I found this post on reddit yesterday, and I loved the idea so much that I have volunteered to be the unofficial PR guy for this project. Say what you will about MFJ projects—and I have sometimes been critical myself about them—Martin and his company have played a big part in amateur radio for a long time. This is a story that should be told.
With the permission of the OP, Preston Booth, I’m republishing his post here. At the bottom of the post, you’ll find a link to the documentary producer’s website, where you can make a donation to the project. I made a small donation yesterday.
—Dan
Quick Intro: My name is Preston Booth and I am a documentary filmmaker in Starkville, MS (birthplace and home of MFJ Enterprises). In 2024, Martin F. Jue’s daughter contacted me to commission a local artist to come and do a small portrait documentary to celebrate Martin’s 82nd Birthday. Once I got to meet Martin and the team, I realized that their story really deserved a feature-length production to best tell their story, and I’ve been moonlighting this project in my free time ever since. I’ve reached out to the /r/amateurradio mods about this post before making it, as I know that self-promo is frowned upon, but I think I’d regret it if I didn’t share this project with hams.
Martin is actually a tremendously fun person to be around. Shortly after sitting for the documentary and doing his interview, he just wanted to stick around and chat about me and my life and what had led me to this point. Next thing I know he was asking me if I wanted to get dinner at some point in the future to chat more about it. It seems like he really loves to get to know people and learn about what makes them tick. From all of the research I’ve done during this project, I’ve seen him do the same for many other hams who came to tour the facility. This always sort of struck me as odd because I’m sure his workload was unfathomably taxing at his age, but it seemed like he was always willing to drop what he was doing and spend time with folks who made the trip.
Martin’s childhood explains a lot about MFJ’s philosophy. Martin lost his father at the age of 5 and he grew up in the back of a grocery store with as many as 11 kids at one time (siblings and nieces and nephews). He fell in love with radio tech at a young age, but due to their circumstances he had to build everything from scrap parts he got from a repairman (first ham contact) in his town. Martin grew up completely cut off from commercial ham products as a child and I think it made him hellbent on providing for others what he went without as a child. Randy Romero, Martin’s righthand at MFJ disclosed to me that Martin’s Philosophy was, “making quality affordable” and it really tracks with my interactions and research with Martin. On the topic of quality, another of Martin’s priorities was providing opportunities to folks in the local community. For those who don’t know, the deep south can be an absolutely unforgiving environment to live economically speaking. Martin’s own experience made providing opportunities for folks to prove themselves through hard work a priority for him. Realistically speaking, at any point in MFJ’s 50 plus year history he could have just outsourced manufacturing overseas and dramatically decreased his overhead and increased the quality control standards but for him it seemed to be paramount that he provide jobs locally. I know MFJ’s build quality is a passionate topic around here, and I’m not here to argue that. I just thought the backstory behind the philosophy might be interesting to some of you.
Martin’s first big break with technology actually came from a science fair project in the tenth grade. At the age of 14 he built a full radio telemetry station from what others may have considered garbage. The technicals are really fascinating so I will include the quote here:
“… This was back in 1960’s when satellites were first put into orbit. And my project was a telemetry system that would demonstrate how a satellite would work.
It would do things in a very simple manner: to measure humidity, I had two nails and it had salt around it, and I would measure the resistance of that. Because that salt would absorb moisture and reduce the resistance.
And the way that I measured the resistance was I built an audio oscillator whose frequency would change with resistance. And the same thing with measuring wind direction and wind velocity. They used volume controls out of the radios and it would just turn and swivel and they would change the resistance. And a transistor with the cap taken off would measure the intensity of light.
But each one of those would cause the frequency of the oscillator to change; so you’d hear a change in pitch. And then there was an electric motor that I got off of a display that was on one of the displays from a store, a tiny little motor that would turn a switch and it would switch each one of these for a certain amount of time.
Then I built a little radio transmitter on a broadcast band that would transmit it to a different receiver, just an ordinary receiver. And then from the tone that you could match by using another oscillator, it would be calibrated. You could make measurements.”
He won his school’s fair, but it also ended up being the first science fair project the school had entered at the state level and he won that one as well. The grand prize was a trip to Mobile Alabama to ride on a Destroyer and it was actually the very first time he had ever left the state of Mississippi in his life. Of course, I’m blown away by his resourcefulness but it’s also really cool to see the defining moment where you can see the wheels turning in his mind that a mastery of technology could really start providing opportunities to better his and his families situation.
Martin’s first move after receiving his master’s degree at Georgia Tech wasn’t to establish MFJ, it was to move home and run the family grocery store business for his brother so his brother could take time off and travel to mainland China. To hear Martin tell it, he says this is where he got his “MGS: Master’s in Grocery Store”. From his own words, this is where he learned the fundamentals of business, marketing, and client relations. This one just blows me away because he was so hilariously over qualified to be running a little country grocery store but his priority has always been family and duty.
Martin was drafted for the Vietnam War. This isn’t something he ever discussed with me or with the broader public, but I found an excerpt from an old ECHO Zoom QA he did a while back. Apparently shortly after high school he received his draft letter, went through bootcamp and was in his own words, “happy to serve” but at the end of the process they told him, “You can’t see, and you can’t hear, and we don’t want you.” Just sort of nuts to think about the butterfly effect of Martin going overseas instead of college on all of our lives.
I get the feeling that Martin is deeply a private person, but he is so generous with his time and experience that he says yes to nearly every one who asks that he often finds himself in the spotlight. As a result, he’s often asked a lot of similar questions regarding his upbringing and his early experiences with HAM tech. One thing I find really interesting is that when discussing the first project he ever worked on (the fox hole crystal radio he built from the boy scout handbook) he always is sure to mention that he could not ever get it to work, but that the time he spent trying to make it work is what got him excited about ham tech. He later built a single transistor radio from a kit he saved up to purchase, but when asked about his first project he always is sure to mention the failure. He doesn’t seem to measure his experiences by his successes but what he was able to take from each experience.
Quick Factoid section:
- MFJ’s longest tenured employee was a woman named Phyliss Randle who worked for 45 years at the company before retiring. At one point MFJ was employing three generations of her family which just blows me away. In fact, while getting to know the employees I didn’t interact with anyone (not including students and recent grads) who had been there for shorter than 9 years.
- The first Dayton Hamvention that Martin attended while he was teaching at MS State Univ. and he would drive all night Thu/Fri and Sunday after class so he didn’t have to buy a hotel room lmao. He said that he’d often be getting back to Starkville on Monday morning just in time to teach his first class. Man was an absolute beast I have no idea how he was able to operate on such little sleep.
- On the topic of MSU, MFJ’s first production line was actually comprised of students who built the project for extra credit or personal compensation. Apparently, he didn’t stop teaching and pursue MFJ full time until they had over 30 employees, so there were many years where he was working two full time jobs.
- I still don’t know what Martin’s middle name is. It’s sort of funny because it seems like such a non-important detail, but whenever someone else he just says, “the F stands for fun” and he’s sort of private about it. That being said I have had a lot of fun spending time with him so I can’t say it is entirely inaccurate.
- On the subject of the name, he mentioned that he named it MFJ Enterprises because he always wanted it to grow, but that he didn’t name it Martin F Jue Enterprises, “just in case the business failed, I didn’t want to ruin the family name.”
Honestly, I could go on and on. I’m just fascinated by this man and his company and I feel so blessed to be the one to get to tell his story. If anyone is interested in the project or watching the trailer, go to https://www.prestonboothcinematography.com/mfj-documentary.
If anyone has any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer them all in a timely manner.
I’m also really interested in hearing the community’s MFJ stories as well, so if you have anything you’d like to contribute, I’d love to hear about it.
Thank you for letting me be a part of your ham radio community!
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