A visitor to a blog on the Isthmus Web site late last week mentioned a home on Mineral Point Road near Queen of Peace School, and asked: "What's up with the GIGANTIC aerial antenna at that house? Anyone else seen it?"

A reader passed the question along to me, which provides an opportunity to introduce Ralph Henes, 65, a Madison native who attended Queen of Peace School years ago and now lives nearby, at the corner of Mineral Point and South Owen Drive, in that house with the GIGANTIC aerial antenna.

The timing of the introduction is pretty good, because this year not only is Henes celebrating his 50th year as a ham radio operator, but it is 10 years since he astutely engineered a deal with a cellular phone company to have a cell tower put in his backyard, at the company's expense, with Henes's ham antenna on top.

He also got city approval for the whole thing, which given the way things usually work in Madison, should qualify Henes for some kind of honorary Nobel Prize in negotiation.

The tower has allowed Henes to talk with other ham operators all over the world, and in one instance, it allowed him to help save the lives of a couple of sailors marooned in a boat off the southern coast of Mexico. More on that momentarily.

Henes caught the ham radio bug after his parents moved the family to Beaver Dam, where he attended high school. He was visiting one of his school buddies and they went down in the basement, where his friend's dad was talking on a ham radio.

"He was talking to Russia," Henes said. "That kind of tripped my trigger."

He got his ham license — it required learning Morse code back then — and at this point the romance and intrigue of communicating with people in faraway lands has endured for Henes across half a century. He's retired now and is on the ham radio in his home office every day. There's a group of half a dozen or so guys who sign on most mornings around nine to chat. They are scattered around the country: the states of Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado and several here in Madison, including Henes.

Some of those distant voices become friends. Henes and his wife, Cheryl, took a trip out west not long ago to meet in person the man from Washington they knew only over the air. There's a long-distance trucker and ham operator from Lansing, Mich. whom Henes will meet for coffee someplace off the Beltline when the man is in the Madison area.

The story of Henes's backyard tower dates to November 1997, when Henes was watching the local TV news and heard about a meeting in the Queen of Peace-Midvale neighborhood scheduled for the following evening. The neighbors were concerned about a proposal to put a 60-foot cell phone tower near Midvale School.

Henes decided to attend the meeting, since two years earlier he had put up a 48-foot tower of his own for his ham radio. Maybe it could be a cell tower as well. At the meeting he got the name of Airidigm, the cell phone company. When he contacted Airidigm he was pleasantly surprised to learn the company was interested in his backyard site, which is on the crest of a hill.

They were interested, all right. In the end they agreed to take Henes's tower down and put up a new one that would meet commercial liability requirements. They would also pay Henes an annual fee and put his ham antennas up on top.

In early 1998 the proposal began making its way through various city commissions, boards, and finally the city council. In September 1998, the new system signed on. In 2003, the cell phone company decided to discontinue the deal, so now the tower is only for Henes's ham radio, though he said he would welcome another cellular company.

On the morning of July 24, 2005, Henes was chatting as usual on the ham with a Madison operator, Ed Toal, and a California operator, Dick Mannheimer, when someone cut in saying: "May Day! May Day!"

Henes, addressing Mannheimer in California, said: "Dick, did you hear that?"

Two men sailing from California to Colombia had encountered rough water and suffered engine and marine radio failure. They got on the ham, overheard the conversation between California and Wisconsin, and broke in on that frequency.

The ham operators were able to calm the men down and contact both U. S. and Mexican naval authorities, leading to an eventual rescue. "I maintained verbal communication with them for six and a half hours," Henes said.

In gratitude, the men sent Henes the flag from their boat. They signed and dated it, and now it hangs in Henes's office, directly across from his ham radio.