Dan Pedtke ("ped-key"), KW2T, is the founder and organizer of Tech Night.

Dan is an RF hardware engineer. Having built his first transmitter in 5th grade for a science fair, his career has taken him from broadcast transmitters to nuclear accelerators, from consumer products to military, from vacuum tubes to FPGA software radio coding. Dan holds the highest FCC commercial and amateur radio licenses, and has taken the highest level electromagnetics courses offered at Michigan State University, where he worked on the world's highest energy heavy ion accelerator at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Lab.

He has worked with RF and antennas all his career, from consumer electronics to cryogenically cooled LNA front ends at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, from 100 KHz to 99 GHz. He has been VP of Engineering and CTO at 3 companies, and has sheparded many electronic products from cradle to grave. There isn't much in electronics he has not done, from software coding in C++ and python, to all parts of radio design, from power supplies to instrumentation amps, analog and digital audio and video, HTML to Matlab, and drones to satellites. With 8 patents, his work can be found protecting Boston's Logan Int'l Airport, on top of many mountain peaks in the US, at hospitals and universities, and in low earth orbit.

Dan has a BSEE and BA in Economics from the University of Notre Dame, and has done graduate work at Rochester Institute of Technology, and Michigan State University. Dan currently works at a drone company in Boston, MA, and does freelance consulting. He has had a ham license since 1971, 49 years as of 2020. He is past president of 4 different ham radio clubs, starting in high school, and including the Rochester VHF Group.

In his free time, Dan keeps track of his 5 homeschooled kids (3 are hams), and hikes and bikes and canoes the local venues, and is a 37 year member of the National Railway Historical Society, and so he occassionally chases trains. He is a beekeeper, and is a member of the SCA (google it) where he goes by Gildemir of the East and does archery with a longbow. Dan plays keyboard and bass guitar, and has some skill at the french horn and trumpet. He has a current first aid and CPR card, and was a past volunteer ambulance EMT. And he did this entire website himself with a text editor in LINUX. Ya, that's right, all this "he" and "Dan" stuff is just me doing it, I should just admit it and do this first person.

You can contact Dan at: