with whom I had had a QSO the previous year (2024) while I was operating from Armenia as EK/AB1F.

One reason I recalled the prior year’s QSO with Terry was because, after my return to the States a few months later, we had exchanged direct QSLs in the month of December 2024, and Terry’s QSL had the distinctive silhouette images of him and his wife, Mady, who was also a ham.

The other reason I remembered Terry was that I had learned from his email signature that he was a retired Professor Emeritus of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, and Chemical Engineering & Materials Science from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering.

On my return two weeks ago from Bhutan to my home in Greenbelt, Maryland, I received an email from Terry thanking me for picking up his call in the pile-up of European stations and inquiring how he could send a donation and get my A52AA QSL card with the “panoramic view” of Thimphu. I replied right away, glad that I was able to connect with Terry from both Armenia (EK) and Bhutan (A5).

Terry’s email reply contained, in his own words, “bad news.” Mady, his wife and companion of sixty years, had passed away ten months earlier in February 2025. As a widower myself, I could understand, to some extent at least, what Terry was going through and conveyed my sympathies.

In his next email, Terry mentioned how he and Mady, originally from Puerto Rico, had met in San Francisco in 1965 and had got married in 1968. Soon after that, Mady studied for and passed the test and got her amateur radio license to join Terry in the hobby. Terry mentioned that they had traveled all over the world together and operated from several countries.

While pondering over the brevity and transitoriness of life, I decided to look up Mady’s call G4WHV on QRZ.com. When read Mady’s bio I was struck dumb by the various callsigns she had held: KA6ZYF, KP3YL (representing her home island Puerto Rico) and G4WHV, 7J6AAB, OZ1KLD! The list did not end there. Mady (and Terry) had also operated from several locations in Russia, Kazakhstan, Albania.

What caught my eye, though, was Mady’s Japan call 7J6AAB. I knew that the ‘7J’ prefix was assigned exclusively to foreign amateur radio licensees operating from Japan. I had worked many 7Js with my VU2ABE call from India and I remembered that they were all male operators, mostly US servicemen posted in Japan. But I vaguely (I do not know how after all these years) recalled that there was one female (YL) station that I had spoken to decades ago. I opened my VU2ABE logbook on my computer and ran a search for 7J6AAB, Mady’s call sign and I almost fell out of my chair. There were two QSOs going back twenty-four years to 2001!

I couldn’t believe my eyes or my good fortune. My log also showed that we had exchanged QSLs. From my folder of scanned QSLs, I was able to pull up Mady’s QSL.

Excited by what I had found, I wrote a hurried email to Terry enclosing the screenshot from my logbook and also attaching the QSL scans.

Less than a minute after the email had left my computer, another thought struck me. ‘Surely, Terry too would have worked from Japan?’ I quickly discovered his JA call – 7J6ABN – and ran another quick search. And there it was! I had spoken with Terry too, twenty-four years ago, two decades and a half before our Armenia and Bhutan QSOs.

What about QSL cards? Sure enough, there were two in my possession from Terry, the dedicated QSLers that he and Mady have always been. I quickly sent another email with the log extract and attaching the scans of the QSL cards in the same manner I had done before. Terry, for his part, was also able to look up his logbook and QSLs to confirm our contacts from 2001.

Suddenly, the sadness of Mady’s passing was replaced with fond memories, gratitude, and even joy at reconnecting in this unexpected manner after many, many years, even after Mady had passed on.

Not to be didactic, but what if we had not maintained logs or exchanged QSLs? I’m forever grateful to Mady, Terry, and other amateur radio operators who diligently maintain logs even if it is not a mandatory requirement and who go the extra mile to exchange QSLs electronically or via mail.

PS My gratitude also to JA4DOB – Kono-san, who has passed on also, my QSL Manager at that time who made the exchange of QSLs possible.
Arigatou gozaimashita, Kono-san!

73 de  AB1F – VU2ABE – EK/AB1F – A52AA