Club Officers

Greetings form the Olive Branch Amateur Radio Club! As elected officers for the club for 2021, we want to encourage you to practice your HAM Radio skills, participate in HAM activities and join us for monthly meetings and weekly Nets. You can find out more about our Club on various pages of this website. Please let us know if there is information you need or would like to see covered by this site. You can always reach us by using our Contact Us email link in the footer of each page.

President
KI5UTQ
Stephen Shahan

Stephen has been a Ham since April of 2022. He passed his Technician and General license tests in one attempt and earned his Amateur Extra license just two weeks later in May. Stephen is a member of the Mississippi National Guard since 2014 and brings significant leadership and experience to his position there. Stephen enjoys spending time with his family and friends. He was recently married to his beautiful wife. He enjoys climbing towers and rigging and is very interested in Skywarn and HF modes.

Vice President
WA4CB
Doug Kave

Doug was born and raised in Maryland and moved to northwest MS in 1997 with his new bride. His background is mechanical engineering and has 9 patents issued to him with his work in the biomedical industry. He has many hobbies including woodworking, blacksmithing, and of course amateur radio. He has two YouTube channels, one that documents his homestead living (His Way Homestead) and the other to highlight blacksmithing and amateur radio (CommanderBacon64) He earned his technician license January 2023 and Amateur Extra April 2023. He really enjoys hunting POTA and is working on being able to activate parks soon along with learning CW.



Secretary
KI5TKL
Don Murphy

Don worked for FedEx which moved him and his wife to Southaven, MS from Pittsburgh, PA in 2021. He got his Tech license and joined OBARC in January 2022 and received his General license a year later. His interest in Ham radio was kindled by a friend of his in Pittsburgh, W3BMW (now a Silent Key). Don served 16 years in the US Army and then worked 26 years in IT for Supply Chain companies. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern Mississippi and a master’s in systems management from the University of Southern California.

Treasurer
KF5OIM
Richard Shaw

Richard Shaw was born and raised in the Memphis / Bartlett area but has called Southaven home for more than 18 years now along with his YL Melissa KK5MEL, two sons and one daughter. Richard developed the love for computer technology from his father, also a ham, NF4H (SK) and became interested in emergency preparedness and Amateur Radio several years ago. He obtained his General License in 2012 and upgraded to Extra in 2018. An advocate of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), Richard is not only and advocate but an avid user of Fedora Linux as his primary operating system for both work and for fun. Richard has been a Fedora Packager for over 10 years, maintaining most of the major Ham Radio packages including Fldigi and all its sub-packages, WSJTX, FreeDV, QSSTV and theAX.25 stack used in many of the amateur radio TNC packages today. Richard is also one of the developers for FreeDV/Codec2, mainly rewriting the build system from scratch and packaging it for Windows. He is also an avid Solar enthusiast building both a Solar capability for Ham Radio but also for his entire home.



VE Coordinator
KB5SSG
Wade Wingfield

I have an Associate of electronic engineering from State Tech (West Tennessee Community College) in Memphis. Holds an FCC GROL license (formerly first-class license) and an EXTRA class Amateur Radio License. Worked for Sharp Manufacturing for 13 years as an electronics trouble shooter. Spent 15 years with ATT as a Power Technician for working to trouble shoot power problems, wired phone circuits and fiber circuits. Managed several ATT backup generators ranging from 60kw to 1.3Mw for facilities backup power.