What is now known as the Amateur Radio SIG  had it's seed planted in 1988. The Naturist Society's "Clothed With the Sun" issue 8.3 showed Bob Cannon's, N4SMC ("Shed My Clothes"),  QSL card, which pictured him climbing a ladder  nude on the back of  his RV.  Lee Baxandall suggested  to Bob that maybe he (Bob) should start up a SIG for the Naturist Ham Radio community. Bob declined at the time because he was too busy with other projects.
 
    Terry Ryan, N3FIH listed the Amateur Radio Sig in "N" magazine in Fall of 1990. Terry was soon contacted by many naturist hams and non-hams. Bill Pacer and Keith Miller (AE3D) contacted Terry and discussed the idea of  Terry's group doing a Special Event station to commerorate Nude Recreation Week. A Special Event station had already been operated by Bob Cannon and Grant Porter (NI4CA) at the 1991 midWinter Naturists gathering. Early in 1991 Terry published the first newsletter for the SIG, encouraging members to participate in the upcoming Nude Recreation Week Special Event operation.

But the next Special Event for the SIG was at the Eastern Naturist Gathering, which  just happened to be held Field Day Weekend, so this turned out to be a combination Special Event/Nude Field Day Station. In an article written for this event by Bob Berger, K8RDN, he mentions his own operation of a station at the 1990 National Nude Weekend Beach Party. I'm not sure if Bob's 1990  National Nude Weekend Beach Party operation was a Special Event Station at the time, and will change this web page accordingly when I find out for sure. Are you starting to get the impression that I need to gather some better information concerning this topic? Anyway, the 1991 Special Event operation was a great success, with a number of SIG members participating and they made hundreds of contacts!

      Then, at the 1992 Western Naturist Gathering, I bumped into Dave, (callsign withheld by request). Dave told me about a nudist/naturist net that met on 14.265 on Thursday evenings at 7pm PDT.  I went to a friend's station at the above times and listened around, but never did hear the net. I still had no idea about the SIG's activities, special events or anything else.
 
     The next known Special Event station was for the 1992 National Nude Week, but it's likely there was a station at the midWinter Naturists Gathering in Feb 1992 at Sunsport Gardens, FL. A number of stations located all over the country participated in the National Nude Week Special Event. A total of 358 contacts were made, representing 40 states, 4 Provinces,  and Puerto Rico. A number of articles in the Feb 1993 Bare Waves (Our SIG's newsletter at the time) described operator's experiences during the 1992 National Nude Week Special Event. There were stations at 3 landed clubs and 2 nude beach sites that year.
 
     The following August (1992) I found myself employed at a place that had Internet access. I found out about the "rec.nude" newsgroup right away, of course.  Many of the articles had "signature files" attached at the end.  These  signature (sig) files are a way of personalizing the article.  Many of these sig files contained call signs.  I figured maybe one or more of the people with call signs in their sig files  might know whatever happened to the nudist/naturist net.  When I posted an article to that affect the replies I got ranged from "never heard of 'em" to "I've heard of them, but didn't know they met on any regular basis" and "They just do field day type stuff".
 
      During 1993 Terry experienced health problems which interfered with Amateur Radio SIG activity around this time. When he recovered, he found family and job commitments further frustrated his desire to continue with organizing and publishing the newsletter.  At the time I had not yet become involved with the Amateur Radio SIG;  not having a station of my own had kept me ignorant of any of the SIG's activities (still).

     So I took it upon myself to see if I could arrange a net on 14.265 on a Thursday night in May 1993 at 7pm PDT in the hopes of finding one or more of the original net people.  I forget who all showed up that first night, but I think Ben, WD5HLS was one of them, and Kenny, in Denver, was another.  We decided to meet again the following week.  We averaged 5 or 6 checkins a week until August 1993.
 
    I then took a 2 week vacation in August.  I happened to stop at Laguna del Sol, a nudist resort near Sacramento, CA, where I bumped into Bob, WL7GS (we sure got a lot of Bobs in our group).  I told Bob of the net, and the following Thursday night he brought on board 2 Alaskan hams, Brenda and Larry, AL7LX and AL7LW.  We had a total of 19 checkins that night, and it would have been 20 had I got home from vacation in time.  From that night onwards, we had an average of 10-15 checkins per week until October, when propagation began to cut into the length of  time we could run the net.  By the time December had arrived, the average was down to 5 checkins, with some weeks less than that.
 
     Once spring 1994 had arrived the checkins began to increase, and as of the last week of April had resumed the 10 checkins per week level.  During this time we kept changing the time the net would meet, but kept the frequency of 14.265Mhz, and also kept meeting on Thursday nights.  We now meet at 0000Z.
     The topics vary, of course, but mostly center around nudist/naturist things, like what we did the previous weekend, current events that relate to us, etc. We also wind up passing along information about landed clubs and free beaches, hot springs, and that sort of thing. We don't discuss rates at the landed clubs since that would likely conflict with part 97 somewhere.  Some of us occasionally threaten to start up a 40m net on Tuesdays, but nothing has come of it so far.

     During the late winter/early spring, we began to plan the Special Event Stations in earnest. Nobody had heard from Terry in awhile, and I hadn't received a reply from a letter I'd sent in October or November.  I sort of took it upon myself to send out a newsletter to the few hams that had checked into NudeNet if I couldn't contact Terry.  So I wrote Terry another letter explaining what we were up to. This time I got a reply.  It turns out he has no HF rig these days, and is actually quite busy with his family and his job.  He gave me his roster and copies of previous newsletters.  It's going to be a while before I can publish newsletters of the caliber he had been sending out.

     Getting back to the Internet, for those of you who have email access but no newsreader access to rec.nude, Ben, WD5HLS, has created an electronic mailing list for NARSIG members. To get on it, email a request along with a brief introduction to:

     The topics on the mailing list deal with the planning of  upcoming things like Nude Recreation Week/Day and the like.  I usually post things like excuses about why the newsletter isn't out yet.
 

     Well, that's a rather fuzzy version of how this group came to be.  Many thanks to those that were instrumental in the re-incarnation of NudeNet and who help  keep it going during the lean months of November thru February.

    Without diehards like Ben, WD5HLS, Bob, N5KF,  and many many other regulars, the net would have had to re-establish it's presence on 20m during the spring, which would be no easy task!

     If you have any questions or suggestions concerning our group or this website, please feel free to write me at:
 

                             Jim Campbell  WB6ZPB
                             P.O. Box 232445
                             Encinitas, Ca. 92023-2445

                             Email: inarousa@yahoo.com..

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