A Toast to the Founder: Danny, K7SS

Wyboston Lakes, England — July 2026

This week, one hundred of the best contest operators alive are gathered in the English countryside. Fifty tents. Identical antennas. Identical power. Twenty-four hours where the only variable left is the operator. They came from every corner of the planet to be here, and this weekend the bands will belong to them.

Every one of them is standing inside one man's idea.

Danny, K7SS. The shirt says "Life's Too Short For QRP!" The arm is resting on an Alpha 87A. This photo could not be more accurate.

In 1990, Danny Eskenazi, K7SS, willed the first World Radiosport Team Championship into existence in Seattle — timed to the Goodwill Games, built on a radical notion: make every station equal, and you find out who can really operate. No tower wars. No amplifier arms race. Just ears, fingers, and nerve. We call him the godfather of WRTC, and we are not joking. Before the sanctioning committees and the qualification standings and the live scoreboards, there was Danny, talking people into something that had never been done.

The idea refused to stay home. Seattle became San Francisco in 1996, then Slovenia, Finland, Brazil, Moscow, New England, Germany, Italy — and now, for the first time, the United Kingdom. Ten championships on four continents. Not bad for one Seattle operator's notion.

And for the record — because memories drift at hamfests — the very first WRTC was Seattle, 1990, built by Danny and his team around the Goodwill Games. Not 1994, and not San Francisco — SF came second, in 1996. The Sanctioning Committee's own roster reads "Dan Eskenazi, K7SS, WRTC-1990." It starts with Danny.

I have known Danny for 45 years. He is one of my Elmers — one of the operators who shaped how I hear the bands. A whole generation of us grew up together inside this sport: trading schedules and insults across four solar cycles, meeting on 20 meters before we ever met in person, showing up at each other's stations, weddings, and pileups. In 2014 I got to stand inside Danny's idea myself, wearing the Team USA shirt at WRTC New England. What stays with me is not the score. It is the thing Danny understood before any of us: contesting was never about the hardware. It is about the operator — and the friendships that outlast every piece of gear we have ever owned.

If you are at Wyboston this week: shake every hand in that tent. That part is the actual prize. And if you are anywhere else on Earth with an HF rig: fifty special callsigns hit the bands at 1200Z Saturday for the 24-hour IARU sprint. Work as many as you can — there is an award programme, and more importantly, you will be putting a hundred of the world's best in your log in a single weekend. Details and the live scoreboard at wrtc2026.org.

The Lesson Worth Stealing From Danny's Idea

Notice why WRTC levels the antennas: because the antenna is the advantage. Strip that variable away and only skill remains — that is the entire design of the event, and it has been since Seattle.

Now run it in reverse. At home, nobody levels anything. The operators you chase share the same sky, the same solar cycle, the same 24 hours — the antenna is the variable, and it is the one you control completely. Height where it counts, an efficient radiator with nothing inside it to heat, honest physics over magic claims. If the scoreboard this weekend leaves you itching to level your own playing field, that is the part we build.

As for me — I could not make it to England this year. So I am doing the next best thing an operator can do: this weekend I will be on the air from KP4, running the same 24 hours my friends are running, competing with them from 4,000 miles away. Some of us are scattered across the map doing exactly that — present in the only way that has ever mattered in this hobby: by signal.

Listen for me in the pileups. And when you work one of those fifty stations, know that somewhere behind all of it is a guy from Seattle with a cigar and an Alpha 87A, still grinning.

Here's to you, Danny. You started something.

73,
Jon, KL2A
Team USA, WRTC 2014