Caryn Eve Murray - KD2GUT

Crack Reporter

Caryn Eve Murray, KD2GUT, was welcomed onto the Amateur Radio Newsline team in the summer of 2015 with the blessing of Bill Pasternak shortly before his passing. She is a print journalist who never gave up on radio. It took her more than half a lifetime to finally get that entry-level ticket (she’d studied for, but never took, the Novice exam at age 12). A few weeks after becoming a Technician in the summer of 2014 she upgraded to General and went binge-buying for a modest but respectable starter ham shack. (The binge-buying continues). Her newspaper career began in New York’s Hudson Valley shortly following a very brief, but highly amusing, stint as a radio advertising copywriter/producer for a small market station in suburban Long Island, N.Y.  She later moved to New York City for the then-new urban upstart daily, New York Newsday, covering city and state politics and small business, and other local stories. When the paper was shut by the Times-Mirror Corp. in 1995, she transferred to Newsday’s Long Island edition, eventually becoming a Sunday feature columnist before moving over to the news desk. She left the newspaper business for greener pastures (with her horse, Grigio) in 2019.

A member of the Great South Bay Amateur Radio Club, she is also one of the editors for its monthly newsletter, The Compass, which carries her column, “Inside the Squirrel Cage.” She also belongs to the Long Island CW Club, the Straight Key Century Club and the Larkfield Amateur Radio Club.

Ah yes, about those squirrels: Caryn holds a New York State license as a wildlife rehabilitator since 1996, and you can guess which animal she specialized in for all those years. She is grateful to her husband, Rod Eyer, a graphic designer, who created the "DXing Squirrel" on her QSL cards. If she's not out activating POTA with her straight key and her Yaesu FT-891, Caryn spends some of the best parts of her day with Grigio, her handsome gray quarter horse.

Her lifelong association with animals has landed her the distinctive status of being a vegetarian ham.

Callsign KD2GUT