I was introduced to electronics when I was a young boy by my father who is an electronics hobbiest. My father built shortwave receivers and all other kind of electronics. I started listening to shortwave broadcast station when I was around 13. At that time we learned english at school so I could understand some of the foreign broadcasts.
In 1976 I became member of the highschool station PI1GOE. I spent a lot of time at the 80m band in the SSB DX window. I also learned to contest there. Still remember the WAE contest with the QTC's. One operator doing the talking, 2 operators doing the writing.
In 1983 I did the exam for my own license, first a no-code license as PE1JLS, 2 years later I passed the morse code test and I got a full license, PA3EOB. In 1989, when we got the option to change our callsigns, I changed it to PA5KT, which is an easy call for CW, but does not sound bad on SSB either. I rarely work SSB, most of the contacts are CW and RTTY.