Orv W6BI is a retired Linux system administrator, an ARRL Santa Barbara Section
Technical Specialist and the AREDN Project Manager.

He was first licensed as WN6WEY in 1967. He's been into digital ham radio all his life, starting with CW. He worked his way up through RTTY, PACTOR, packet radio and PSK31, and started messing around with ham radio networking in 2014. He helped deploy the initial ham radio network nodes and backbone buildout in Ventura County and western Los Angeles County.

He's also active in coordinating the build-out and maintenance of the wider Southern California ham radio network, which now spans from Paso Robles in central Calfornia south to the Mexican border and east to Las Vegas, comprising over 550 nodes, both hilltop and ground-level, including hospitals, PDs and EOCs.

He's given over 80 presentations about ham radio networking using AREDN software over the last ten years and mentored many hams worldwide on ham radio networking. He's active in AREDN groups in Facebook, Slack, Telegram, and Discord, and monitors the forums on the AREDN website.