Back when I was reading the Ten Tec mailing list every day, there was a guy named Paul Valko, W8KC who had a great and exhaustive Ten Tec website. Search for that name in QRZ now and you get no result. Search for W8KC and you get a completely different person. Paul Valko, W8KC must be a silent key. :( Yes, he passed on 22 Apr 2006 at the very young age of 48.
What a surprise. Paul was someone I always very much enjoyed talking with and who visited the factory in Sevierville numerous times over the years. His endless search for the perfect oddball items that Ten-Tec had built in the 1960's and 1970's never ceased to amaze me. He would call up and say things like "you'll never believe this one! A Signalizer S-30 unopened in the original box! The holy grail!"
At Dayton in 2002 we nominated Paul as our "official non-employee show representative" and had a great time spinning yarns with him at our hotel Thursday night before the Hamvention started. I gave him an exhibitor pass with his callsign and Ten-Tec, Inc. stamped on it - he was one happy, happy guy that weekend. A few of us here at Ten-Tec saw the posts on the reflector this morning about Paul and were reminiscing some about that weekend.....not so long ago.
Quite a loss for the hobby. Our condolences to the Valko family.
73
Scott Robbins, W4PA
[As posted on the Ten Tec mailing list on 25 Apr 2006.]
W4PA was the Product Manager for amateur radio equipment at Ten Tec, 1997-2009. His comments show pretty well the high regard the Ten Tec community had for Paul Valko.
And Paul Valko's great website is likely gone too. Well not completely. I did stumble onto a 2006 wiki edition of his website, dedicated to the Founder of Ten Tec, Alfred Kahn, K4FW. Oddly, it was last updated on the date of Valko's passing. Before that, his Ten Tec website had been at http://mywebpages.comcast.net/w8kc/tentec.html, a link that is no longer working. I remember his website as being more extensive than the wiki edition that I linked to above. I checked the Wayback Machine in the Internet Archive & found the Valko site had been archived many times. The latest successful crawl of the site was on 5 May 2007. It looks complete, except for a broken link to an image of the Power Mite 3. In addition, the pages showing the various models of Ten Tec products on The Unofficial Ten Tec Pages look very familiar. I wonder whether they were originally part of Paul Valko's website or perhaps he just linked to them from his site. I have not carefully compared the 2006 wiki edition to the 5/05/2007 Wayback Machine edition, but the wiki edition does have the correct Power Mite 3 image, so perhaps it was the final version.
There is nothing permanent about the web, don't ever forget that. If you find an invaluable resource, back it up somehow!