Frank M. Howell is Professor Emeritus at Mississippi State University and Adjunct Professor at Emory University. He has been an SWL, BCB DXer, and antenna builder since he was 8 years old. At age 20, he led the construction of two radio stations; one, an FMer at Geogia College (WXGC) and the other a commercial AMer (WXLX) in Milledgeville, holding a Third Class FCC Commercial Broadcast License. He served as News Director at WXLX before attending graduate school and pursuing a career as a college professor, teaching at Texas Christian University, North Carolina State University, Mississippi State University and Emory University. Frank obtained his amateur radio license at 58 in 2010. Originally assigned KJ4QJZ, his call sign is K4FMH. Frank lives in Ridgeland, a northern suburb of Jackson, MS.
He is a Life Member of the ARRL and AMSAT (provisional). Frank serves as Assistant Director of the Delta Division, serving under two Division Directors. He was ARES Emergency Coordinator in Starkville MS. Frank has been Vice President of the Central Mississippi Amateur Radio Association in Brandon and President of the Magnolia Amateur Radio Club in Starkville. With Mike McKay N5DU, Frank launched the Magnolia Intertie Inc. non-profit organization and is the Trustee of the KG5FCI call sign for that group of repeaters.
Frank has been co-host of the QSO Radio Show on WTWW with Ted Randall and co-host of the Amateur Radio Roundtable on WBCQ and w5kub.com with Tom Medlin. He periodically blogs at k4fmh.com, sometimes with a focus on the sociological aspects of the broadest elements of the past time that is amateur radio. The Fox Mike Hotel website emphasizes the social science of amateur radio.
He enjoys most aspects of ham radio, especially tests and measurements on his workbench, rag chewing on HF, portable operations, digital modes via repeaters (DSTAR, Fusion), and the occasional DX contest. But he’s interested in it all!
Relevant to this website is his academic career involving sociology, statistics, computer science, and spatial demography. He co-founded two peer reviewed journals — one on social science computer (Social Science Computer Review) and another on spatial demography (Spatial Demography) as well as a book series on the latter topic late in his career. He also co-edited a sociology peer-review journal of research, Sociological Spectrum. Throughout his professional career, the application of high technology to social science methods and problems has been a central driving focus. A teacher and user of GIS since the early 1980s, Frank taught a course on the spatial analysis of social data that was emulated at Cornell and the University of Wisconsin. Many of those methods are being applied to the elements of this website. Hence the subtitle on the home page: the social science of amateur radio. Using a made-up word to describe this new focus, Hamography, reduces the longer and more tedious terminology of the spatial demography of amateur radio. Let’s see where this focus takes him…
