"In my day . . . ЦЩ-Мйр always Strйggle!"
Back in the days of old, when there were Commies – yes, real Commies, not the fake ones that Glenn Beck goes all toad about – radio amateurs had the occasional honor of having a QSO with their ham radio counterparts in the USSR. And every year there was a contest put on by the Central Radio Club of the USSR in Memory of E. T. Krenkel, which contest was CQ-Mir, or ЦЩ-Мйр. The contest was held in May, of course, as a talking point for Lenin's revolution. ЦЩ-Мйр gave Russian hams a chance to contact as many DX stations as possible (perhaps before the Organs arrived in the early morning hours, as was their way at the time). The contest gave DX hams a chance to work as many Soviet oblasts as they could, which contacts could lead to a nice diploma from the ЦРК attesting to the facts.
The contest was called ЦЩ-Мйр for two reasons, both of which relate to the meaning of the Russian word мйр, which means, among other meanings, peace and world. (The word also can mean universe, kingdom and system.
So if you were into the contest, you could say that it was a contest put together by the Soviet ham radio organs to show the Soviet Union wanted peace, or peace with the world, or that the Soviet Union wanted, as even Glenn Beck, even as a child, would have recognized easy enough, the world.
Those were the days, sure.
Now all the little bits of the former Soviet Union are full-fledged, if not totally independent countries. Well, except for the ones with lots of oil, but that's another problem. For the Russians.
All the places that used to have the formerly easy to catch Soviet call-signs (like UQ and UP and UT &c) have their own call-signs. UQ2- (Latvia) is now YL-, UM8 (Kirghizia, now Kyrgyzstan) is EX-, UP2 (Lithuania) is now LY. And Croatia, once part of Yugoslavia (YU) is 9A-, while Azerbaijan, formerly UD6, is 4J-4K.
And yes, I know the US call-sign system is a veritable alphabet soup of guess and hedges.
The fact is, you don't hear that many of the Russians on the air these days, at least not with CW and the watchful eye of the Organs hanging around Post Box 88, Moscow. Sure, there are Russian hams on the air, even if they've all gone digital and now works MFSK and DominoEX more than most gringos.
And the ЦЩ-Мйр is now under the aegis of a completely different group of organs.
Back in the days of yore, it was very uncommon to tune across any part of the RF spectrum – amateur, commercial or whatever – and not find a couple stations on the air. This was particularly the case with 40m and, especially in the morning or on towards evening, 75m or 20m. On the lower bands it was mostly folks talking, having the usual techno-speak and weather report conversations that make up most of ham radio's conversational base. On the bands more suited for DX-chasing, like 20m or 15m, rarely could you tune through the band and not hear a Russian or high-powered gringo station.
Now, as most folks will easily admit, 75m is pretty quiet almost all day. Weekends, sure, more folks are on the air, but you can't call it “crowded band conditions” any more. More like open space to stretch out with that 6kHz wide, over-compressed, over-driven but high-fi audio that some hams have taken as the holy grail du jour.
Part of this is because of the loss of the Novice band spaces, I suspect. Once you don't need CW to be a ham, and once your privileges get changed 'cause the license you got ain't the license you bargained and studied for, why bother, right? Sure.
At the same time we all must admit that much of what ham radio offered as a communications system among electronic & RF techno nerds has been usurped by the InterWebs. Skype beats fading SSB signals any day of the week. You can't beat meeting at 10:30 am with a gang of similar nerds in high-fi, effortless InterWebs telephonism. No fading. No distorted AF (well, at least not that you'd admit). No fancy license studied for and test taken. None of the stuff that went into getting on the air with a gang of folks on 75m every Friday night before the bars filled up and you had nothing to do with nobody but your radio friends. As in: “Why bother?”
Which is pretty much where we are today.
The collapse of the Soviet hegemony brought an end to the good-ol'-days ЦЩ-Мйр contest as surely as it freed up a pile of call-sign prefixes for nations formerly suffocated by the now less than vibrant hegemony. And once the Russians discovered that they'd been missing out on a lot of stupid stuff now found on the InterWebs, well, that was the end of that old chummy talk about it as well.
Simple fact is, ham radio has changed and has been changed monstrously by the advances of technology. The touch-tone pad on your average 2m HT is about as useless as a cat with no teeth. The cell-phone has taken care of that. The 75m traffic net that once traded messages from one station to another so the folks back home would know that Junior had arrived at US Naval Training Center San Diego (boot camp) are now email messages formed up just as the radio grams once were and bulk-sent from a small corner of the boot camp complex. If the state gets covered with a blizzard and the family claiming Johnny Student as their son is worried about his condition in the weather event, all they have to do is call him up on the cell or text him on the iPhone. Who needs the National Traffic System?
Nope, the Russians ain't on the air like they were once. The bands are as open and uncrowded as they'd be if half of ham radio suddenly fell to narcolepsy – despite Gorniak's grumbling on 3675kHz every Friday night like clockwork. Radioteletype has been replaced by MFSK, DominoEX and computerized versions of the old German Empires Hellschreiber system. Even CW itself has been subsumed into a computer program.
And Gorniak's favorite radio don't even have a knob on it . . . 'cause it's a computer, dammit.
And your audio still sucks.
Even the long-time ham radio publications have dropped like flies in a freezing rain. The only few left are published by special interest groups or supported by national ham radio clubs. In Gringolandia that's the ARRL's QST. The SIG publications are small and usually published quarterly, like the QRP ARCI's QRP Quarterly or the British QRP clubs SPRAT. After that it's all on the web, yo. Just go to the site and read it in a PDF.
Yep, it ain't like it used to be. And those of us still able to remember what it was like running a Johnson KW matchbox to a wire draped out the window and hung in the trees might wonder if it's worth the effort & electric bill. Me, I tend to think it's just as cool as it once was, but I say that for a couple simple reasons.
Playing with the electromagnetic spectrum as most hams have to admit they do, even in the most minimalist of views, is still fun. Challenging nature to cut your conversation off, even it it's with Gorniak's criticism of your audio, is yet a trip. Runnin' low power is fun 'cause it challenges you to be inventive and address fundamental problems like antenna construction and transmitter design. But you can say the same for high-power ops.
Sure, my essential tremor makes CW a challenge – especially for the guy on the receiving end – as much as it makes a challenge of just getting on the air for a friend whose post-stroke therapy includes getting on the air every week with friends.
The size of parts these days is nearly criminal to the bifocal and shaky-hands brigate. Building your own stuff is more expensive and certainly more trying. But the technological advances of SMD and even smaller through-hole parts have made it possible to build a remotely-tuned Z-match with robot motors doing the knob twisting. Computer technology's wedding to RF design has made it possible for a radio with 99 memories, two VFOs, DSP audio filtering and solid-state QRO to be called an “entry grade rig.”
Hell, I barely had one VFO and never had all the filters on my “entry grade rig” of some 40 years back!
Which I guess brings this all around to still finding fun in playing with the electrons. CW, at least to me, should always be run by hand. I have no use for & refuse to QSO with someone using a computer to generate what they think is faultless CW. I say that 'cause, if I wanted to have QSO with a computer, I'd turn on this one and let it play surf & wind noises to me all day. SSB – even with Gorniak's critiques of everyone's audio – is fun 'cause I can filter the hell out of it with a simple DSP doodad in my entry grade transceiver. And hosing the computer up to the radio now gives me all those digital modes that used to take up square yards of space in the shack, all of it replaced by a much abused former classroom computer bought surplus.
I do miss the ЦЩ-Мйр contest, at least the way it was back in the days of yore when CW was hand sent. I miss the trip of running a radio that was, even for its time, minimalist. But I do not miss the overly crowded bands, the huge number of folks who thought they had to run QRO 'cause they had antennas made out of wood and bits of solder encased in black electrical tape.
` Nope, it ain't what it was but the nowadays stuff I have in the shack challenges me to build that tuner and make it work without flaming out the entire backyard.
Ham radio's still fun. Even if Gorniak's audio still does suck.
The contest was called ЦЩ-Мйр for two reasons, both of which relate to the meaning of the Russian word мйр, which means, among other meanings, peace and world. (The word also can mean universe, kingdom and system.
So if you were into the contest, you could say that it was a contest put together by the Soviet ham radio organs to show the Soviet Union wanted peace, or peace with the world, or that the Soviet Union wanted, as even Glenn Beck, even as a child, would have recognized easy enough, the world.
Those were the days, sure.
Now all the little bits of the former Soviet Union are full-fledged, if not totally independent countries. Well, except for the ones with lots of oil, but that's another problem. For the Russians.
All the places that used to have the formerly easy to catch Soviet call-signs (like UQ and UP and UT &c) have their own call-signs. UQ2- (Latvia) is now YL-, UM8 (Kirghizia, now Kyrgyzstan) is EX-, UP2 (Lithuania) is now LY. And Croatia, once part of Yugoslavia (YU) is 9A-, while Azerbaijan, formerly UD6, is 4J-4K.
And yes, I know the US call-sign system is a veritable alphabet soup of guess and hedges.
The fact is, you don't hear that many of the Russians on the air these days, at least not with CW and the watchful eye of the Organs hanging around Post Box 88, Moscow. Sure, there are Russian hams on the air, even if they've all gone digital and now works MFSK and DominoEX more than most gringos.
And the ЦЩ-Мйр is now under the aegis of a completely different group of organs.
Back in the days of yore, it was very uncommon to tune across any part of the RF spectrum – amateur, commercial or whatever – and not find a couple stations on the air. This was particularly the case with 40m and, especially in the morning or on towards evening, 75m or 20m. On the lower bands it was mostly folks talking, having the usual techno-speak and weather report conversations that make up most of ham radio's conversational base. On the bands more suited for DX-chasing, like 20m or 15m, rarely could you tune through the band and not hear a Russian or high-powered gringo station.
Now, as most folks will easily admit, 75m is pretty quiet almost all day. Weekends, sure, more folks are on the air, but you can't call it “crowded band conditions” any more. More like open space to stretch out with that 6kHz wide, over-compressed, over-driven but high-fi audio that some hams have taken as the holy grail du jour.
Part of this is because of the loss of the Novice band spaces, I suspect. Once you don't need CW to be a ham, and once your privileges get changed 'cause the license you got ain't the license you bargained and studied for, why bother, right? Sure.
At the same time we all must admit that much of what ham radio offered as a communications system among electronic & RF techno nerds has been usurped by the InterWebs. Skype beats fading SSB signals any day of the week. You can't beat meeting at 10:30 am with a gang of similar nerds in high-fi, effortless InterWebs telephonism. No fading. No distorted AF (well, at least not that you'd admit). No fancy license studied for and test taken. None of the stuff that went into getting on the air with a gang of folks on 75m every Friday night before the bars filled up and you had nothing to do with nobody but your radio friends. As in: “Why bother?”
Which is pretty much where we are today.
The collapse of the Soviet hegemony brought an end to the good-ol'-days ЦЩ-Мйр contest as surely as it freed up a pile of call-sign prefixes for nations formerly suffocated by the now less than vibrant hegemony. And once the Russians discovered that they'd been missing out on a lot of stupid stuff now found on the InterWebs, well, that was the end of that old chummy talk about it as well.
Simple fact is, ham radio has changed and has been changed monstrously by the advances of technology. The touch-tone pad on your average 2m HT is about as useless as a cat with no teeth. The cell-phone has taken care of that. The 75m traffic net that once traded messages from one station to another so the folks back home would know that Junior had arrived at US Naval Training Center San Diego (boot camp) are now email messages formed up just as the radio grams once were and bulk-sent from a small corner of the boot camp complex. If the state gets covered with a blizzard and the family claiming Johnny Student as their son is worried about his condition in the weather event, all they have to do is call him up on the cell or text him on the iPhone. Who needs the National Traffic System?
Nope, the Russians ain't on the air like they were once. The bands are as open and uncrowded as they'd be if half of ham radio suddenly fell to narcolepsy – despite Gorniak's grumbling on 3675kHz every Friday night like clockwork. Radioteletype has been replaced by MFSK, DominoEX and computerized versions of the old German Empires Hellschreiber system. Even CW itself has been subsumed into a computer program.
And Gorniak's favorite radio don't even have a knob on it . . . 'cause it's a computer, dammit.
And your audio still sucks.
Even the long-time ham radio publications have dropped like flies in a freezing rain. The only few left are published by special interest groups or supported by national ham radio clubs. In Gringolandia that's the ARRL's QST. The SIG publications are small and usually published quarterly, like the QRP ARCI's QRP Quarterly or the British QRP clubs SPRAT. After that it's all on the web, yo. Just go to the site and read it in a PDF.
Yep, it ain't like it used to be. And those of us still able to remember what it was like running a Johnson KW matchbox to a wire draped out the window and hung in the trees might wonder if it's worth the effort & electric bill. Me, I tend to think it's just as cool as it once was, but I say that for a couple simple reasons.
Playing with the electromagnetic spectrum as most hams have to admit they do, even in the most minimalist of views, is still fun. Challenging nature to cut your conversation off, even it it's with Gorniak's criticism of your audio, is yet a trip. Runnin' low power is fun 'cause it challenges you to be inventive and address fundamental problems like antenna construction and transmitter design. But you can say the same for high-power ops.
Sure, my essential tremor makes CW a challenge – especially for the guy on the receiving end – as much as it makes a challenge of just getting on the air for a friend whose post-stroke therapy includes getting on the air every week with friends.
The size of parts these days is nearly criminal to the bifocal and shaky-hands brigate. Building your own stuff is more expensive and certainly more trying. But the technological advances of SMD and even smaller through-hole parts have made it possible to build a remotely-tuned Z-match with robot motors doing the knob twisting. Computer technology's wedding to RF design has made it possible for a radio with 99 memories, two VFOs, DSP audio filtering and solid-state QRO to be called an “entry grade rig.”
Hell, I barely had one VFO and never had all the filters on my “entry grade rig” of some 40 years back!
Which I guess brings this all around to still finding fun in playing with the electrons. CW, at least to me, should always be run by hand. I have no use for & refuse to QSO with someone using a computer to generate what they think is faultless CW. I say that 'cause, if I wanted to have QSO with a computer, I'd turn on this one and let it play surf & wind noises to me all day. SSB – even with Gorniak's critiques of everyone's audio – is fun 'cause I can filter the hell out of it with a simple DSP doodad in my entry grade transceiver. And hosing the computer up to the radio now gives me all those digital modes that used to take up square yards of space in the shack, all of it replaced by a much abused former classroom computer bought surplus.
I do miss the ЦЩ-Мйр contest, at least the way it was back in the days of yore when CW was hand sent. I miss the trip of running a radio that was, even for its time, minimalist. But I do not miss the overly crowded bands, the huge number of folks who thought they had to run QRO 'cause they had antennas made out of wood and bits of solder encased in black electrical tape.
` Nope, it ain't what it was but the nowadays stuff I have in the shack challenges me to build that tuner and make it work without flaming out the entire backyard.
Ham radio's still fun. Even if Gorniak's audio still does suck.
posted by the Sparks at 9:55 AM
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