A Timeless Connection: A Ham Radio Coincidence

When I was a young boy, on rare occasions, I would sit with my dad as we made calls through his ham radio to faraway places. A cherished tradition in the ham radio community is exchanging QSL cards—confirmation postcards sent between contacts. These moments with my father were special, though infrequent, and left a lasting impression on me.

Years later, after my father’s passing, I decided to obtain my own ham license and requested his old call sign, W5OAG. The FCC granted my request after I submitted his death certificate. Ham radio became a way for me to reconnect with those early memories. One day, a friend asked why I had a small collection of QSL cards displayed on my office wall. As I explained my fondness for those childhood moments—especially the thrill of speaking to someone in Australia and later receiving a card with a kangaroo or boomerang—my eyes welled up with emotion.

Then, in an almost unbelievable twist, one or two days later, a QSL card arrived in my mailbox. It featured a kangaroo and boomerang and was postmarked September 1969—decades earlier. Stranger still, the stamp was uncancelled, and it had somehow found me at an entirely different address! Determined to unravel the mystery, I spent a year tracking down the son of the original radio contact. I assumed he had found the card in an old drawer after his father’s passing and sent it to me. But he hadn’t—he believed it had been lost in a conveyor belt for over 30 years!

The timing felt too perfect to be chance. I can’t help but believe that my deep love and longing for my father in that moment somehow summoned this remarkable coincidence—an extraordinary sign of an unbroken connection through time.