Originally published in the August 1988 issue of the Collector and Emitter.
Recent earth-shaking exploits by our own beloved Q. R. Zedd, A6A, have intensified the usual immense interest in the man who is an inspiration to us all. For those new to the hobby, or the history of the great man, we present a Q. R. Zedd Miscellany, fantastic facts about the greatest DXer of them all.
Zedd was born more than a half-century ago during a DXpedition to Tibet by his famed parents, Zepp Zedd (inventor of television, the VCR and arch supports) and Constance Wilhemina (CW) Zedd (former fan dancer, international spy and world record-holder for Morse code speed). Only hours after Q. R. was born, his daddy was killed in an avalanche. This, combined with the difficult delivery on a freezing mountainside above the 14,000-foot level, cut Momma Zedd’s CW QSO rate to fewer than 600 per hour for three hours.
Zedd is six feet, two inches tall, and weighs a trim 192, the same weight he carried when he won Olympic gold medals in swimming, track, boxing, wrestling, marksmanship and logbook maintenance. He is frighteningly handsome and all women find him totally irresistible.
Zedd lives on Honor Roll Ranch, just a hoot and a holler south of town. His antenna farm, which includes two towers 3,000 feet tall, has been declared a national disaster area by the Commercial Airline Pilots Assn.
Despite their worries about his towers, pilots — like everyone else — adore Zedd. They use radar a lot, and he invented it.
Zedd worked his first country at age 3.
Zedd has worked all countries on all bands, all modes.
Zedd has worked all stations.
Married to the former Tondelayo Schwartz, blond, nubile, gorgeous 20-year-old once voted the cutest graduate in the history of the Harvard Business School, Zedd has a son, Zepp, one year old.
Zedd’s 1×1 callsign, A5A, was awarded to him in recognition of his magnificence in general, and in particular for his work in restructuring the FCC, designing the antennas for the Voice of America, planning all the electronics in the Space Shuttle system, and spaying the president’s dog.
The great man’s most famous exploit to date is his Atlantis DXpedition of some two years ago. Moving in within weeks of the discovery of Atlantis by his old pal, Jacques Cousteau, Zedd and an underwater team made 66K contacts from a depth of 560 feet while wearing large plastic trash bags and breathing through Scuba gear.
Momma Zedd lives in Mena, Ark. She is still gorgeous. She drives around on a Kawasaki 1000 trailing a Zepp (what else?) antenna. Her specialty is 40-meter CW. She holds the world record for CW. She got to 102 WPM in the annual contest at Boulder, Colo., and could have gone faster except her speed of transcription made her pencil and paper catch fire.
Zedd is one of the few hams we know about who has had a song written about him. The Legend of Q. R. Zedd” was introduced at an Oklahoma Ham Holiday about three years ago by Zedd’s fishing buddy, Kenny Rogers. The record quickly went platinum.
A5A has designed all the good antennas ever built. He came up with an especially neat configuration a few years ago, but let the credit go to a friend of his who was down on his luck, a feller name of Yagi. Zedd then designed another directional antenna and wrote it up for QST, calling it The Quality Antenna.” Due to one of those typographical gremlins, the title of the article came out with a 42-point misprint, calling it “The Quad Antenna,” and it has been so known ever since.
To preserve anonymity, Zedd sometimes goes places under the name of Rhombic.
Zedd is distantly related to both Marconi and Edison.
It was a great thrill to him a few years ago when, testing a new receiver of his own design, he heard long-delayed echoes from Marconi, his maternal great-great uncle. Zedd sent off a response, but there wasn’t any answer. His QSL was returned, too.
Zedd is a life member of the ARRL, is No. 1 (of course) in every DXCC listing, and holds the coveted Yodar Kritch with oak leaf cluster. He once worked W5MCJ on hf phone, a feat likely never to be equalled.
All men revere Zedd, and all women adore him. He is in all the Halls of Fame of the world, including the NFL Hall at Canton, Ohio, and the Baseball Hall at Cooperstown, N.Y. He still holds three rushing records in the NFL, and had a lifetime major league batting average of .388. He never made an error.
Zedd is so humble that it’s hard to keep up with his exploits.
He can often be found around Saturday meetings of the South Canadian Amateur Radio Society. It isn’t hard to pick him out. He s the handsome devil sitting modestly in the corner, booted feet on the edge of the table, his transceiver stuck to the chest of his sweat shirt with velcro tape, loading into his 20-meter belt buckle.
— KU5B