On Sunday 14 April 2019 John Lilley met Mick’s daughter who told him that Mick died last year after a series of strokes.<\/p>\n
When John started as a boy technician at Rockbank in 1960, he had the good fortune to be partnered with Mick for a few weeks. Mick taught John the ropes before he began shifts there on his own.<\/p>\n
Mick was not only knowledgeable about short-wave radio; he also had a strong interest in the arts, as his wife was a concert pianist. Mick brought an audio amp and turntable to work on night shifts and those on shift with him passed the hours listening to quality classical music.<\/p>\n
Mick spent a year on Willis Island (probably 1957 or 1958) as the radio operator, with two other people, one of whom was a meteorologist. Willis is about 450km ENE of Cairns, and was a hurricane warning outpost. Mick had the amateur callsign VK4IC and was a highly sought-after contact on CW, as because of its distance from land , Willis Island was classified as a separate country for radio amateur purposes.<\/p>\n
Mick left OTC in 1961 or so, for Collins Radio, who were opening an office in the outer Melbourne suburb of Croydon.<\/p>\n
John last saw Mick in 1978 when he was the Supervising Technician in charge of radio installation, maintenance and repair for the Victorian Country Fire Authority.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Sunday 14 April 2019 John Lilley met Mick’s daughter who told him that Mick died last year after a series of strokes. When John started as a boy technician at Rockbank in 1960, he had the good fortune to be partnered with Mick for a few weeks. Mick taught John the ropes before he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vale"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paMOfU-1N9","jetpack-related-posts":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.otva.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.otva.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.otva.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.otva.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.otva.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6891"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.otva.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6893,"href":"https:\/\/www.otva.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6891\/revisions\/6893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.otva.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.otva.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.otva.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}