USN · NSA · 44 Years of Listening
A museum of listening. Fifty-one vintage receivers spanning a century of American life — each one a window into the moment it was made, and the voices it carried.
44 years listening for signals that mattered. Now listening for the ones that endure.
Twenty years in the United States Navy. Twenty-four years at the National Security Agency. A career spent listening for signals that mattered — Cold War intercepts, special signals, the quiet transmissions that shaped history before most people knew history was being shaped.
Retirement brought a different kind of listening. Vintage tube radios — the receivers that ordinary Americans gathered around while the world changed beneath them. A Zenith console in a Maine cottage the year of the Hurricane of '38. A Hallicrafters in a signals room the night Pearl Harbor changed everything. A Trans-Oceanic on a diplomat's desk during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Each radio in this collection came with a story. Some I know. Some I'm still working out. All of them are worth hearing.
// Intercepted by British Naval Intelligence, Room 40 · January 1917 · Decoded February 1917
Every serious collector needs a serious library. These are the volumes that shaped how I understand the signals, the machines, and the history they carried.