After building a Knight-Kit SpanMaster receiver in 1961, Lee soon tired of being only an SWL and by 1962 was licensed as WN9EBT at age 15 while attending Lane Tech High School in Chicago. He became a regular on the Illinois traffic net (ILN) and 9RN as his CW skills increased and joined in the ARRL’s CD Parties as an Official Relay Station appointee. He began chasing DX soon after and received his first DXCC certificate in 1969.
To this day, Lee remains an avid contester and DXer with a strong preference for CW, including memberships in FOC (#1741) and CWOps (#84). He joined the Voodoo Contest Group at 5V7A in 1998 and has since operated with them in CQWW CW on DXpeditions at XT2DX, 5U5Z, TZ5A, EL2A, P3F, and PZ5V. He was on the 1988 KP2A Multi-Multi team that set a North American record in CQWW CW and on the winning Multi-Multi team for CQWW CW in 2008 at HC8N. He has many Top Ten finishes in the ARRL CW Sweepstakes, his favorite contest.
He is on the DXCC Honor Roll for Mixed (340), CW (339), and Phone (340), and needs only two more for Digital Honor Roll (329). He holds both 5BDXCC and 5BWAZ awards. He recently passed the 2,800 mark in the DXCC Challenge thanks to several rare multi-hop Sporadic E openings on 6m FT8 to Europe and Asia.
Lee is in his third year as president of the Central Arizona DX Association (CADXA) and also serves as the newsletter editor and webmaster for this 130-member club. He is a two-time past CADXA DXer of the Year and was president two other times in the past. He is also an active member of the Arizona Outlaws Contest Club.
Lee authored “The True Contest Adventures of Sparky and Runner,” which appeared in both the National Contest Journal and The DX Magazine in the past and has written or contributed to several articles and books about the Voodudes. Most recently, he authored an article in the July/August 2016 NCJ, “Using the N5IA/N7GP 8-Circle Array in the CQ 160 Meter CW”.
Lee earned a B.S. in Communications at University of Illinois where he also earned his Commission as an officer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He went on to earn a Juris Doctor at The Ohio State University. Lee practiced labor and employment law from 1973 – 1990 as in-house counsel for several Fortune 500 companies including Sears, Roebuck and Motorola. He then held several positions in Arizona state government.
A trained mediator and arbitrator, Lee was on the mediation and arbitration panels of the American Arbitration Association for many years. After teaching courses in law, ethics, mediation, and conflict management system design as an adjunct instructor at University of Phoenix, Lee joined the University full-time in 1996 and held several different management positions there. He retired in 2014 as the Senior Vice President of Academic Administration for University of Phoenix, then the largest private university in the United States.
