Arcs & Sparks & Late Night Radio

Dragon-Ball Z-Match

2011-02-13T11:47:00.001-08:00

Somewhere in the grand eloquence of the InterWebs there is already a record of my having put the station first in a spare bedroom with antennas in the attic, then moving all that to a converted outhouse and finally, moving it all back into a spare bedroom with antennas hosed up with remote switches &c back out in the former outhouse. So them details you can find elsewhere, if you're interested.
Yeah, I know: I am imagining that I actually have a readership, another narcissism to which we are all drawn in these days of instant FaceBook fame & all those book reviews we do for Amazon.
Tough.
But the story continues with the final addition of a remote control Z-match that will handle the crap spewed by my HF radios and a rehabilitated SB200 amp. And the story of the amp is almost as boring as this tale, so I'll deal with that later.
Suffice it to say that I have taken the Z-match circuit that I first cribbed from the InterWebs maybe ten years back and modified the part sizes so I could run 500W through it. The first two Z-matches were designed for QRP, since I was whacked about that at the time. For QRO – which was 100W max for some time – I used either an SG-239 or an LDG auto tuner (I went through two of 'em), an Elecraft T1 autotuner (only blew on of those up) and the AH4 that hoses up to the Icom radios.
The low power QRO tuners worked really well. I found the SG-239 to be the most easy to use, mainly 'cause it's set up for the user/owner to dream up the distances between the tuner and the rest of the radio stuff, along with advice on a tune/lock/reset doodad for real and serious remote control. The LDGs were interesting 'cause they're made to do interesting things for power levels under 20W. Same-same the T1, although it's not as easily remoted. But in the end, if I was going to run more than 100W (or under 20 with the Elecraft & one of the LDG tuners), I needed something a bit more husky.
Making the decision began with the T1 dying on me at the beach vacation complex. Took me a couple minutes to finally determine that I was off the air with that box.
Lucky for me, I had dragged along my rather arcane lookin' home-brew Z-match.
This was an obvious learning moment.
For all the nice things you can say about an automatic antenna tuner, QRO or not, you're still stuck dealing with a machine the controls of which are not exactly in your paws. If the automatic parts of the tuner are controlled by some AI thingie in the box, it can make up its mind a bit far from what you'd even be willing to try. And if the AI thingie in the box quits, you have a nice circuit board with a bunch of useless parts on it. You're off the air.
Now any manual antenna tuner demands an operator with paws. And most of the time, such antenna tuners have husky enough parts to at least let you know when you've reached the design limits by arcing across capacitor plates or between turns on a coil. And of all the tuner designs that I've messed with, the Z-match beats all the other knob-twistin', coil-switchin', variable efficiency boxes by more than a marginal distance.
Two knobs, most of the time, take care of all your needs.
Thus the decision to figure out how to build a QRO Z-match, with QRO meaning anything up to and maybe even a bit past 500W.

The way this station is set up, I have two runs of about 75 ft in double-shielded Ethernet coax taken from service at the university from which I retired. The two runs, along with a big pile of confusing control cables, go from the pipe chase that heads the upstairs bathroom bathtub/shower to the former outhouse & part-time ham radio shack.
Out in the shack I have built two boxes containing what are called either toggle-relays or ratchet-relays. The coils on these beasts trip a ratchet kind of like a on/off/on pushbutton. One pulse they close alternate contacts. Another pulse and they go back to what they were before the first pulse. Thus they do not need constant voltage & current to stay in whatever switched state I want. I discovered, after I bought what I thought was a reasonable number from Roger's digs, that they're rare little beasties and they're very expensive. That and the kind I have don't seem to exist any more. Bummer.
At least I have enough of 'em to make a six-hole antenna switch for the HF antennas and a four-holer for the VHF/UHF antennas. (And yes, I know switching HF is a whole bunch less fussy as VHF/UHF. Gimme some credit for at least trying. And no, I don't do moon-bounce of run QRO stuff on VHF/UHF. What I can hear is good enough for me.)
So with this switching system, I can pick out either fixed-frequency antennas, such as the 4BTV I got for Christmas or the 30m/17m vertical that I made out of beat up CB vertical parts and some hardware from DX Engineering. And for the tunable beasts, well, that's why I have all those extra control cables running out there.
I tune the tower as a shunt-fed vertical on 75m. Works pretty good too. Consistent good reports from the Late Nite Radio/Old Hippies on the Air gang. I originally hoped to switch it between two shunt lines for 40m and 75m but I found the relay chosen (one of those then-inexpensive toggle relays) turned into carbon powder running more than 100W. Lesson thus learned has tempted me to build a motor-driven doodad to switch those load lines. Ain't gotten that far yet. The tower, however, has its limits.
It doesn't do 60m or 160m or any of the other bands that are interesting in these days of low sunspot counts.
For that I need an old friend antenna: the open-wire-fed, balanced feed dipole lash-up that was my antenna of choice (my choice or not) for many of the first couple decades I wasted money on the air. And when we put up the tower last summer – we being KD8HCV, non-ham Dale Goubeaux, a few admonitions from my youngest and with my wife biting her nails – I made sure to put a yard-arm and pulley at the top of it with which I could haul up any antenna wires I wanted.
At which point we get back to the QRO Z-match.

High power RF, I learned many times over the four decades I've been doing this – requires lots of space or expensive vacuum. Capacitors that work great for 5W or 20W have a tendency to arc and melt when pressed past their design limits.
Which is why I was sooo damn happy to find a split-stator, dual-gang 40-475pF capacitor in Roger's stash for only $40-odd bucks. That made things very easy.
If you look at the schemo above, you'll note that the frequency-dependent part of the Z-match's transformer requires a dual-gang set up. Try finding one of those. I did for a long time and figured I'd just end up putting two Ten Tec 400pF high-voltage variables on the same shaft or ganged with a toothed belt. The discovery at Roger's made that shopwork project unnecessary.
Which left only the coil, something that I didn't feel like building more than maybe twice on a good day with no Ls in it. So I bought some time back a 4-inch diameter toroid of #2 material.
I went with the #2 'cause I figured my main intention was to get 160m through maybe 15 and that'd be good enough. If I'd wanted to be fussy, I'd have used a toroid of #6 material, which is more suited for tuning between 60m and maybe even 6m. I know this 'cause my two QRP Z-matches use the #6 material and they's just super good. Wanting to have 160m meant I'd have to go with #2, which, obviously, I did.
Which left only the gauge of wire to consider. And having just resurrected a much-abused SB200, I'd learned that wire sizes under #12 are like asking for trouble. So I went to PowerWerx's webpage and ordered a chunk of #10 wire.
And when the wire arrived, I discovered something: winding #10 wire is like trying to straighten coat hanger wire. And yet, after a couple hours of consideration, I managed to get the core wound with the #10, layered with fiberglass tape and the secondary – for which I only had a bit of #12 – on taped up.

I've never been good at estimating how much energy it takes to do things, which means that I'm not good at estimating what's gonna happen to various parts when they're stuffed with lots of energy. So when I stuck the finished Z-match out under the tower & hosed it up to the pitiful remnants of earlier open wire projects, I didn't expect to see the system fail so quickly.
When I hauled the box back inside and opened the beast up, my nose told me something was up.
I let all the smoke out.
Well, if not all the smoke, at least a fair batch of it.
And I'd burned the enamel off the windings in a couple places. Which meant that my investment in #10 magnet wire had, one might say, gone up in smoke.
My back up was a chunk of #10 multi-strand wire in a Teflon jacket. More hard to wind stuff.
So I tore off the magnet wire, rewrapped the core and rewound the Teflon over where the smoked stuff had been. I wound the first 10 or so turns close, twisted in the tap, wound the next six or seven open, so the secondary could lay between 'em with space to not burn up again, and then wound the last ten or so turns a bit less than close-wound until I had the previously used 27 turns on the core.
Then it was “back in the box, bitch” and off to try it out.
I found that the Teflon wire, by dint of its being insulated, even close-wound makes more inductance than the enamel, which had been nominally spaced out across the coil. So I could tune the antenna through to about 1.2 MHz, way past 160m. So I took off a few turns at the top and tried again. Got to 1.650 MHz with that. So I hauled the box back in, took two turns off the bottom and suddenly I was good.
The lowest frequency I could hit was about 1.75 MHz. The highest? Well into 6m. And where once tuning 20m had been seriously problematic, now it was just a tad closer to not too frustrating.
With that, I'm done with it.

If you've looked at the pictures, you might be wondering what I used to box this beast up. Answer's simple: PVC. The body of the box is a 10” chunk of high pressure PVC pipe salvaged from a university project. The end pieces – well, the entire innards – is chunks of PVC sheet that I bought from Small Parts.com. I used a saber saw to cut out the disks that form the end panels and the mounting surface for the two drive motors. A table saw cut the main chassis down the width to slide into the pipe. And the end of the pipe sealed shut was cut slightly larger than necessary, chamfered around the edge to slide into the pipe with reasonable force and then glued into place with good ol' fashioned PVC glue. Some of the innards is reinformed with pieces of PVC sheet either screwed into place of glued there.
The motors came from Hong Kong. I found 'em on the Virtual Village. One is a 2 RPM motor (driving the frequency tuned part) and the other is a 4 RPM (input capacitor; it's a bit too fast on some bands). I cobbled together a PCB to control the motor direction through a relay. Got three boards made inexpensively at ExpressPCB.com, which gave me a direction control motor for the shunt feed to the tower as well.

All together, I'm happy with the way this beast works. Yes, it's huge, all things considered, and it does resemble the remote tuners that I saw and used with the WRT2 transmitters on the USS Saratoga (may she rust in peace) nearly 40 years ago. The final installation will come this spring, when the snow is gone and I can finally get out to the garage to torture pieces of angle metal to build a X-frame cradle for the beast. Gonna lash it down between the tower and the wall of the shed. And put up some legitimate open-wire feed. Then it'll be even more kick-ass. And come next winter, I'll have no excuse to avoid the 160m contests.

If only I could figure out how to pay for a 160m amp . . .

"In my day . . . ЦЩ-Мйр always Strйggle!"

2011-02-11T09:55:00.000-08:00

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.

Got Signal?

2010-09-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

Two things about ham radio that make it such an interesting adventure are (1) home-brew & kit built gear, and (2) buying used home-brew or kit built gear and recognizing therein that the quality of what you buy is only as good as the quality of the builder's desire to make it work.
At which point it goes without saying that buying used home-brew or kit build equipment is either the result of an estate auction or the builder finally giving up on undoing all the shoddy work that went into building whatever it is that's up for sale.
And all that explains the SB-200 amp sitting on my desk, basically unusable, that has held the floor down under the desk for the past three years. I spent $275 on it being here, not counting shipping costs. It was a hard luck case of sorts when I got it, but at least it came from a place where the seller had taken the time to test the amp before boxing it up to sell. As the advert said, “Good output on 15m and 10m, fair on 40m and 80m. You fix or use as-is and save! Tubes are good!”
Which is exactly what I got.
The box had been built before the day of solid state transceivers and thus needs modified for radios that were not designed to switch relay voltages of 130VDC. Back in the day of tube radios, this was no problem. But new transistorized radios won't take that sort of power switch arrangement. Thus, I had to add a board to use with the Icoms. And I had to rebuild the power supply, which fortunately was available as a kit. After all, the amp was sold by Heathkit from around 1964 through 1978 as part of the Heathkit SB-series of transceivers, receivers, transmitters & accessories.
I went through a bunch of Heath gear when I first got into ham radio back in 1969, starting with the SB-310 shortwave receiver, which I soon modified to give me 15m ham receive coverage. I used a DX60 transmitter, a home-brew T/R antenna switch and a TenTec KR40 keyer for my entire time as WP4DKA. Then I built a SB401 transmitter and tried to use it with the '310 for a while. I also ran a used DX100 transmitter, a behemoth of drifty VFO, chirpy signal CW/AM gear that disappeared into some void between 1973 and 1975 when my first son was born.
All that stuff had been replaced by a TenTec Argonaut somewhere along the line and the Argonaut went on the shelf when I built my last piece of Heath gear, an HW101 that died during a blizzard around 1977 or 1978.
So now, surrounded by Icom radios – all of which are very nice, easy to use and, so far, high quality & trustworthy gear – my decision to get a used amp was driven more by idiocy than reason. Idiocy because I just want to have a strong signal when I get on 75m every Friday night with the ex-radio hippies and late-night-radio leftovers of the once thriving Ohio Valley Teratology Net. And maybe talk to my cousin in Pennsylvania who lives in a RF noise hole and has to run a kW to get a signal over to Ohio mid day on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, something that hasn't worked for a while 'cause my signal is buried in the noise at Keith's location.

But back to the amp.

First thing I did was buy a power supply rebuild kit from Harbach Electronics, which set me back $75 and a couple days of patient building. I later added in the low voltage keying board so I wouldn't fry my Icom radios running the amp. (I have yet to hose the amp up to the radios 'cause, well, that's the rest of the story.)
In the process of getting the amp running I've had to redress some cabling and give a serious long look at the tank circuit and the tubes in the RF deck. What I eventually found was disheartening.
Whoever had this amp last modified the hell out of the band switch circuitry.
First, the high end of the HF section was wired backwards, so the 10m tap fell into place before the 15m tap. And someone had moved the tap on the 10m section of the tank circuit to what can only be guessed at being 11m, although the placement is more suitable for something higher in frequency than 11m.
Confused work there.
Then the padding cap that get switched in to the tank circuit on 75m is on the 40m position of the band switch, which makes 40m tune way the hell off somewhere else.
This misplaced padding cap position was tossed in because the point and switch contacts on the 75m position of the switch is, for want of a better term, gone.
So what I end up with is an amp that won't work on 40m and barely makes sense of 75m, should I be nuts enough to use it only there. Which I could, I will admit.
But I bought a five band amp and I want a five band amp.
So now I'm adding on the bill the $35 it costs to replace the mangled switch section (not counting what it would cost me to have someone take the switch out of the box and take it apart so a new section could be laced into place).
Then there's the quality of craftsmanship that's missing from the ass of the amp, on the input section to the tubes. And there the list is simple.
First off, all the bypass caps have long enough leads on 'em to snag a fingernail.
Then there's the strange wiring of the input circuitry, some of which is part of the build instructions but about which I have serious disenchantments.
That's 'cause one of the tubes runs hotter (as in the plate gets redder) than the other. And that may be caused by something not done up right or completely failed in that section of the box.
So there's that.

All in all, it looks from the figures and frustration that I could just as easily have bought a higher-priced, probably better-constructed, used amplifier. I could have bought a fresh off the factory floor amp, if I had been interested in buying one of the cheaper – and notorious by their cheapness – amps that run tubes familiar to anyone who's been playing radio since 1969.
Which brings up the other part: I have another amp, a Heathkit Warrior HA-10, that I got more or less as a “please take this off my bench and make it go away” deal.
Took that one apart – it was way easy to do – and built it back up again. Used it for a long time over the solar maximum of the late 70s and early 80s. Worked the world, seriously, with that amp, a TR7 and a home brew three-element beam on top of a 40 ft tower.
Then we moved to the new digs and that was the end of ham radio. At least until the past couple years when it became possible to remotely control antenna switches, antenna tuners & similar bits and pieces that make it more fun.
Which brings us to today: two Icom radios and a used SB-200 that needs serious therapy.

By the time I clean up the wiring mess in the tank circuit area, rebuild the entire input section at the tube sockets & replace or repair (if possible) all the broken bits and pieces, I'll have spent almost as much in resurrection as I did making the box appear on my porch.
But that's the way it's gonna have to work, if I want the amp to work.
I've done it before.
It ain't easy, however.
Every single component in the radio has to be vetted. Can I trust this piece? Is it the right value now, if it ever was? And what about all these improvements to the design that have shown up since the beast went out of “production” a bit over thirty years ago?
That is a good question. The hot tube may be part of a design feature that was discovered by a ham in Holland. Another guy in the US collected a pile of useful mods and improvements that sound interesting. But mods are like Communism. They sound good on paper. But . . .
Will they work?

And truth be told, as my 65th birthday approaches, I am less than enthusiastic about sticking my hands inside a piece of radio gear, let alone guide a soldering iron in there among the plastic and wire.
The plate voltage for the amp is around 2.3kV. Twenty-three hundred volts.
I took 750V across my arms once. I remember screaming.
I doubt I'd remember anything if I crossed 2.3kV. They' sweep up the ashes and thrown me in the oceans so I could swim with my family every summer.
I don't have the steady hands that I once had either. Two hands to plant a screwdriver tip in the head of a screw. That kind of thing.
So there's that to consider.
But I spent my money and, goddammit, I want the amp to be amplifyin'!
And I'm tired of hearing W9BS tell me I'm weak and that I need a signal.

A Book Not About Radio

2010-03-06T18:44:00.000-08:00

Well, I done finished writing my book. There's an advert for it in the sidebar. You can order it online from the link provided. But I have to tell you two things: First, it's about time travel, mean monkeys, friendly cats, two guys from the future trying to fix things up so the future goes on to be what it is supposed to be. All that. And secondly, if you find anything wrong with it, like misspelled words and bent story lines (which I already know about, being as how it's PostModernist fiction), don't tell me right away. Read it all the way through. Jot notes down in the margins or on the back blank pages or something. Give it some time.
Give me some time.
Then tell me.
See, I went through a ton of frustration on this project. The biggest problem was having to read it again and again, looking for typos and blown up sentences and stuff. It was wearying. And then there were all the little things like the same word used three times in one sentence to say one thing. Yeah, like that. And a huge amount of wasted space on adjectives. All of that stuff I had to find before I could say that it was "sell-worthy."
And then there were the typographic problems. Widows and orphans and hyphenated words at the bottom of one page and the rest of the word at the top of the next. The usual stuff most people don't notice or if they do, they just figure it's the work of a rank amateur and let it go at that before giving up.
I didn't want to come off looking like I didn't know how to paginate, see?
I'd get all finished finding what I thought needed fixed and then I'd fix it and upload the changes to the site. Then I'd order another proof.
Before that proof even got halfway out the shop where they print 'em, I'd find stuff that I'd missed which had gone on in the upload that I was waiting proof on. So when the proof got there, I knew I had to fix all the stuff in the proof that I'd found before receiving the proof. And then there were the things I found from that proof which, upon being fixed and again uploaded, led to more errors.
I think I went through four proofs getting to where it is today.
And just today I found a mistake on the back cover, a small typographical one, a matter of an apostrophe, that I will have to fix when I find all the rest of the stuff that I didn't find this time or that time or any time before.
Yeah.
It was a pile of more frustration going through all that than it was just writing the damn thing. And even there I had help, as noted in the previous posting. At various points in this long dance around frustration, I often thought that, if I hadn't put this much effort into it already, I'd just give up. Seriously.
So there I was -- and here I am today -- trying to not make something for the public offering that looked like my amateurish hand set penny dreadfuls, even if the penny dreadfuls that I've printed for the Amalgamated Printers' Association are pretty much the source of what's in this book.
But at least it's done.
You can buy a copy if you want. I'm sure by the time it's been around for a while -- presuming I get more than one reader total -- that I'll have found time to go over it again and find even more stuff to fix than most readers will take the time for.
And therein lies the problem: I have finished this one. There are two years of penny dreadfuls already printed for the APA membership, two of which are stories of their own, stories which have proven to be source material for another book, just as the earliest two penny dreadfuls were the source for this book.
Yeah.
I'm already working on another one. There must be something wrong with me.

Whole Lot o' Crazy Stuff Goin' On!

2009-03-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

Many years ago I got into searching for single-purpose ICs that would or could be used to make a decent radio. Just something to replace, say, all the tubes & shock-box parts in an old Hallicrafters S38 probably come off the factory floor when I was still in diapers.
I came across quite a few ICs, actually.
There's the TDA1072AT, which I will extrapolate on below.
The TDA1572 chip is the gussied up version of the '1076 with a separate IF output for whatever uses one might dream up.
There the TDA1083, which is everything you need for a receiver, including a small .25W audio amplifier. It's laid out a little weird but it looks like a promising trip. (I say looks like because I have ten of 'em and have yet to fiddle with a single one for any purpose at all. Limits.)
Then there are a handful of other ICs, most of 'em Sony chips, many of which are no longer available except in vast quantities from warehouses here and there in the Orient or wherever. Among these are the TCA440, which is a pretty neat little RF/OSC/MIX/IF chip for which the builder must provide a detector & AF am circuit. If I could find a handful to play with, I'd be cool.
The TDA1046 IC, identified on the website for the data sheet as "AM Empfängerschaltung mid Demodulator" also travels under the name of TDA4001, which is identified on its data sheet as "AM receiver IC with Demodulator." The chip is what it says it is, but looking at what information there is leads me to suspect that it wouldn't make a very good HF radio. The oscillator is only spec'd out for 1.5 MHz and the IF is shown only at 455 kHz. Still . . .
And there's the TBA651, which is shown as a tuner & IF amp for an AM radio. Like the TCA440, this chip is the basic IF section of a standard AM radio. There's an IF output to a transformer in the design notes, with the output of the IF transformer being a simple diode detector feeding an external AF amp. Replace the diode with a product detector and it might make a good CW/SSB radio . . . if you can do that at the spec'd 455 kHz IF.
The TAD100, an IC from the late 60s, is another of the "basic AM radio" chips. The datasheet suggests a circuit covering LW and MW bands. And a two transistor AF amp. Yeah, it's that old.

Out of the whole batch, the TDA1072 (and the TDA1572 version) is the most sensible of ICs to go with. First off the oscillator is spec'd to 50 MHz. And the IF has proven in experiments to work in the 4 to 9 MHz range. It has a detector bypass (which must be capacitor grounded to get any AF out of the detector) which in one online application provides for BFO injection. There are two AGC lines, one of which must be coupled to ground for the detector to work. And the chip has a mute line that must go to ground in receive.
The next possible winner is the TDA1083. With this one you get a nominal mute line (which actually shoots between an AGC function or an AFC function; the IC is touted as a AM and FM receiver) & AGC. You get the ability to use an external oscillator (with a weird looking coupling mechanism that others have used successfully). And there's a pick-up point at the second of two IF amp stages to use an detector outside the chip itself (or to inject a BFO signal). And there's the .25 W AF amp, which is one less thing to fight with if you're like me. The only drawback is the way the IF system works and what to me looks like a kind of haphazard IC pin layout. There are a couple designs on the InterWebs using this IC, including one for a 75m SSB transceiver.
Of course, if you don't want to play with one or two ICs to build a radio, then you've got the NE602/MC1350/NE602/LM386 circuit common to a whole list of tiny radio kits.

Now I started on this madness over ten years ago, at least to my reckoning. Over that time, other than amass a small fortune in ICs, some of which I parceled out to friends with greater levels of determination than I, I've done nothing with the idea.
Then I found a design on the web from one of the original unindicted co-conspirators. That design, using a 4.915 MHz IF, seemed reasonable and, with as few parts as the design had, possible for my shaking hands and short attention span.
Now, after months of burning things up and winding tiny toroids and all the other accumulated million aggravations that beset any project that I start, I've gotten to the point where I can say three things about the single-chip radio project:

1. It is possible to use the TDA1072AT chip to make a shortwave radio with nearly single-signal detection, even using 455 kHz ceramic filters. (I used a 455 kHz ceramic resonator for the BFO.)
It is possible to get a reasonable CW/SSB system out of all this accumulated soldering, burning, cursing and quick turn down of the AF gain pot.
If you want to build one of these, I'll be finished writing up what I've found – much of it with the help of my fellow unindicted co-conspirator – for eventual publication in some QRP ham radio magazine. And note that I said eventual publication. I don't do command performances any more.
Oh, one more thing: I'm tired of working on this . . .

That being said, here's a picture of what happened the last time I messed with this design. It isn't that bad of a radio, really. The only problems I have – and they're problems that I feel are more owing to my klugish way of putting things together before I get out the real metal working tools – are oscillation & instability in the input circuit. And there's a small problem with the BFO injection level and more importantly, a bit of trouble getting the BFO frequency set solid. Minor stuff, right?
After that, it's a good enough deal to listen to Radio Habana on, which was the original goal nearly a decade ago when I first got a bug up my kilt over this single-chip receiver madness.

Very, Very Small . . . Verrry Smallll!

2008-12-05T14:49:00.000-08:00

I have gotten to the point where I am so old I can't remember when I started getting all the physical symptoms of getting old. But somewhere in the last century or so I came down with what the medicos call, among other things, "essential tremor."
My hands shake. Sometimes real bad. Usually when I have a dangerous tool like a knife or a soldering iron or a drill in my mitt. Makes soldering tiny parts a real pain in the tuchus.
At any rate, even before I discovered this shaking thing, I had a distinct aversion to surface mount stuff. It was just too damn tiny and, with my propensity to drop things for no apparent reason (also part of the tremor thingie), I just didn't feel all that much good about trying to build stuff using SMD. Surface mount devices.
Of all the things I've built over the past twenty-odd years of living at this rendition of the estancia, I can't think of but one or two things that had SMD on 'em and all of them, all two of 'em, were a pain in the ass. Stuff that I thought was spiffy would be thought better of if I discovered in the process of research that there was SMD solderin' going on in the process of building.
Things that had standard, thru-the-hole-on-the-board part placement & construction were preferred.
And once the shaking started, none of it was fun any more.
I thus at first limited myself to building things that had no more than 20 parts. Voltage regulators. Charge controllers. SWR bridges. Direct conversion receivers. Stuff like that. Ten, maybe twenty parts max. And no SMD.
The only time I fell of that wagon was in buying and building up to the part of putting a box together for it a SW40 from Dave Benson. And the PFR-3 that I bought from Doug Hendricks last year at Dayton, which is another story after this one.

So last summer I take the FT817ND that my eldest gave me for Christmas the year before and a bunch of other claptrap down to the beach house for a week of relaxation and Corona-by-the-pool drinking. I took along an Elecraft T1 auto tuner, which I had successfully built and then subsequently blew up. And I took an LDG auto tuner that survived the madness very nicely, thank you very much.
But I realized almost immediately that I'd have been better off bringing the home-brew Z-match tuner that had served me well for many years prior.
Only problem was the size of that version of the Z-match. It barely fit in the bag when I had only a K2 and there weren't no room for it in the bag that I had gotten for the '817. (Which bag, by the way – and we're talkin' of the '817 here – is a Maxpedition Sabercat Versipack [$109.99 from Lapolicegear.com].)
Upon getting home from the beach, I began investigating my options.
I didn't really want to build another damn tuner, so I sprang the cash for a MiracleAntenna QPack Precision tuner, as noted in a previous and boring entry of this blog.

Upon getting the QPack Precision, I still needed a SWR bridge. And my previous experience with SWR metering had proven many times that a simple LED is a lot more rugged and a damn sight easier to figure out than a mechanical meter movement. Thus I searched up a couple version of the N7VE/Dan Tayloe SWR bridge and found two simpler version of the circuit, the last of which had one part less than the first.
So I sprung for $60 worth of circuit boards and built a little bridge to fit inside the QPack Precision.
It woiked great.
I could sit under the backyard chestnut tree with my '817 back-and-go station and play radio from 75m through 6m. All I had to do was flip the appropriate switches on the tuner and tune the appropriate LED to the appropriate darkness. And there was a lot o' switches, yo.

Are you waiting for the "But then . . . "?

Well, then I started thinking about how small the QPack Precision was compared to the Z-match and that got me looking for a box like the QPack box, which led me to the Hammond 1445 series extruded aluminum boxes, which led me to building anew another version of the first Z-match tuner, which led to a discovery.

One of the reasons that QRP loonies can get away with the simple circuits and the low grade components that they often use in very creative ways is the low power levels at which they play. There is a huge difference in building a resistive network for five Watts versus building one for 100 W. In a resistive bridge the usual deal is to run two Watt resistors for a five Watt tuning bridge. Try that with 100 W and you get smoke in da room, yo.
The streets is real, man.
Recent technology has led to the availability of what looks like a five Watt non-inductive resistor which in fact is really quite inductive under that pretty twenty-first century covering.
But recent technology had led to the development of so-called "thick film" resistors, some of which are monstrously sturdy for their size.
A 100W, non-inductive, thick-film resistor is now available in a TO-247 case.
Seriously.
But you need a heat sink.
In the mean time, there are now SMD, non-inductive resistors that come in 10W and 20W ratings. They're about the size of an unused clump of kitty litter.
Seriously.
But you need steady hands to play with 'em.
I know 'cause I have messed with six of 'em so far and the results have been, well, tiny. And they cost about $6 each. That's a trade-off.

The rebuilt Z-match has a tiny SWR bridge in it using three Bourns SMD chip resistors and a couple thru-hole parts on a board ain't much over .5x.875". The switch solders right to the edge of the board and the LED stands off it a few inches inside the box.
And it works.

Only thing is, I now have about 30 tiny little circuit boards for which I could take the time and buy enough of the little resistors to build 30 of the little bridges which I could then sell off to recoup the money spent on getting the boards done.
I could if I was nuts.
But I have intervention now and they won't let me solder that much crap. Not even stretched out over a couple months, like's been the case with the PRF3.
Nope. I'm done.
I have tasted the waters of SMD and I have found them, well, frustrating has hell. Between the hands wandering around in spasms of joy and indelicacy and the family getting tired of my cussin' and the parts flyin' around in all directions with the cats immediately taking interest in them in flight or on the ground, I've had enough.
I'll leave the SMD work up to younger hands and eyes than mine.
The next SWR bridge I build will use those big sucker resistors.
And a meter. A big meter with large numbers that I'll be able to see from across the yard. Yeah, from across the yard. Like a goddamn scoreboard.

That's the ticket!

Another Trip into Antenna Valley

2008-10-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

One of the joys of QRP is portable operation. As in: the radio & all the accouterments fit into a small space and, if the set-up is properly planned, doesn't weigh more than a six pack. The opposite of that joy, that "go anywhere/fits in my pocket" ham radio set-up, is the discovery upon unpacking, that the antenna doesn't work or the radio's batteries are toast.
I can usually set up ahead of time for the batteries & the radio and all that. It's the antenna – by far the most important part of any station – that always kicks me in the ass.
Happened last year in NC.
Probably will happen again this year, if we can afford to go on vacation like so many years before.
Happens a lot, actually.
See, I get the whole station set up on the card table or picnic bench or on top of the cooler under the umbrella slathered with 40-weight sunblock. Beer in hand and wire aloft I push the button on the auto tuner and behold: nothing happens.
Or I get out the other auto tuner and it resets in the middle of calling CQ. Or in the middle of answering somebody else's CQ.
Takes the fun out of it right there, it does.

After this past summer's experience I decided that I'd had it with auto tuners. I decided that I needed to get back to using the trusty ol' Z-match that I'd build off a circuit I found on the web. I'd built the little box (a couple times) back some eight years maybe, when I first got the K2 up and running.
Took it to the beach one summer and worked a VK on 18m in the middle of the night with a wire out the kitchen door & aloft on a 30 ft telescoping pole.
Then I bought a LDG tuner and ran that for a while. It was impressive. It worked. I bought another auto tuner, a SG239, and put it out in the antenna shed at the end of a long chunk of coax and a nearly as long chunk of control cable. That worked so good I bought an Icom AH4 to go with the IC706mk2G that I had.
Took the '706 to the beach and played some radio with it and the AH4. Worked great except for the switcher PS noise being radiated by the control cable between the '706 and the auto tuner.

In between one or the other of the above events I sold the K2 (and a bunch of other stuff too) and bought an Icom IC718 HF transceiver. Then I bought the '706. Both radios work real well with the SG239 out in the shed and, the few times I've run 'em with it, they work with the AH4.
So all is well in auto tuner land.
Until this past summer.
Now, don't get me wrong: the Elecraft T1 tuner that I bought to use with the FT817ND that I got for Christmas some years back works quite nicely with the '817. Well, it did.
The T1 stopped working in the middle of the week at the beach. I'd brought the LDG tuner as back up and it worked great with the '817.
But I knew in my hippy little heart that I could have saved myself the trouble with the old Z-match in tow.
As soon as we got back to the estancia I set to with finding an easy and small – and small is the most important quality – manual tuner. It was then that I discovered that I could spend money or I could spend time and money.
In the end, I did both.

After much fiddling & figuring, I ordered a QPack Precision manual tuner from Universal Radio, down the road a stretch from the estancia. It arrived in short order & I gave it the test ride. Worked great, 'cept for not having a built-in SWR metering circuit.
So I built a version of the N7VE bridge. Once I had that idea working, I even sprung some money for a small circuit board upon which to build the bridge so it would fit cleanly inside the QPack Precision box.
Then I started thinking about how the QPack worked against how my clunky homebrew Z-match worked.
The QPack Precision is a pretty solid box manual tuner. It has two big knobs that twist 360°, two four-position switches, BNC input and output connectors and a little switch on the end of the box to ground the ground-tending line on the main coil for unbalanced loads.
It tuned a chunk of wire hanging from a curtain rod and a big chunk of wire strung between two trees in the back yard. Worked real well and, with the SWR LED indicator doodad stuffed inside, made a pretty neat addition to the QRP go-bag station.
The homebrew Z-match has two knobs to tune with. The only switches are one for the SWR indicator circuit and the switch that grounds the ground-tending side of the output coil, just like the QPack. But without the two four-position switches.
And I seemed to be spending more time switching things back and forth on the QPack during tune up.
The Z-match is a simple two knob twist: one knob position depends on band/frequency. The other knob dips out the indicator for the load. Switch out the SWR bridge and I'm on the air.
So the Z-match just seemed more simple. And a lot easier to use.
But by this time I'd spent on the SWR bridge in the QPack – which involved getting a new set of end panels for the QPack box – I'd discovered a whole new set of aluminum boxes that I could put the old clunker in.
'Cept that I really didn't want to take the old clunker Z-match apart. I'd put too much time and energy and cussin' into getting it to work good.
So I sprung some more money on a bunch of extruded aluminum, two capacitors and, eventually new toroid cores to build the beast with.
And along the way I'd discovered surface mount thick film 10W resistors that aren't much bigger than a match head. And a couple capacitors, smaller in size than the ones in the QPack but not much different from the capacitors used in the original circuit (above)
Which meant another jigger of cash.

All this spending and discovery led to the present version of the Z-match shown here. It's a lot easier to use than the QPack and doesn't take up much more space, even if the box is higher. The knobs being on the front panel, I discovered, makes the tuner a little easier to use. (I'd discovered using the QPack that I needed an extra hand or some means of tying the QPack down while I twisted the knobs and fiddled the switches, a serious design criterion for QRP pack-and-go set-ups.)
The SWR bridge switch and LED are right there in front, between the two knobs so they're easy to find and see. And the little SMD resistors are rated well above any possible power level I'd use with this tuner.
All is just spiffy.
Only problem is now having to figure out what I'm gonna do with the extra cores, SMD resistors, capacitors, enclosures and circuit boards I sprung for in the process of trying to improve on an already cool enough design.
That and finding time to use all this stuff in some cool, vacation-like way without being desanguinated by the end-of-summer mosquitoes or smacked in the head by falling chestnut pods or looked at real funny by the neighbors as I sit in the yard and play with the radio, tuner, keyer paddles & whatever else I drag out there.
I mean, it's not like I have money left to go to the beach, even as much as I'd like to before the snow accumulates feet deep in the driveway & I have to pay some guy with a truck to come clean us out of the fluffy white.
Which reminds me: I gotta start researching a solar panel power source. For at the beach, where there's so much sun.
Ah, yes . . .
The sun.

About Half a Mile

2008-04-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

For many years now Cindy's been gettin' all up in my grill over how much exercise she thinks I get or don't get. She's into the Nautilus machines at the local Y. She goes there three times a week for a couple hours of joggin' on the belt & runnin' through the weights and all that. She gets a lot out of it, not the least of which is weight control and a better spirit. I have no problems with her going & I have even so much as tried to go there regular for a while before it just got to be, well, something I was never into.
Because of my lack of interest in the set-up, Cid cut back from a family to an individual membership with the Y and that was that. We – me and the young'n – didn't go or seem interested, so it made little sense for Cid to buy a membership for herself and two non-attenders when a single membership for her was cheaper by a few bucks.
No problem there, neither. The less she has to spend trying to make sure me and the young'n is healthy, the more we have to spend on things like heavy desserts, high-kick lattes & espressos & spumoni ice cream.
Yeah, that stuff.
But still Cid gets up in my grill over this exercise thing. She doesn't think the mile I put in every day at work before 8:30 a.m. counts, even if it does involve going up or down stairs and pushing carts into classrooms so teachers can amaze their students with such computer savvy as they can muster without too much effort. Nor does the many walks I take every day from one end of the campus to the other simply to show somebody which buttons to push.
And yet it ain't enough, seems.
All this, of course, falls flat on it's little complicated noggin when you consider the amount of effort that I can put into printing 200 copies of something trivial.

See, I have an old-fashioned letterpress print shop in my garage. Actually it's Cid's garage but she lets me park my three cast iron presses, a half-ton of type & other printerly accouterments, a paper cutter and a print shop cat in there next to or in front of or around the side of her fancy car with the moon roof and all that.
Just moving the stuff in there was exercise. But then it makes sense that such would happen, given that the largest press is listed in a 1928 ATF catalog as having a shipping weight of 1800 lbs. Shy of a ton. And the smallest press weighs in at about 500 lbs, shy of a quarter ton. But that ain't the point, all that weight.
One of the presses, which was built in the days before electric motors could do much more than amaze people by their size and heat, was originally sold with a treadle. Like one of those things you stomp on rhythmically with your foot so as to turn a crankshaft which imparts motion to some other parts of whatever mechanism. That press, the one with the treadle, weighs about 1050 lbs according to the catalog. It was built between 1874 and 1900 by the George Phineas Gordon Press Works in Rahway, NJ. The chase, which is the frame holding the type, is designed for a 9x13 printed space, although it'd put some serious strain on the mechanism to print something that large. The day it was made it sold for about $250, shipping charge of $20 not included. It's a helluva machine and it's over 130 years old.
It's motive power is a treadle. Remember that: a treadle.
Many a time, presses of this size and age are usually run – or were usually run, back when there were more of 'em – by a belt over the flywheel and a small electric motor on a plank of wood behind the press. At that point you or I or anybody with quick hands and an understanding of the machine as possibly dangerous could get maybe 1000 copies an hour of it, all things considered. A fast person with the press running off steam (as it was originally advertised) or motor might get up to 1500 but that'd be pressing one's luck.
Now, when I originally bought this press from John Renner back in 1983, he was running it with an old washing machine motor on the floor. I dragged it into the garage and ran it that way until, one day, the motor went up in spoke. From there I hosed up a treadle with a 2x4 & some aluminum strap. Ran it like that until I gave it to Tom Ebbert, who, upon discovering that it took five treadle pushes per impression, put the motor back on it. He ran it like that for a couple years and then got a larger, more 20th Century press.
So last December I got it back from Tom and set to restoring it to operating condition. And no, I didn't pressure wash it and clean each and every tiny little part and make it look like it was a piece of statuary in a studio. I got the rollers recovered by a company I just learned about in California, Ramco Roller Products. Then I got a treadle from Hern Iron Works. And once that was done, I took some type that I'd set for Treasure Gems, a limited edition communal publication of the Amalgamated Printers' Association, and plonked into the chase & set up to run.
I put the ink on the press and got that pretty well distributed by treadling the press a few ten or so impression cycles, which works out to about fifty pushes on the treadle from five revolutions of the flywheel going into each impression and the flywheel turns once per push on the treadle.
Then I had the stock counted out into stacks of 50 and turned to with the printing.
I got the first 50 done and took a break. I was getting a bit winded.
I printed the next 50 and took another break.
The next 50 I pumped with my right leg. I'd pumped the press through the first 100 with my left leg only. And the last 50 I treadled off with first the right leg and then the left.
Then I took a break. I went inside and got a drink and went out and cleaned the press up. Another fifteen or so impressions to get the ink dissolved in the cleaning fluid (usually mineral spooks or kerosene) and then maybe one or two more treadled impressions and I was done.
Then I took a break.
The next day I got up, cleaned up the shop some and distributed some type. Stuff I'd set for another job that I'd run on the C&P, the larger press that runs off a motor, although I could get a treadle from Hern Iron Works for that one too.
Later on that afternoon I put the other side of type on the Gordon and treadled off the next 200-odd impressions, taking breaks along the way every 50 copies. Then I cleaned up the press again and took another break.

Monday morning I got up and went to work. My legs weren't feeling bad. I was ready to do my morning walk about and push equipment into rooms as needed and all that. While I was at it I counted out the steps around the central building core tunnels. It came to about 400 footfalls of one leg counted each step (as in two steps, left & right, equaled only one step, in this case the right leg only) for a quarter mile. I compared that to the 1000 kicks of the treadle that I'd had to push just for the 200 copies (not including the ink up and clean up treadling that I'd done) and figured that three trips around the core tunnels would have been 1200 kicks.
So I ended up with a bit more understanding of how much exercise I was getting out of having this press out there in the garage. And I was thinking also about having had another treadle press out there, a 7x11 Pearl of early 20th Century vintage, upon which I could have printed the piece that I'd just done.
The Pearl was easy to treadle. It had probably never been run any other way and its mechanism is much more simple and less convulsive than the Gordon. But I gave the Pearl away because I didn't have the room for it, even if it was a foot smaller in two dimensions than the Gordon.

Now all this consideration of what it takes to print 200 copies of anything fed directly into my remembering all the Army and Navy books on mobile and portable radio command communications systems. There's always a picture somewhere of some soldier – and maybe every now and then a sailor – cranking away on a generator to keep the voice of command on the air. And from my experience at riding bicycles, now and when I was younger & in my prime, so to speak, I have some idea of what it might take to keep a 100 W radio crankin' out the jams.
A lot. It'll take a lot of crankin' to do that. Run the radio.
Which is why I am into batteries and solar panels, mostly, and seldom would even think of using foot power to play radio. It's too much to coordinate at once. And a lot more to coordinate than runnin' a press.

But now at least I know now how long it takes to print 200 copies of something on the Gordon. It's not that long, really. Just a little more than half a mile.

Why, That Radio Ain't Got Knobs on It!

2008-03-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

Been a while since I had to buy any ham gear. I've got 18 radios now in one room and a couple more stashed elsewhere around the estate. The most recent acquisition is the Yaesu FT817ND that I got from the eldest two Christmases back. The oldest is either the Viking Ranger transmitter out in the garage or it's the Korean war vintage R174 receiver I bought many years back at a Hamvention. Fresh out the warehouse and into the surplus market, box & extra tubes & manual and all. Sweet little radio.
In between all that I've bought, built & sold an Elecraft K2, a home-brew solid state HF amp (bad experience a couple times), an SG2020 transceiver & a bunch of other little radio bits, some of 'em still on the shelf.
The most recent serious radio has to have been the two Icom transceivers I got after finally coming to my senses about the K2, the SG2020 and all the steps between QRP and QRO that cost me way more than the original two radios aforementioned.
So now my main radios are an IC718 HF transceiver and an IC706Mk2G. I bought 'em both with one or two extra filters in 'em and I have 'em all fixed up and ready to rock, all memories full and all that.
Like I said, it's been a while.
Of course, when anybody goes to the Hamvention as I have been doing for the past 36 years, it's pretty easy to see all the new stuff, which is how any hams squeal like pigs & apes when they find something that the sales brochure says they must have. That's what keeps the radio manufacturing companies interest in ham radio.
If the world of radio was all commercial, nobody'd have any radios like we have now 'cause we'd all be dedicated to cell phones and satellite ship-to-shore links &c. But since there's this little bunch of weird radio tinkerers, ham radio gear gets designed and bought and everybody but our wives or other creditors goes home happy.
At least that's the story, even if I don't quite believe it and ain't too worried about sticking to it one way or the other.

The other night I was listening to the usual crowd of loonies on 3.675 MHz, the failed hippie non-egalitarian hot-shot old codgers used to be radicals net, and they were talking about menus and pull downs and settings of this and that and the other thing. And I got from listening that Gary was working with someone, maybe Dave, and they were trying to get Gary's radio to work like Dave's radio or whatever.
After a few minutes I realized what they were talking about.
An SDR.
A "software defined radio," like you get if you use the computer to control all the conversion, filtering and processing functions that you find fixed in place and unalterable inside radios like I've been buying. And I've been buying or paying attention to people who buy radios since about 1957 or so. Just after the transistor became the big-ticket deal.
Well, an SDR is different than any radio I've seen yet.
Basically it's a computer that acts like a radio. As in all the conditions of signal path & processing, from the input and output filters to the conversion gain & the IF filtering and audio digital and analog processing is done inside a computer box.
You have a box with a power switch somewhere on the front and you hook a keyboard, mouse & computer monitor up to it. Then you hook the antennas to the antenna holes, microphone to the microphone hole and you turn it on.
After that it's all menus.
A menu to change the speech processing frequency roll-off. A menu to change the power output for various modes. A menu to choose between a whole raft of different IF selectivities, if you want to consider direct conversion a radio with an IF.
See, that's the neat part: with the computer controlling input filtering both in what's called "roofing filters" and in the filters that work at the frequency of intended reception, you don't need an IF. You just chose with phase relationship you want to pick your sideband and, if you're on AM, you just listen to it as if it were still a sideband signal. The computer processes the audio so you think you're listening to AM.
Yeah, like that.
So after listening for a while it was obvious that (a) Gary had a new radio and (b) neither he nor Dave nor anyone else listening in with the same kind of radio could figure out how to make Gary sound like anything but Gary.
As in: after an hour or so of fiddling with the settings on the microphone audio spectrum processing, the only thing that the two of 'em, Gary & whoever else I don't remember was working with Gary, could say they'd accomplished was to have reset to default a couple times already.
Yeah. They screwed around with it until it was unintelligible so they rest the computer's control of the way things worked to the factory default settings.
And it still sounded like Gary.
And how much did Gary possibly pay for this experience?
Hold on to your teeth, Jasper. The SDR radio in question has an InterWeb suggested price of . . .
Simple most radio of the two offered? Only $2,799. Direct from the factory.
Most expensive with the most goo? Why that's just $4,799. Hell, cheap that one is, yessiree.

I remember when I saw a radio that cost nearly a kilobuck. Made me wonder what sort of people would pay that much for a radio they were ostensibly gonna use as a hobby toy. Never could myself come to grips with that much money for a toy.
And yeah, I know: the '706 goes today for about $900, which is about $200 more than I paid for it something like six years ago or so. The '718 was only about $500, if that much. Entry level radio they called it.
And here's Gary and at least one other LNR crazy has plunked down between nearly $3k and $5k for a radio that has so many menu options that he has to go to factory defaults after messing with stuff all over the place.
After an hour or so of listening to this futzing around and looking at the picture of the FlexRadio thingie on my computer I turned off the '706 and went to bed. All the way through the process of getting from the radio room, through the shower and all that and finally falling into bed I could only shake my head in dismay.

We've come a long way, us'n's have, from the day when radios had tubes and a good radio had more than five, although I'll admit that the R174 is a helluva radio for a five tuber. Right after that came the transistor craziness, with most radios having at least four and the more you had the more prestige it bought you.
Long way from the Viking Ranger to the FlexRadio Flex-5000 with all it's doodads and menus and geegahs and whatever else it has that makes it worth $5k. Long way from that.
No wonder I don't get on the air that much any more.
Ain't no fun if the radio has more knobs than it can have on one side and all them knobs don't turn, not even in default reset.
Na.
Don't think I'll ever see the sense of having one of those. Not this old codger. Got better things to do with my $5k, when I have $5k or if I ever find $5k that I want to part company with like droppin' a turd in the bowl. And yes, I know that makes me sound like one of the geezers on 75m complainin' 'cause everybody's gone off using AM and now it's "all that Donald Duck noises."
And besides, radios are supposed to have knobs and switches on 'em, which the FlexRadios obviously do not.
Another reason to stay grumpy.

"I Already Did That!"

2007-11-29T11:34:00.000-08:00

You have to understand how the system works. Basically there's a hole in the wall that you plug the main power hose into. That hose leads to these two circuit breakers, which you can trip if you wish, to turn the power off to the rest of the equipment. This panel & circuit breaker on the left turns the power on to the left side of the desk, that is: the Mac and the ServeSwitch. The panel & circuit breaker on the right runs power to the PC & the DVD/VHS player.
Now the Mac or the PC signals get sent to the projector on the ceiling by pushing the button on the ServeSwitch. Number 1 is the Mac; number 2 is the PC. These buttons on the top of the desk select the signal you're going to send to the projector and give you the power on/off for the projector.

Got that?

It makes sense to me because I've been working with this same equipment for the past 29 years. I've put the stuff in the rooms, I've tested the set-ups, I've replaced broken gear & made numerous trips to any of the seventy-five such rooms on the campus to help folks figure out which buttons to push.
Yes, they're all academics, the most of 'em.
And most of them have been living with this technology at one level (deeply involved) or the other (touch-typing and basic mousing) for over twenty years.
But the longer I do this and the more I see of how people completely ignore everything that goes into understanding how things work in this culture today, the more I'm sure that the majority of folks on this planet have less awareness of basic problem solving than a four year old with a screw driver and a hammer.
If the kid can't get into the box with the screw driver – most often as a result of not-quite-synched up manual dexterity – said child will resort first to crying for mommy, followed immediately after the first wimper by a swing of the hammer. And such hammer swinging inevitably leads to a smashed finger or a bruise on the leg. From the aforementioned not-quite-synched up manual dexterity.

I walk into the room and see that most of the people are folks who work with the hard-core hardware of the university. Safety officers, physical plant supervisors, job detailers, folks like that.
Now the original call was "I can't switch from the PC to the Mac and I can't get the picture on the screen."
The computer monitor is blinking from nothing to the Mac screen. Blink. Blink.
"How's that happening?" I ask.
"I kept pushing on this button and it started flashing."
The button is the one that toggles between Mac and PC.
"Ok. You want to use the PC, right?"
"Yes"
"Ok, well you have to turn the PC on." I turn on the PC.
"How'd you do that?"
"I pushed the power button . . . right here."
"Well ok, but it's not on the screen."
I can see from where I'm standing that the video projector is in standby. The red "lamp" indicator is blinking and the green "power" indicator is out.
"Ok. Well, we have to reset the power." I push the "off" button on the keypad on the desk.
"Well, it's not up there. It was. Then I couldn't switch to the PC, so I pressed this button . . . "
I hear the click of the circuit breaker going off.
The PC screen goes dead.
She has succeeded in turning the PC off again.
"See, it went off. I want it on."
"Well, ma'am, you have to leave this on . . . " I push the circuit breaker back on and push the power button on the PC. The PC starts up . . . again.
So the PC starts up again & the projector, which has a cool down cycle as part of the power down/power up function, eventually comes back to "ready." I can tell 'cause the red and green indicators are both on and not flashing.
In the meantime the "instructor" (for want of a better term) has connected to the campus network and is accessing her files on a system drive. She turns and looks at the screen.
The screen is washed with a blue background and the slowly brightening symbol of the manufacturer and a countdown indicator. When it gets to zero the screen blinks and shows that the projector is taking a signal on input 3.
"Well, now how do I get the PC on there?"
"Push the PC button," I suggest calmly.
"I did that and it didn't work."
I push the button. She sees me push the button. The PC screen comes up on the projected image.
"Oh."
"That should set you up. Anything else?"
"No, thanks."
I leave the room.

Five minutes later she calls back and says she can't get any volume. One of my co-workers responded to that call. When he got back he told me that she had the volume controls all the way up: on the computer and on the control panel on top of the desk. She was trying to play a video that had been recorded with almost no audio level.

Seven times zero is still zero.

On my way back from the room and before Yvan took off to answer the next problem, I thought about something we'd been discussing earlier. It was one of those short-frame conversations where both of us already know we're in agreement but it's worth passing the symbols around.
We had been talking about how religious groups and political groups always end up looking more like a bunch of monkeys throwing shit at each other. No matter how high-minded or highly-evolved the philosophical background or the rhetorical schema of the situation might be, it's all just monkeys throwing shit.
That it's supposed to look high minded or more egalitarian or humane or divested of any pecuniary or egocentric power, all the words in all the books and all the speeches and promises and treaties and treatises, it's just monkeys throwing shit at each other in some attempt to wrest control or power or whatever magic is supposed to lie beneath the piles of words and pleasant turns of phrase.
The same old shit.
But it occurred to me that it's way more simple than even that. It's not that some folks just don't have the technical skill or the knowledge or the science or the deep understanding of how things work inside.
Everything that I had done to get the presentation back on the screen so the person at the front of the room wouldn't look like a monkey was basic logic. Very basic logic.
Everything I did to get the show back on the road did not require for one instance any math skills or knowledge of how resistors and capacitors work in parallel or in series. I didn't have to divine the bias voltage of a beam power pentode vacuum tube. I didn't have to finagle the inductance of a transmitter output network or even do the math for a quarter-wavelength dipole antenna at one wavelength above ground.
I simply saw what was on and what was off and, instead of mashing on one button until something else, something completely unexpected happened, I went through the process of bringing each component of the system back to its operating settings.
And I waited for the projector to go through the lamp warm up cycle.
And how many times I've had to explain that?

Nope, we's all still monkeys here on this rock. Makes no never mind if the rock is a bench in a lab at some university or a tuft of grass growin' up between the cracks of ancient limestone on a ridge in Africa. We's all jis' monkeys here, boss. In fact, from this experience I would like to propose a metaphor: the metaphor of the lab monkey and the banana.
Here's the set-up:
A monkey is in a room looking through a glass window. On the other side of the window from the monkey there is a room with a table. On the table there is a banana. The two rooms face each other through the glass and what happens in one room can be seen from the other room through the window.
And the two rooms are joined by an open passageway between them.
In other words, if the monkey wanted the banana, all it would have to do is get down off the bench it's sitting on and go through the doorway into the other room to pick the banana up off the table.
But that's not what the monkey does.
The monkey stares at the banana. It glowers at the banana. It heaves great sighs of desire at the banana on the other side of the glass. Eventually the banana is just too much to take, staring back as it does at the monkey staring at it.
Because everyone knows bananas stare back.
So now the monkey gets all upset 'cause the banana is staring back at the monkey, challenging the monkey to get the banana and eat it. And this makes the monkey even more hungry for the banana.
The monkey starts hooting at the banana on the other side of the glass.
The monkey stars slapping the glass with its own palms.
The banana lays there on the table like an insult.
The monkey starts pounding on the window and jumping up and down.
The banana just stares.
The monkey shits itself and urinates on the bench and howls at the banana.
Eventually the monkey's pounding breaks the glass and sharp slivers cut the monkey's hands and arms. Blood is pouring out everywhere and the monkey is even madder now.
That goddamn banana just lays there and stares at the bleeding monkey as the monkey's shouts turn to whimpers and it bleeds to death. And just before it dies, the monkey falls on its side and sees the doorway connecting the room it's in to the room the banana's in.

And that's you and me, monkey. That's you and me.

QSL 100%

2007-11-23T14:50:00.000-08:00

Back a few weeks a friend of mine got his ham license. He's been on the air mostly with the 2m gang from down in Cincinnati and a couple times on HF. I think it's the outright vagaries of the ionosphere that slows him down there, but he's at least getting on the air and having fun chattin' with people.
I have yet to get him interested in contests. We'll see.
I have to get myself interested in contests most of the time any more too. In the long back, I'd get on the air on weekends and, depending on the contests, I'd work a couple hours here and there and be done with it. Sometimes I'd have a couple pages of the log book filled up and sometimes I'd have a page on a good day. Either way there were contacts in the log.
Also long back I got into the habit of QSLing all DX contacts. First there was the kick of actually talking on my own radio to somebody in a country that I'd either never thought about or, in the case of the Mediterranean & Canada, places I'd been. And back when I first got into ham radio – and even when I was just a SWLer – my father had printed up QSLs for me on his huge Chandler & Price press.
Hand set type; hand fed press. Beautiful work done by a true artist. The shame is I really took that kindness & interest in my life for granted.
If I could live this live over again . . .
After Dad died I ended up with most of his print shop in my garage. I remembered some of the stuff he'd taught me but I had to go looking through the libraries to find a book that did the art of letterpress printing justice. That book was The Practice of Printing by the Polk brothers. Published most recently in the 1950s, I think. By hook and crook and scouring of used book stores I found a copy. Then I found another. And then I started adding printing books to the burgeoning collection of text material that will confound the witless when I'm gone.
So I learned what I didn't know and relearned what Dad had taught me.
And I started printing my own QSLs.

Now the art of a QSL is pretty precise. The most important part is the text block area where the contact with another ham via radio is verified with a strangely vague minutiæ for which hams are famous. It all comes down to time, date, frequency, signal report & who the hell was listening or talking. Five or six lines of ten point type on ten pica slug will do the job.
Then there's the callsign, station location and operator's name &c.
Easy: you wrap that around the call sign with the call sign set in as large a size as you can cram onto a 3.5x5.5 card.
Now all of this goes onto the card one way or the other. Many of the cards that I've received over the past nearly 38 years of ham radio have had the QSL info on the back of the card. Thus the front only has the call sign, the operator's name and address and maybe some graphic doodad. That and a club affiliation symbol or two.
Get all that done and it comes down to colors of ink, type of card stock & how much money you wanna spend. That, of course, comes out of who's doing the printing, how it's getting done & whether or not the printery is dedicated to QSLs only or is a job shop that does everything from wrestling & bull fight posters to business cards for the local drug pushers.
The big shops with a wide client base do some beautiful work. Some have pretty quick turn arounds on orders. But the simple fact that your job is just one of however many come in on a daily basis does make a difference. And big shops have many different ways of producing the same product. The deal can get very sticky.
Small job shops that do QSL cards and maybe rubber stamps – such as Ebbert Graphics & Stamps, now no longer in the QSL business – turn out some very nice work in reasonable amounts of time for reasonable money.
Either way it all comes down to trial and error and the good luck that you picked a good printer with a solid reputation for quality work from in front. If you bought cards from Ebbert, you got quality stuff. If you bought 'em from the guy's got an old offset press in the garage and a home-brew plate burner, you took your chances.

I knew what my callsign was before I got the ticket. I knew that 'cause one of the first letters I got after I took the test was from Rusprint QSL printers in Missouri. I also got one from The Little Printshop, another place that may no longer be in business. (There are two places listed on the web under Little Print Shop. Ain't sure if any of them's the one I'm remembering.)
Both of those firms printed their QSLs via letterpress. I was impressed with the stuff they showed but I knew that my father was all set to crunch out a batch of cards for me the minute my license arrived. The fact that I was in Puerto Rico and my folks were back home in Ohio meant little.
Being the sort of neurotic letter writer that I am, I sent each of the aforementioned firms a letter explaining that, although I appreciated their samples & mailing, I already had a deal made on QSLs. One of the folks sent me a nice note back thanking me for taking the time to write and expressing appreciation for my father's endeavors.

Nowadays I just walk out to the garage, set some type in a composing stick from the late 1800s, lock the form up in a chase & put some ink on the 1923-vintage 10x15 C&P NS that's holding the corner of the garage down. Then I stand there for however long it takes to print however many of whatever I'm working on and, from time to time, put piles of printed stock on the drying flats that I built under a bench that holds a 1911 C&P Pilot sidelever press. When that color's done, I clean the press & go back in the house.
The next day I print the next color and so it goes until I have the entire stack of whatever printed up and ready to use, mail, fold, hand out, stare at or toss away.
It's a time consuming process and by today's standards, I'd be just as well off buying a big box of photo print paper and running it all through the photo printer that Cindy has tied to her Sony Vaio. It would probably take a third as much time, even if I did have to take the entire pile of printed material out to the garage to cut down to size on the 23 inch C&P paper cutter that's holding the rest of the garage floor down.
But it wouldn't be the same.
At which point we can get back to my friend and his QSL cards, among other distractions.

A while back I came across a QSL card design that I really like. The QSL info is on the left side of the card, separated by a border design of some sort or the other. To the right of that is the call sign in another color and then the geographic & operator information goes above and below the callsign.
It works out to three press runs. First for the black ink, which is the QSL info & all that. Then the callsign, centered between the operator info. And then the color decoration separating the two blocks of black ink text.
For my own cards I use blue anchors as the separator. The call sign goes in gold or metal-flake red or orange or whatever I feel like mixing up. It's a nice open design and I am lucky to have enough of the entire Cooper Old Style face (1920s-vintage Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry in Missouri) to print all the card in it.
For my friend's card I put the call sign in red and a blue design out of an old type case for the separator. The cards came out looking really sweet. Only thing I did different with my friend's cards was omitting the "A W8IJN QSL" that I have in the lower right corner of my cards. And I didn't put the press name as a separator between the address area and a hand written note on the back, like in the days of old fashioned post cards.
You do remember post cards, don't you?

So out of this experience I found myself recently looking at eHam.net's product & service reviews for QSL printers. And there's a ton of 'em still out there in this day of desk top publishing (most of which needs a serious slap on the wrists from the keepers of the typographic graces). There's sixty-four of 'em, in fact. Most are companies in North America but there are also QSL printers doing international business from Italy, South America and, most amazingly to me, Russia and Eastern Europe.
Yeah, the places where you had to get a license to have a typewriter are now home to free-market QSL card printers who do extremely nice work, despite what the reviews might say.
Rusprint is still in business.
Ebbert ain't listed 'cause I think he went out of the QSL business before the web found out about reviews of QSL printers. Too bad, too, 'cause Tom Ebbert has almost as much type & cast iron as I do.
Neither of us has enough of the really stupid gene to consider going into the business of QSL card printing with the equipment and technology that we have.
Letterpress printing can be very beautiful. It's the only form of printing left that lets you actually touch the type that's going to carry the ink and, unless you're running a Heidelberg "windmill," it's the only way left to print that kind of work by hand. As in hand-set type and hand-fed press. And that requires patience, nimble fingers and a lot of standing in front of rumbling machinery.
For all that, Tom & I are very happy to let Wayne (QSLs by W4MPY) wear himself out. Back in the day we would all gather at the Dayton Hamvention to complain about how much work it was having to work as a pressman but none of us ever had the good sense to stop before we got really tired of it.
Which is a nice way of saying that, while I do enjoy printing cards for friends and for myself, it's too much like real work for me to be doing it for free – or for money.
Modern technology has made everything about printing that my father knew – or that I ever knew or learned as a graphic arts person – just another mouse button click and a thumb drive stuck in a slot. The hard core printing, the heavy metal printing, takes a lot of time and it's not exactly outside of the world of the physical.
Put a 40x60 pica form in a 10x15 chase and load that into a press if you want to know how physical it can be.
Still, it's fun and once we get past the feasting season I'll have a chance to hand all 1013 QSL cards to my friend. I hope he doesn't use 'em up real quick. But then he could scan one into his computer, take the file to a photo printer and have 'em crank out as many as he needs. My only involvement then will be in chomping all that paper down to the size of a post card.

Hope he realizes that he can print eight at a time on a 11x17 sheet.

Tasteful Towers, Part . . .

2007-11-20T06:13:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again, the time of year when people want to know my underwear sizes or how many socks I need. It's also the time of year for the annual tree murder and the hanging of stuff on the murdered tree. And thus, without further ado I inject the viral waste of time that is my "wish list" into the holiday stream.
Last year I let everyone have my five wishes outright. This year ain't no different. Five wishes, at least three of 'em sensible and most of 'em, given changes in the physics of the universe, at least possible.
Here's the five:

1. A time machine.
2. An end to superstition & religionism throughout the universe.
3. Cushcraft A270-6s 2-band VHF beam $90.
4. Comet CF-4160J diplexer $60.
5. Homes for the outside cats (Goldie, Monk, Foot, Baxter, Albert, & Skinny)

Now most will notice, perhaps, a similarity of theme. Some may notice that I did not ask for any tower-related items. Well, there's reasons.
First off, I have enough pieces of tower in my stash now to put up a pretty reasonable and only slightly rusty tower. I ain't gonna do that 'cause I'm saving those pieces of tower for some special occasion. Like winnin' the lotto and moving to something like ten acres of hilltop land somewhere out of the snow & freezing rain scene.
Or wanting to put another tower behind or next to the garage so I can put the J-pole up by itself. And load that tower for 40m.
See, I have recently been afforded the opportunity to afford two sections of Amerite 25 or two sections of Rohn 25. Since either of these tower pieces fit each other (as in Amerite 25 is a version of Rohn 25), it comes down to a matter of how to come by the stuff and at what level of difficulty.
If I pick the Rohn, I have to figure out how to get a truck or van over to the local store to pick the stuff up off their dock. If I pick the Amerite, then I have to make sure that we're talking about the same stuff before I drive a truck over to the other local store and pick it up off their dock.
And the price difference ain't that great, which means that, if the first store has it in stock, I'll have the rest of my time between T-day and X-day to put the act together and spend my cash.
And yes, Cid already knows about this.
The young'n ratted me out.
At which point I will end up with the potential for some forty feet of tower in the air with the top of the mast & antennas being something like forty-six to forty-eight feet in the air.
Easily enough to load as a vertical on 75m.
Especially with the ground system I've spent the summer entertaining the neighbors with. (Involved the use of a edge-trimmer cutting through the back yard in lines radiating out from the concrete base of the previous cheapo tower event).

The end plan is to have the 2m & 6m beams up high enough to do me some good. With the recently repaired rotor that I bought at least two decades ago at the Dayton Hamvention that much will be easy enough. It's only the hauling the stuff around & bolting it together that can be tedious. That and trying to raise the beast from a horizontal position in the back yard to a vertical position over a chunk of the yard.
And I have that kinda figured out.
See, I've put up twenty feet with a J-pole on it with four hands, two backs and another person pulling on a rope. Adding the extra twenty feet will require a few more hands, a bunch more backs and, in addition to the one rope-pullin' line handler, probably a winch on a truck. And careful patience & planning.

Cid ain't too sure about this but since I've already been ratted out by the young'n I figure it won't make much difference now. Cid'd like to move & I appreciate that. But thanks to the Halliburton-in-the-White-House monkey, the sale and purchase of houses is out of the question for us. In fact, we're starting to look like Argentina around here. And not just 'cause so many of my neighbors speak Spanish.
Like I said, the only ameliorating circumstance would be winnin' the lotto and moving to something like ten acres of hilltop land somewhere out of the snow & freezing rain scene. Another form of Argentina.
Adding to the math of this project is the simple fact that I'm ten years away from Dad's actuarial finish. Given that I don't smoke and drink too damn much, I figure there's a chance I might outlast that date. But there's also the possibility that I might survive that date and still be somewhat hemmed in by age.
I don't want to miss out on having fun before I snuff it, especially since I can afford it and because I figure it's time to enjoy the time I have left.
You get that way – or at least I get that way – when the passing of the years becomes too obvious & friends of some duration start disappearing.
So whether Cid thinks highly of this project or not is somewhat beside the point. It's my tower; I have the cash; the base is in the ground and Frank is home sick with pneumonia.
So there.
And there. Too.

Given all that, I now have the chance to spend the rest of "kolpela taim" (Tok Pijin for "winter") figuring out how to put at least one more RF feed and another control feed out from the house to shed so I can run VHF/UHF antennas on the tower, tune the tower & a dipole/inverted V antenna for HF & switch stuff around while still being able to rotate the VHF/UHF antennas toward where I wanna play.
Now that, that will be a real challenge.
I say that 'cause it involves figuring out how to get all those hoses out of the house without cutting any holes in walls or retrenching the space between the house & the shed. I've already got corrugated plastic pipe from the side of the house to the shed, through which I think I should be able to push one more RF line and the additional six or seven wires for the rotor & remote VHF switching controls.
Couple hours with a one-inch-thick concrete/masonry drill otter do the trick. Covering up the damage so that Cid don't notice it when springtime comes around and it's time to remulch the garden spaces and that row of plantings along the side of the house will be something a bit trickier.
And you'll hear about here, you can bet.
I'm gonna have to get more window screen for upstairs. I feel a fit of building coming on and nobody messes with me any more after that last intervention.
Boom.

Tower, Tower . . .

2007-10-27T20:57:00.000-07:00

There are three ways to put up a tower for an antenna system. The first way is simple: don't. Just use the trees and the sides of barns and buildings and be happy that you have some wire you can charge to send signals from your digs to mine.
The second way is to put the base in the ground, post it in with some concrete and then hope you can find someone stupid enough to climb the pieces you have, use a gin pole to drag the pieces you want up and hope nobody gets killed putting the thing together in the process.
The third way of putting a tower up involves fighting with chunks of it on the ground, laid out in nice little rows which will eventually get bolted together. Then you hope that the hinge stands at the base of it will take the stress of walking the huge weight of the entire thing into the air and then hoping, once you get there, that it don't fall into the neighbor's house or into yours. Or kill anyone in the process.
None of the last two make any sense.
That's why I'm putting up a tower.
Now it's not that I have to have a tower, mind you. It's just that someone has, over the past 25 years of livin' at these digs, given me a pile of bits and pieces of towers, a few of which fit each other but most of which, all together, don't fit anything.
I even had to do some creative pipe bending just to get the first section hinged up on the base, a base that I stuck in the ground some ten or twelve years ago, back when I had even fewer pieces of tower that all fit together.
And back then, I got a friend who hangs off the sides of rocky mountains all over the country to come over and put the last two pieces in the air.
That would have been over 40 ft of tower in the air, a reasonably close chunk of metal aloft to allow me to tune the entire piece as one antenna on 75m. Which would have been, as they used to say in the former parlance of my son's youth, awesome.
But the friend came over, got up to the top of the tower, lashed on the gin pole and was all set to hoist away when it occurred to him that he was on a piece of metal with no other horizontal support than the strength of the metal below him.
In other words, he had a change of heart about the project.
He chickened out.
And being as how I won't stand on a coffee table without a safety belt, I understood and absolved him immediately of the need to stay aloft any longer than it took for him to lash on the yard arm by which I sent aloft a dipole antenna that I used for a while at that time.
But now it's different.
This time I have hinges.
As if.

One of the most troublesome parts of putting an antenna tower in the air, other than the logistics of getting enough people to feel safe lifting a couple hundred pounds of metal tubing over their heads, is the simple fact that, after all is said and done, nobody can be truly sure that it won't not work.
Yeah, can't be sure that it won't work.
As in: if you put it all up and have all the cabling dressed and laced and all that, it's still extremely likely that someone is going to have to climb the sonofabitch and either adjust, remove & replace or repair and replace some fairly complicated part of the entire assemblage.
This time, for example, except for the fact that I discovered this before the process of lifting and straining and bolting down was done, someone would have to climb up to the top, unbolt huge piles of stuff and drag the rotator assembly down the tower so we (that's me and whoever else is crazy enough to be part of this) could figure out why the rotator won't rotate.
Seriously.
The rotator, a beautiful pile of metal gearing & a fairly fancy motor, sitting on the ground with cable that I used the last time I worked on it, did not even begin to respond to the application of voltage &c that would make it, well, rotate.
So lucky for me (and whoever else might be crazy enough to be part of this) I found this before we put the tower up. And lucky for whoever else is crazy &c, I can now have the pleasure of taking the entire top (or "crown") of the tower apart so I can figure out why the damn rotator won't rotate shit.
All of which I will have to do in a shed or in the garage, being as how I waited until the middle of October to put this entire project in motion.
And the best part?
I can't find the documentation on the rotator.
Unbuckingfelievable.
I get to troubleshoot this problem in the blind.
Either that or I go out and spend more money than I spent on the rotor in the first place to replace it with a lighter-weight rotor. Yeah. A lighter weight one. As in: one that won't turn the heavy rigging that I would love to put up there, were it not for the fact that it's buried under detritus next to the garage.
Which is another story entirely.
And in the process of all of this, I wrenched up my back somehow so that I get to enjoy another bout of stenosis. You know: the lovely pain that shoots down my hip, around my thigh and down in two very easy to identify paths along the front of my left leg to my damn toes!
Yeah, that stenosis. The radiculopathy thingie with the pain and the leg.
That.
But, looking at this on the bright side, at least it isn't rainin' too bad right now and what I've got cobbled together might just work . . . once I fix the rotor.
As if.

Going Digital, Part I

2007-10-23T06:31:00.001-07:00

There was a time in the not too distant long-back when I actually looked forward to getting on the air & playing radio contests. I'd keep up with what contest was on its way my direction & I'd figure out what I needed to know or do to play the contest right.
I always took on the challenge of what many folks – except for them what's deeply into contests as a way of life – would call "minor league" or "off brand" contests. Like the Dutch PACC contest, which shows up in the second weekend in February. Nice quiet little contest with a simple exchange for DX stations, meaning anybody outside of the EU & across an ocean or something.
Then I'd go for the SAC (Scandinavian Activity Contest), which runs two weekends, one for CW and the other for phone. Another nominally uncluttered contest that works out good for folks wanting to get closer to a "Worked All Norway" award. Especially trippy if you think you speak Norwegian or Danish. These folks will come back to you like a lost family member. In the local dialect.
Back when there was a Soviet Union & gringo hams could count on very simple, quick turn around QSOs with Russian hams there was the so-called "MIR Contest." The fact that the word Russian word мир means both "world" and "peace" made that contest interesting. Hundreds of Russian & Soviet hams on the air with their fast CW turning contacts almost as fast in the contest as they did in non-contest ops. And maybe a year or so later a pile of QSL cards showed up in my bureau envelope.
Ah, thems was the days, thems.
Even after the fall of the Soviet hegemony (or it's transubstantiation into something considered less threatening by the gringo governments) there was enough contest activity to make life interesting out of former Eastern bloc countries.
Like the YO contest. A chance to get "worked all provinces" from the Federaţia Română de Radioamatorism (the Romanian amateur radio club). Another nice, quiet contest with the opportunity to shoot for the various "worked all counties in Romania" awards. Thirty different stations.
Didn't know there were that many counties in Romania, didja?
I found out by leafing through a now much abused copy of a book published by the SSA. I also found a bunch of other awards for ham radio activity that were just too goofy to pass up. I haven't added any of them to the wall in a long time, but that first fleeting encounter with the diplomboken back near the peak of the last sunspot cycle (around 1985) was part of the contest scene too.
But like all good things tied to the baseband technology of amateur radioism, the contest scene was up for changes. Some occurred while I was playing in the surf, other changes came later and the most recent changes have pretty much taken the fun out of what was, once I got used to it, an interesting way to spend a huge chunk of weekend time away from all other concerns than those most basic to human survival.
Like outhouse breaks.

And that's pretty much where I spend contest weekends any more: sitting apart from the hobby and invested in more mundane and more social pursuits. Truth up, amateur radio contest just ain't no fun no more, G.
Yeah, the reasons, at least in my view, are probably pretty much the carping of an old guy trying to figure out which button to push. But a huge pile of the reasons for contesting falling out of favor with me involve the absolute mechanization of the contest process.
Where once it was a hand on a knob and a hand on a key or microphone, nowadays it's software interfaces with the radio that put the operator in the position of a phone-answering Tamil in an overseas, out-sourced technical support & help desk department.
That and CW just ain't fun when it's 100 wpm for the contact exchange and two billion words per minute for the sign-off & cheerio.
And that's the fault of computers too.

See, many years ago – like around the time I got my first ham licence, which would have been thirty-nine years ago – there was an article in one of the ham radio magazines about two guys going looking for this one guy in their neighborhood who seemed to have such a powerful station that he won all the DX contests.
All of 'em.
So these two guys go lookin' and eventually come upon a radio shack hidden in the sierra madre with a bunch of towers, huge antenna systems and a small building obviously containing all the equipment.
By some quirk of fate or fault of the property owner the two guys gain access to the innards of the radio shack only to find a huge pile of radios connected to a CRAY computer, which computer is spitting out QSOs and rotating beams and aiming antennas with a frightening complexity and speed.
The original computerized station.
The story ends with the two intrepid breakers-and-enterers shaking their heads in disbelief. They can't understand how a person – someone who obviously put the station together and set it up to run automatically – could get involved in a hobby so deeply that the human element completely disappeared in the process.
A sort of wonderment at the deist mindset applied to ham radio much as Darwinism got subjugated to philosophical economic modeling in Marxism. You know: like a divine being gets so deep into making stuff that it creates the entire universe, only to get bored with it at the moment of completion, and which deity then spends eternity sitting back in some celestial throne watching the shit go down.
But I digress.
As usual.

My first radio was a kit radio. I built it. The most it got plugged up to was a set of headphones, a key, an antenna and a power source. Everything else was done by use of fingers. The only digital stuff going on with it and me was the connection between my nervous system, my fingers and the radio's knobs and control surfaces.
That's the way radio worked in 1969, the way it worked in 1957 (when Dad got me the Hallicrafters S38E) and up until about 1989 when I bought and built an Elecraft K2. Knobs, switches, plugs and cables and a true physical contact between the operator and the equipment.
All that started to change at least two decades ago when ham radio manufacturers began to use digital processes in their radios. First came the frequency counter that displayed the operating frequency to within a few hundred Hertz. The various electronic paddle keyers that appeared a few years before that were just the beginning. Before long all the serious switching and modification of signals and signal paths fell under the control of various digital circuits, all connected to a few push buttons on the front of the radios.
And then somebody thought "You know, we could have all that switch setting info appear on the back of the radio so the user could build an interface to run the radio even better."
Like the marvelously fancy (and egregiously expensive) ELINT intercept radios that the CIA used, some of which radios actually were offered to the public, although I couldn't then and bare can now understand why.
From there it was the intersection of two technologies that led directly to today's fancy-pants radios. The beginnings of the "personal computer" revolution, by which computer technology became economically accessible and functionally useful to the common schmuck in the shack spelled the end of the old manual, manipulative approach to radio design.

I have spent probably nine thousand dollars on ham radio gear over the past 30-odd years of playing around. Much of that money was scrimped and saved. Some of it was obviously diverted from the family coffer to pay for my own self-indulgent puttering. I am not the least bit reluctant to admit that or to point the finger of silliness at my own fuzzy face.
One of the radios that I've bought in the past four years or so was billed on a couple websites as an "entry grade radio." This means that the radio was considered basic and basically worthwhile to someone just getting into the hobby. It had features that a beginner would find useful. It was easy to operate and it had sufficient power to do a beginner's style job on the air. And there were a few add-ons that made sense.
And it had a hole on the back where many of the radios controls could be tied to a computer with the appropriate and easily available software.
It had two VFOs, passband tuning, RIT, keyboard frequency entry, built-in transmit audio processing and, with the appropriate add-ons, it could be set up with digital processing of the audio signal to remove noise & heterodynes on a received signal.
That's what they call an "entry grade radio" today.
Compared to my "entry grade radio," the modern one is a dream station radio. At least it would have been to me back 39 years ago. And the today one costs about the same as a middle-ground one from that time, dollar for dollar.

All this computerization of the innards of the radios has played right into the computerization of the social fabric. "They" say that almost every home in the USA today has at least one computer in it. One PC per family, with many more families having two or more computers. There are three in my house that get daily use and, if you want me to count the stuff that's sitting in my office, Cid's office & the kids catastrophe masquerading as a bedroom, there are a total of six computers that anyone could use. Altogether – as in: including the computers that are sitting in closets waiting for a nice day – there are eight.
And the radios in my office/shack are all hooked up to my main box of geeks.
Two radios, each of which individually is accessible to and from my computer, that I can sit down and play contest on, were I of the sort who enjoys spending radio time at a keyboard.
That is, after all, the only connection between radio contesting today and the radio itself: the computer.
The computer logs the exchanges.
It logs the frequency, the time & the contacted station's callsign.
It keeps a list of multipliers and new countries or whatever.
It will calculate an approximate final score.
It notes and announces duplicate contacts, deleting them automatically if necessary.
And on CW the computer decodes and encodes the contest exchange message.
The computer does it all.
I just have to sit back and pick a band – to which the radio gets switched by the computer control software – and run off the keyboard and monitor. Frequencies, times, whatever and whoever: it's all done inside the computer.
And when I'm done with the contest I can email my results to the appropriate official to see how well I did or didn't in having the largest score.
All of it.
On the computer.

From here on out, my main problem with contesting no longer concerns the amount of time and bandwidth spent by contesters chasing DX or gathering sufficient points. My main problem is that computerized radios have led to computerized contacts which has led to computerized contesting, which has taken the fun out of it all together.
If you spend any time listening to a CW contest these days you'll hear something very evident: speed. The CW speed some contesters run is ridiculous. Hearing an exchange at 30 or 40 wpm is not unusual. Hearing the sign-off at 80 or 100 wpm is very usual.
"Burp-burp" followed by "brat-brat" and then on to the next contact.
I hear this stuff and think that I'm out of the game. I don't want to have to mouse or keyboard my way through a spectrum display to look for contacts. I want to tune the radio to a signal, catch the operator's attention, get the exchange right & move on to the next spot on the dial I can find someone running the contest on.
Although this sounds old-fashioned, it's the way I like to play radio.
Talking to people.
I don't consider keyboard-driven CW as CW. I could just as easily work contacts on PSK or RTTY as I could with a microphone in my mitt. I would rather push a switch and twist a knob to rotate the antenna than have the computer hear a call-sign, figure the location & turn the antenna automatically to that point in space where a straight-line path exists in the ionosphere between the far station and mine.
At the same time it's easy for me to see in the computerization of ham radio the continuing lurch in the direction of religion versus hobby.
An overarching concern with the latest doodad & how it will supposedly give me more QSOs per minute in a contest and assure my acquiring the DXCC certificate in the long run smacks too much of a fundamentalism that has nothing to do with returning to old values or age-old precepts. Such meticulous attention to unnecessary details seems obsessional, and hobbies being hobbies they're already obsessional enough.
Remember my nine thousand dollar estimate?
Can you imagine what that sum would be if I were truly obsessed with this stuff?
I can.
It ain't a pretty thought.
I'd have a room full of radios that stopped being "entry level" six model numbers ago. I'd have a couple towers in the middle of a moderate sized acreage. I'd have radios, plural, hosed up to computers, plural, to spend even more time inside, immobile before a couple screens than out in the yard enjoying the fact that the sun still shines, the grass still grows and the cats keep coming to my door.
I'd be a obsessive moron with no physical presence of friends or family and, despite all the certificates such a station would gather for me, I'd still be alone in a room with a bunch of electronics equipment.
And I still wouldn't be able to copy CW faster than about 20 wpm on a good day, no matter how fast my computer could copy it for me.
I wouldn't be having fun. At least not like I used to.

So rather than not have fun by running my entire station via a couple interconnected, web-connected & whatever-else-connected computers there'd be, I'm not having fun 'cause the computers – and those who seem driven to use them in contests – have taken the fun out of contesting for me.
My only recourse is simple: I turn off the radios, get up out of my chair, go downstairs, pet the cats inside and out and then sit in the sunshine reading a book. After all, a good day above ground is a good thing & sunshine, even if it falls from the sky in rain drops is better than a dark room full of glowing junk any day.

I just would rather have a couple simple-minded, old-fashioned, personal-touch contests now and then. More than once a year at SKN at least.

KD8HCV Is On the Air!

2007-10-19T07:21:00.001-07:00

Monday morning we all gathered at the tower computer & insulted the database on QRZ.com. Mikey was a no show. Tuesday, expecting results, we gathered again and still no word of Mikey's license. Wednesday she come up & still no news. Not that it would have made any difference, being as how he was out on a remote job. Then Thursday comes up & still nothing.
We all sat through the day pretty well settled on the possibility that Mike wouldn't get his license – at least not find out that he had one electronically – until after the weekend. Thus, on Thursday night we all figured we'd wait until tomorrow with our fingers crossed but our minds pretty well made up that it was a 50/50 shot either way.

Now on Thursday nights we have this little domestic routine: Cid hired a retired woman to come in on Fridays while we're all out at work &c to clean up the house. Vacuum the carpets, wipe down the bulkheads, check the hatch combing, scare the cats. Stuff like that. Thus, after dinner, if Cid hangs around – 'cause most weeks she goes to the gym – she gives me a hand. But this time it's just me & I am thus turned to on picking up the kitchen. Wash out the sinks, clear the counter tops, put stuff away, sweep the floor.
So the phone rings.
I have caller ID and if it ain't a number I recognize or if no name or caller ID is shown I let the machine answer.
But this time it's Mikey.
I pick up the phone. "Hello?"
A pause.
"Nils?"
"Yeah?"
"It's me, Mike."
"Yep."
"You finish dinner?"
"Yep."
"You got time for a first QSO?"
"You get it?" (referring to the license)
"Yep."
"Sweet." I hand the phone to the young'n. He'll hang it up when I get upstairs.
Upstairs I pick up the phone & we transfer the communications protocols.
"Let's do this," I suggest, "Let's meet on 144.2 USB."
"How about 75m?"
"Ah . . . Ok. Three point eight one five is open."
"Ok."
I fiddle with the antenna settings, smack the tune button & up we come on 3.815. Mike hears my carrier.
"Man, that sounds weak."
"Ok, you call me."
I hear a voice under the static crashes. "You're weak, dude."
Over the phone Mike says "What's your idea?"
"Meet me on 144.2 USB."
"Ok." Mike fiddles with his radio & zippo-bang, there he is. Almost on frequency.
We discuss the frequency problem. I tune him in with the rit. We talk about that. His radio vs. my radio kinds of things, stuff I've already noticed between my '706 and the '817.
All that settled, we hang up the telephones & get to talkin' on the air. While we talk I fill out a QSL card. Two, actually: one regular size, the other a business card size. Printed the smaller ones so I could use 'em at the Hamvention &c.
We talked for maybe 45 minutes, both of us using vertical antennas. When I switched to the 2m beam (horizontally set) we could still talk but it was not anywhere as clear. We stuck to vertical polarization & went on.
Being as I had chores to do, I offered that we could end up one of the local repeaters & I'd get another of the work gang to show up so Mike could talk with him. That being decided we QSY'd to the 145.11 repeater. I was able to talk with my other co-worker but Mike couldn't hear either of us. Then another guy from the gang showed up and we talked for a while.
Mike called me on the telephone & told me he was trying to figure out what was up. I said that I was gonna go do my chores. He was cool with that so I left Frank and Oscar to listen up for him.

The next morning I took the QSL cards & a Nifty! Ham band chart to work and handed Mikey the gifts. We talked for a while about what was up & whether or not he'd talked with Frank and Oscar.
Turns out Mike had turned on the receiver tone squelch control and, since the neither the repeater nor Frank or Oscar were running tones, Mikes radio ignored the signals. Once Mike turned that off he was able to hear the other guys & thus carried on for a while before signing off.

Mike now has the entire weekend to waste on things like putting up more antennas or fixing up what he's got. He can also drop down on MedCars or any number of other nets & discussion groups to check out how things work.
And he's discovered that we didn't sound good on 75m because he had simply forgotten to push "The Button." The button on the LDG auto antenna tuner that he had sitting right next to the radio.
So that's another thing Mikey learned.
Just think: when Mike does push "The Button" he's going to discover hanging around on 40m or on 20m or even 75m can be a great way to spend the entire day or night just talking to people . . . one after another until he runs out of log pages.

But at least he's on the air, right? So listen for him. He's KD8HCV

Fantasies of Intervention

2007-10-15T09:54:00.000-07:00

Back when Mike ordered up his station he also ordered up a couple copies of the 2008 ARRL Handbook, one of which he put in my paws. Now back in the day I would spend hours looking through the pages, finding stuff that I thought about building or stuff that I knew better than to get involved in. Ain't no different today, McGee. I still look at the stuff.
Simple fact is, this gift is gonna be the cause of a huge pile of hours in intervention. Right on the front cover is a picture of an antique knob on a front panel for what is obviously a DCR. Now I've built a handful of DCRs. I have spare boards & all sorts of other crap from that kind of stuff: find a design, work up a board, order three sets, get the boards, part 'em up & try it out. Then I move on to the next distraction.
After a couple years of that my family tries to keep me from getting ideas.
And here Mikey gives me a book full of more of 'em.
But while I'm sittin' here reading the book, I stumble across the section on radio wave propagation. Nowadays that pile of info has grown exponentially from what we thought we knew about radio wave propagation, back in the day when I could actually build stuff without intervention.
Now we know more about the sun & its part in what's called "space weather" than we did five years ago, let alone 50 years ago when I was ten years old.
Now we know about the influence of aurora events. We understand ducting within the ionosphere layers. We have a better grip on all the physical weather events and how they effect the way radio ways move around from antenna to antenna. There's so much stuff now that it's on the Extree class license exams all by itself.
Some of it I even understand.
And yet, because of all the new stuff we know – and all the new stuff we can get tested on just to get or keep our license – there's enough still unknown to make messing with radio wave way beyond interesting, especially on VHF, UHF and in the lower end of the RF spectrum. There's not just tropo ducting & stuff. There's this whole "grey line" propagation theory, something we almost knew about ten or fifteen years ago but about which we know tons more now.
This would all be well and good if it weren't for the fact that I've played with HF propagation long enough to feel good about it. The stuff I really want to try is VHF and LF propagation. And that's easy enough, providing I take advantage of things like towers & the gain of inexpensive antenna systems. I don't feel the need for an amp on VHF or UHF, mainly because they cost way the hell to much & I'd have to be able to control 'em from inside the house.
As in "long feed lines introduce loss." And the feed line distance from the radios to a tower is easily over 100 ft, even if I am using Ethernet coax & all that.
Getting the antenna systems high enough is a big enough problem as it is.
I can't put 'em in the attic 'cause, well, the attic makes 'em hard to tune and they aren't as directional, being as how they're surrounded by all those roofing nails and furnace duct work &c. So I still need to send the signal through that 100 ft of hose to the 40 ft tower – as yet to be erected – where the antennas (will) abide. That and the control cable for the rotors.
And yes, if I had a huge estate like Mikey's got, I would put out a little railroad track for the satellite antennas too.
But I ain't in Mikey's yard and that's just a little bit too weird, even with the forgiving and kind neighbors I am lucky to have. The ones live behind my house, not the trailer trash weasels seem to rent from the slum landlord who lives down the street in a very nice house. So I ain't in to satellite ops.
Not yet.

So maybe this all works out for the best, Mike givin' me this book and all that. I get to learn by reading about stuff that I'm not sure about, even if I did memorize the answers. I get to try out stuff on the HF system that I've got & maybe learn some more. At least get more comfortable with failure.
But on VHF and above, well, there's so much to learn.
And so much to try out.
The hard part is finding people who are absolutely insane enough to want to try things out on the air. Not the hide-bound egomaniacs that I hear more often than I need on 2m SSB. Some of them guys . . .
The best thing about VHF & UHF antenna building & the propagation theory that goes along with it is the simple fact that, while size doesn't matter, boom length does. And at the frequencies in question, the element size is easy enough to hit using simple hand tools and a pair of good bolt cutters. Simple fact is, I think it'd be fun to have a bunch of UHF and VHF antenna thingies hanging around so I could work out with Mike how far either of us can talk on the radios we got.
Could be worse.
We could both get into grey line props. And my hair bein' a bit greyer than Mike's is, well, I figure I can do that easy enough. Just don't tell him about it. He'd go out and find all the source material on microwave and challenge me to a dual of Gunnplexers.
Like I need to have a radar dish in my back yard.
Or do I?
Hmmm. . . .

Another Good Man Discovers "The Project"

2007-10-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

Mikey called a few minutes after my Q with my cousin, Keith, to tell me that he had passed the Tech and General license exams this morning. Evidently he scored pretty good. One of the VEs gave him a thumbs up & three fingers, possibly to indicate that Mikey had only gotten three questions wrong.
Which ain't bad for a university functionary with way more intelligence than most folks with PhDs, even if a couple of 'em do have ham licenses too.
Which is another story to tangential to get into right now.
The VEs also told Mike that their experience with returns on the exam results has been within a couple days to a week of finding out what call sign he got.
So, after having invested heavily in a hobby that he'd only been peripherally connected with & with no experience listening to the madhouse on 75m, Mikey is now on his way to being able to join in the myriad crack-brain conversations that he has only recently been able to hear.
Either he figured, having spent the money on the gear, that he should at least get the license or, as I suspect, he needed another project.

Little does he know that once you get into ham radio, the project subcontracts itself into a collection of cat litter buckets full of parts for things only half done before interest in something else came along.
Like crack brain conversations on 75m.
And since Mikey already has cats and dogs to keep him company while listening to those crack brain conversations, he probably has many empty cat litter buckets that he hasn't taken down to recycling yet.

Thus we can say that (a) Mikey should have a General license & call sign in his mailbox in a couple days and (b) he already has a complete station, including many antenna projects (which are another form of subcontracted main project) and (c) he's got parts and probably enough cat litter boxes to keep him busy for a while and (d) he's already got friends on the air.
See, back in whenever, Mike made a youtube.com video about some stuff he was hearing on the local (100miles distant) repeater one night. Many folks saw the video, sent him emails and coached him along about the license stuff. Some of those folks were members of the club running the repeater in question and they started mentioning Mike in their conversations on the repeater. So then it ends up with Mike having all these people who are anxious to talk with him, once he gets his ticket, which should be soon.
So Mike has the station, the brains, the ability to be easily distracted and he's got people want to talk with him, some of whom he's been listening to for, well, as long ago as his choice of radio arrived on his porch.

Me, I gotta go out and figure out how to raise the tower in the air (which may involve getting Mikey to test the winch on his truck), locate all the part for the 6m beam and cut some card stock for QSL cards when Mikey gets the paperwork. See, I knew there was another project in there: printing the cards.

My father printed my first QSL cards on his 12x18 Chandler & Price platen press with type set by hand. Now I get to print Mikey's on my 10x15 C&P with type from the 19th Century. Yeah. That old.

Age: the final project. These are the ramblings of . . .

We'll All Gather by the Tower . . .

2007-10-09T06:54:00.000-07:00

Continuing on my rant about no atheists getting ham licenses or no ham licensees being atheists, I did a little snootling around and was pleased to come across some folks who, in addition to being nonbelievers or whatever, were also amateur radio loonies. And given as how a few of 'em actually stuck their call signs in with their attestations of disbelief, I figured I'd get some email going.
But most of 'em, the ones I found on QRZ.com, didn't have email addresses listed in the data pages that came up in searches under callsigns. Some had websites. Most didn't. At least the callsigns I looked up.
So be it.
A couple years ago, when I first brought this subject up with the folks at the Freedom from Religion Foundation there was a bit of misunderstanding about what I meant with amateur radio. I let that go 'cause I'm geared like that, but I did start looking on my own for other hams that were willing to admit in a more or less public way that they saw nothing & no one to believe in.
One of those leads involved the Atheistic Forum, a discussion group hanging more or less off the side of the Danish Ateist.dk site, which is a good site with really spiffy graphics and all that, if you can read Danish.
I can (he said with a smile).
On the forum, in response to my question about amateur radio ops who might be atheists, someone wrote "Do they still have ham radio?" And yes, the question was in English. I got a couple responses, none with any commitment & none from radio amateurs.
So I moved on.
Then the letter (linked above) to the editor of the FFRF monthly Freethought Today showed up. I emailed the fellow who'd written he letter & he responded that he had heard from no one else.
At that point I Googled the terms "amateur radio atheists" and got a link to a blog & a couple other hits. I chased 'em down, found other callsigns & names attesting to amateur radio & atheism and then re-Googled under similar search terms.
I came up with six callsigns.
But all that got me to thinking about what kind of person admits in a public forum – albeit within the confines of the InterWeb – that they are not prone to believe in imaginary friends with hideously extreme powers who, no matter what they do, seem to be either ineffectual, sadistic, plainly psychotic or all of the above? Would such a person mind me sending them an email asking if they were, indeed, non-believers? And what good would it do if I did any of the above?
And not just because they're rhetorical questions did I just type 'em out.
I don't think it takes much to tell the world you don't believe. I say that 'cause I work in an environment and live in a family environment that is, at the very least, tolerant of differences in opinion. Sure, there are folks who'd love to see me turn to Jesus and I'm sure some of 'em – as in: I know of one young person for sure – is that way in an almost neurotic mode of thought.
"I don't understand why no one in this family sees the grace of Jesus."
And I don't see how anybody can.
So we're even.
But that's me. I have no idea what it would mean for anybody else to say they don't believe. I think I've "come out" to just about everybody I know, excluding the landlord of the dump next door & maybe the lady across the street owns the laundry. Them what knows me well knows me well enough to know that I don't believe & that I don't see any reason or compulsion to believe. They know that I know that when the last breath is drawn and the brain dies of severe hypoxia, I won't be here any more to worry about.

But back to the radio thingie.

One of my relatives, a man who has spent his life in the Lord's service, used to get on the air all the time. Another of my relatives became a ham because of the first relative's assistance and interest. The relative who serves the Lord is now retired. He long ago stopped playing radio because he didn't like the way the band sounded. Things had changed in his life over the years that he's been licensed, not the least of which was the nasty attitudes of many folks on 75m.
That nastiness hasn't gone unnoticed.
It's one of the reasons that I don't play radio as much as I used to. To be up front about it, when people tell you to come back when you have a signal and when people tell you that you are inferior to them because you haven't sacrificed your family for your hobby, it gets a little too much like "No, you!" You've seen it:
"Screw you!"
"No, you!"
"No, screw you!"
"Oh no! You! Screw you!"
"No, screw you!"
"No, you!"
On and on like that until the ionosphere absorbs it all & radios around the world go silent from disbelief.
With that situation pretty much the norm, it should be obvious that anyone not believing as the rest of the superstitionist world does that it would make no sense to show up on a frequency and call a meeting of the Invisible Pink Unicorn Net or the Flying Spaghetti Monster without being tuned up upon.
And it goes without saying that it is probably a good thing that my relative in the Lord's service will likely not hear anyone calling such a net, seeing as how the normal people drove him away from listening years ago.

And it's not that I want to get a bunch of disbelieving folks on the air to tell the world how great it is not having an imaginary friend. I'd rather have a bunch of folks show up who, aside from not believing, were the kinds of folks whom you'd enjoy being with. You know, a bunch of regulars like used to hang out on the air but who also don't believe and are not reticent or reluctant to speak about it, should the topic come up. And such a topic would come up more from someone dropping by – although that ain't the only reason – with the rest of the group not being reluctant to talk about it. Should the subject come up.
See, that's the most important part: freedom of speech.
If you’re free to speak about your belief in Jesus or Rama or Allah or whoever, then it follows that I and my friends who do not believe in any or all of those divinities should be free to discuss it to.
And if you're free to have such discussions of Rama or Allah on the air, I should be free to say I don't believe and you and I both let each other off with that.
Sad fact is, to admit that you don't believe, that you are an atheist, well, for some reason that's seen as an affront to civility. Most folks, upon hearing me say that I am not a believer go to great extremes to make sure that they think I'm going to hell and they'd hate to see that happen, not that they'll ever know, being as how they'll be in heaven and I'll be crispy.
I've had very few folks – and most of the ones who aren't in that few are people I work with, so they've gained a sense of tolerance from my continued avoidance of lightning bolts – say "Oh, hmm . . . Well, isn't that something . . . "
And being as how that freedom of speech is not tolerated by the believing who come to know that I don't believe on an individual basis, I can only imagine what would happen should a half-dozen or more folks showed up on a frequency to not pray or read from a scripture or otherwise attest to their belief in the divine.
Simple put: if I ain't allowed to say I'm an atheist you can damn sure betcha that a gang of folks won't be allowed to even discuss the topice among themselves. On the air or not.
Not that such is gonna dissuade me from at least contacting the few hams of disbelief whom I have found on the InteWeb and suggesting that we get on the air.

Which brings up an interesting side note.

I know from communication with Ron, whose letter started this ramble, that he knows of one ham who, despite being a nonbeliever, does not wish to talk about it on the air. I'm sure that there are many more who feel the same way. I know of one other. Which goes to the question of just what would a bunch of disbeliever/skeptic/agnostic/whatever hams talk about, if they were of like mind and got on the air?
Good question, too, even if it's might be rhetorical.
The best answer, of course, is whatever comes up.
A gang of folks who don't believe getting on the air should be no different from any other gang of folks getting on the air. Some of the people still active in the OVTN remnants discuss their political views all the time. All you gotta do is bring up the state-wide No Smoking in Public Buildings law and Gorniak will go nuts for at least thirty minutes. Someone bringing up the coevolution of Perseus/Mithras theology and the Jesus/Mithras theology might get someone else (like me, more 'n likely) going for a few minutes too.
The fact is, it'd be no different whether the participants of the group were believers or not. It'd just be that we all got on the air and had a similar a priori point of view that others listening in might get fired up about, but about which any one of us might care even less than a fig.
And I personally love figs. İzmir figs, dried in the sun so their sugary sweetness crystallizes on the outside, making them doubly sweet and doubly crunchy. Just the stuff to keep your dentist employed.
But I digress.
Again.
So, having distracted myself enough with this subject, let me just close by saying that some day it will happen that I will hear some nonbelievers on the air and I will praise the one true Frank for having found them on the air. I will join them in the fellowship of disbelief because I am free to do so and quite gladly too. But I expect that any such group will not last long without being flamed by tuners up and tuners down. I expect that such a group will be vilified and ratted out.
But I'll love watchin' the show. Or hearing it, as the case may be.
And not wanting to leave the subject untouched, I'm gonna email the folks I've found – as best I can, given as how some of 'em don't have email addresses on the QRZ.com page – and ask 'em for advice on where to show & and when. We may be just a disorganized band of heathen disbelievers, skeptics and such, but we at least can get on the air.

Fellowship on 3.775 MHz, anyone?

Too Much Is Always Better Than Not Enough, Yo!

2007-10-02T10:33:00.001-07:00

So Mikey went out and spent some money on radio stuff. When he showed me the itemized list of stuff he was plannin' on putting in his radio shack, I looked at all the stuff and told him that he had a lot of work ahead of him. He said that his having already spent the money was a sort of incentive licensing. I agreed.
However, when Mikey showed his pile of loot on paper to Frank, Frank said that he wished he had that kind of money to pay some bills.
At which point I pointed out that Frank's point was ill-made. What has happened is much simpler. Mikey is in a position that few of us old geezers got into ham radio when we was kids ever had in our wildest nightmares.

See, Mikey is in a position to just look in the books, figure out what he wants, find out if it will all fit together & into his radio shack and then, having arrived at a list of stuff, order it blindly like a madman.
Me & Frank, we had to save our money up on newspaper routes and a summer of mowing lawns and selling crack and heroin. Life for us weren't like it is for Mikey. We had to start out with a shortwave receiver, not a communications receiver like you find in all the new ham radio rigs today. And for a transmitter we were lucky to get two tubes & a crystal socket. No way we had a radio with two VFOs and multiple IF filters, a hundred memory channels & digital audio filtering.
We were poor and we were morons.
And we liked it!
Not like that today, see? Like Mikey picked out a transceiver that anybody in their right mind who had the slightest inclination to ham radio would drool and slobber over like an old man at the school yard gate. Especially Frank.
And an antenna tuner! One that comes assembled with cables & everything ready to hook up so the radio's happy with the antenna and the antenna radiates like it otter. Not like me & Frank had it back in the days of yore and cheap whiskey!
And enough cable & antenna wire & fittings and doodads to fill a garage full of stuff, every stitch of which is going into the station that Mikey's been dreamin' about since he got the idea that he should buy all this stuff and talk to people.

See, that's where the real deal comes in: the talkin' to people part. That's where, once he gets all the stuff assembled & takes the exams and passes 'em and ends up on the air, Mikey will discover things like MidCars.
"This is MidCars, seven-two-five-eight, any mobiles and mobiles only please call KL3GI."
And the Ohio Single Sideband Net! Why, he might even get a chance to talk to the guy used to have a rotating call sign. You remember: WW8MM, the other Mikey. The One True Mikey. Can you imagine that? The two Mikeys on the air together, talking to each other like civilized beasts?
Ooh, I get so . . . what's the word? . . .

Ah, never mind.

Yeah, it's gonna be something when the 44 pounds of stuff shows up at Mikey's door and he's gotta figure out how to put it all together & turn it on for the first time & all that. That's the moment when you truly know that you've arrived at the point of real ham radio: when the bill comes and it still works.
The warm glow of the display & the little rocker switch on the power supply, the antenna switches & all that. Hmm, hmm, hmmm . . . Hmm! And then the stuff you can hear. All the stuff you can hear. And better 'n the RadioShack scanner that's been sittin' there all those years.
Not that you or I would ever get rid of it.
Mikey has to start somewhere if he's gonna go for the most radios in one room award. When the boxes of loot arrive, that'll be his start.

Not many people recognize how this works, this ham radio thing. But it's something that anyone can learn, if they are organized, studious and dedicated to having something else to do besides shovel snow or feed the wild birds. You start out, of course, with the desire. The desire you might get from reading about ham radio or seeing a display of ham radio or listening to your demented ham radio friends talk about it.
From there you go to the licensing tests and the equipment purchases.
Then you get on the air and discover that you might need another piece of equipment to go with all the other stuff you spent money on already. At that point you have reached a very important point, the zero crossing kind of point where what you put into the hobby personally becomes what you put into it financially & metaphorically. In the end you will discover that what you have ain't enough.
You will have found the prime rule, a rule that is as ancient as it is mystical and imprecise. It's the rule of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs and the entire subspecies of humans known as SubGeniuses.
And the rule?

"Too much is always better than not enough."

So begins the adventure. Soon enough Mikey will want another forty feet of tower. He'll want a fancy-pants beam antenna and a rotator. He'll want to get into building his own VHF/UHF arrays to work satellites. He'll want to do moon-bounce, bouncing his signal from where he lives in the middle of the piney woods off the moon and back to me, sitting an hour's drive away in the middle of the wetlands & low-rent housing. Then he'll want digital stuff. And analog stuff. And a one tube radio built in the 1920s by some guy who gave it to his son to blow up but the kid never did and it ended up in the estate auction, from whence it went to a flea market in the county fairgrounds at which point it entered my life for $30.
Yeah. Mikey's in for a real trip now.
But as addictions and delusions go, ham radio is still pretty much the most geek-oriented way for a person with a frontal lobe to spend his or her time. You just sit in the room with a bunch of radios and listen for people who sound like they might be interesting. Bible study groups. Survivalist groups. Traffic handlin' & emergency communications back-up groups. Low power groups. High power groups. Antenna twistin', head-spinnin, morons with more money than brains they got groups. At which point all Mikey has to do is decide. He'll have to come to a decision.
Even if he is cooler online, he'll have to ask himself the primordial question: "Am I nuts or what?"

We can only hope.

An Invitation to . . .

2007-09-19T12:57:00.000-07:00

Friend of mine dropped by the other day to tell me he's thinkin' of gettin' a ham license. Being as he already has a background in electronics & a degree to go with it, he figured he might as well try. So he skipped on down to one of the online ham radio testing sites and took the test. Got a 50%.
What the rules said about what and when and where, that's what blew him out of the water. So he figured he had the electronics part solid. A couple days later he came by and said he'd passed the Tech exam with a 84% cold start. Next thing I know he's sittin' on a park bench reading a print out of the General test questions. Going through 'em he says he found where he messed up.
I told him he may as well take 'em all, tech through extree. He was amazed he could do that. He had, he said, looked up the exam times & had all that info.
I suspect that one of these days he's gonna come in to tell us he's ordered a radio from one of the biggies. He's got enough real estate to put up a good 75m antenna and he's already got 30 ft of tower in the air. Recently remodeled the kitchen. Needs another project.
Wait 'til he finds out about grounding systems.
In the meantime he sent me a couple YouTube shows to watch, the first of which is him trying to figure out one of the local repeaters' nights of weird activity.
Now all of this means very little unless you're one of those punkin' head kids that likes to get on the air and talk with people he sees every day but would rather use up electricity talking to them same folks over the air. At night. When everybody else is home trying to get drunk enough to go to sleep.
Or you could be one of those nocturnal creatures that stays up all night – like most teenagers – with nothing really keeping you awake but the sheer stupidity of staying up so late that you can't crawl out of bed until like three in the afternoon. Those kinds of folks hang out on the air a lot.
I know.
I was one once and every now and then I slide back into it 'cause, well, I get sidetracked easy and the next thing I know, it's daytime.
Which means I have to mow the lawn or something & when that's done there's always something else, which leads me to take a nap in the late afternoon. That leads me in turn to stay awake a bit longer than necessary, even medicated. And that leads me into staying awake late into the night and on into the next day, sometimes even listening to people talk on the radio.
Or me talkin' with 'em on the radio.
Which brings us to the second video, that being of what appears to be a country & western song about becoming a ham, which video I also was pointed to by my friend, who happens to like country & western music some.
His comment attached to the link to the video was "How can I turn down an invitation like that?" And it ain't just a rhetorical question, mind you. It is an interesting way to see the world . . .
It all comes down to a matter of perspective, something that may be missing from the first of two videos attached to this entry. Notice first that these people are over sixty feet in the air. Notice that none of them appear to be wearing any safety belts or other restraints. Notice that one of the people is pouring a glass of champagne. And last but not least, notice that a whole pile of pictures seem to be taken from vantage points considerably out on a limb from the tower itself.

Perspective.

Mr. Strap-On

2007-08-21T17:09:00.001-07:00

I've had this FT817ND for something like eight months now. I've gotten a couple non-factory doodads that are pretty much upscale for it, like the OBP speech compressor that goes inside the Yaesu mic what comes with the radio & the 500 Hz CW filter (both linked before). Beyond that I've either cobbled together or modified the hell out of a bunch of stuff that makes me feel that I have a "grab and go" HF & VHF/UHF radio set up ready for any eventuality.
I'm thinking of eventualities like rotten conditions at the beach vacation or marginal conditions in the back yard while grilling steaks.
That kind of stuff.
In the course of this I know that I've put at least enough money to buy another FT817ND outright & maybe outfit it with the doodads mentioned.
At least that much.
All of this is recorded and witnessed to here, but it still amounts to a lot more than most folks would want to spend money on – not to mention build – if they were as obsessive as I am. Like the three big-ticket Maxpedition bags that I've gotten or the accessory bags for those bags that now clutter the floor. Sure did need 'em when I saw 'em on the web & yes, they do all the stuff that I thought they were going to do, even the ones that are accessories to the two main bags. (And we won't go into the recent purchase – it was on closeout! – of what is, simply put, a backpack.)
Hell, I can barely stand up straight unmedicated.
What the hell am I gonna do with a backpack? Carry my lunch in it? Go on a hike through the mall? Ask my son if he needs a bag for school? It is about to start in a couple weeks, school is. Maybe he'll need a bag to carry all the stuff that he can't fit into the authentic German military surplus bag that he's been using for the past three years already.
So there's that.

But in the main, most of this stuff makes sense. The only thing that don't make sense about any of this – and we're talking bag issues here – is the simple fact that the main bag in the sequence now is either a fanny pack (as if) or a hand-held.
In other words, the Proteus Versipack can be configured as either a belt-around-the middle fanny pack or it can be carried in one hand, like a camcorder.
And the entire damn FT817 station fits in there: radio, auto ATU, speaker/mic system, antenna cables & reels of antenna wire, keyer paddles, headphones, two batteries (if I try real hard), flashlights, pens, note book &, by way of straps, the PAC-12 portable antenna system.
The other bag holds all the extra batteries & charger stuff that I've collected over the past twelve or so years of being half-assed about being a full-blown QRP loonie.
Suffice it to say that I have a grab bag radio station that I can take to the beach and into the woods and out to work and over into the car and into the garage and out to the picnic table and over to grandma's if she's crazy enough to let me in the door.
And a really decent station set-up all fits in that one bag.

Wowie-zowie!

'Cept there's a problem. The problem is that the Proteus bag will never go around my waist as a fanny pack 'cause my fanny don't take that much weight. I was a RC school kid, remember. This means that the only way I can carry it – all twelve pounds of it – is by the carryin' handle on top. This ain't a big deal right now, but I know from previous experience with previous experience that my wrists ain't as ready to rock as they were when I was a kid and thought I could play clarinet. Fact is, my elbows ain't that happy either. So I needed some way to carry the Proteus bag & its contents that won't cause me to have another date with the serious pain killers.
I survived the 60s. I do not like serious pain killers.
Worse than "dead girlfriend music."
So casting about in my lethargy I came upon an interesting idea: straps. Shoulder straps, in fact.
See, the Toadstool Versipack (which is no longer available) now holds the batteries. And the Toadstool pack has a shoulder strap. Which leads to the possible conclusion that I could make a shoulder strap. And thinking that, I also have to remember where I put the shoulder strap that came with the FT817ND, which strap also has a microphone clip thingie on it.

And then I discovered StrapWorks, from whom I have been able to buy all the doodads necessary to not only have a shoulder strap (and a two inch wide one at that) but also a couple other pieces of strap work that undo the need for a chunk of rope by which to tie the telescoping mast to any local upright. Now I can just strap it on.
That's right. I've become Mr. Strap-On.
What a planet.
Now I can shoulder the Proteus bag and leave my hands free to catch myself when I fall down from carrying all this crap to the beach along with the cooler full of Negra Modelos upon which I end up setting the radio. And with a bit of work & some needle-point, I expect to be able to shoulder damn near everything, including the cooler, once I figure out how to glue the hardware on it.
I can get damn near everything I need from StrapWorks. They have those adjustable plastic snap buckles and even the same thing with a reflector built into it so you can catch moon beams or flashlights in the dark. They have strap from ½ inch to three inches wide, shoulder pad bits & pieces, swivel snap pieces so you clip the shoulder strap on and off the bag you're working on. All that stuff. They have it. And for the past two orders that I've made online, the stuff's been here in less than a week. The next big project is the two-inch wide shoulder strap that I'm gonna make just for kicks.

Somedays things just work out so well that it's enough to almost make me believe that things are working out well. That other believing, well, it's like the other kind of happy. I ain't into that.

The Speaker/Mic Doodad for the FT817ND

2007-08-20T12:01:00.000-07:00

Due to an overwhelming response from the folks who read this tripe, I have been forced to crib my wife's camera & take some pictures of the speaker/mic assembly doodad that I built for the FT817ND. I also scratched out two of my usually inscrutable schematic diagrams so the pictures will be informed by the head-scratching that will arise from anyone trying to make sense of what I drew on paper and put together in reality. (Click on the graphics to see them in a larger size.)
Presuming that you're interested in reality.
So here's the deal: About a day after I got the FT817 from my son, which would have been the day after Christmas, I started thinking that a speaker/mic would really make the little radio truly portable and mobile. Looking at the documentation in the booklet that tries to explain everything, I figured out that I would need to, at the very least, work up some way to jigger the mic line & the PTT line together. That's 'cause I was going to use the Radio Shack speaker/mic that I was using with my Icom T2H 2m HT. The Radio Shack speaker/mic (stock number 21-1834) goes for about $25 and I have, since I lose things all the time, bought maybe three or four of them. Two I can find right now. The rest are in the void.
There are four wires on the speaker/mic cord that come to a block of plastic with 3.5mm and a 2.5mm male plugs sticking out. The large plug carries the receive AF (which goes through a 3.5mm cut-out jack if you want headphones). The smaller plug carries the mic AF. The mic is an electret, so it needs about 3VDC to work.
Fiddling around with all this I discovered that (a) the PTT line on the FT817 does not like even the least bit of voltage on it when I keyed the mic. This would happen if I tied the PTT & the 5VDC lines together to power the mic by way of the ungrounded side of that wiring. But I did discover by way of this that the PTT voltage (about 5VDC) will run the mic and play the PTT function quite nicely.
So I started out with a couple little plastic Serpac box (Mouser P/N 635-C-4PC-B). Using an already mangled up soldering iron tip & an Exacto knife, I cut out a space for a neutered RJ45 plug (neutered 'cause I took the locking tab off it) and a hole for a 3.5mm mini stereo plug. I also melted holes into the short edge of each end of the box. On one end I put a hole to take a 3.5mm mini stereo jack (for the keyer paddles through the mic line [see the owner's manual on that]). On the other edge I put two holes, one each for the 3.5mm & 2.5mm jacks that lined up with the plug set of the Radio Shack speaker/mic.
Then I collected all the parts, changed the tip in the soldering iron, put the knives and sharp edges away and took a nap.
Once I'd recovered from cutting and melting, I sat down with some thin wire & a couple restraints and put the monster together. The entire assembly wasn't that difficult. The proper placement of the RJ45 plug & the 3.5mm stereo plug that mate up with the female connectors on the side of the radio took a bit of work, but once I had everything sitting solid I used cyanoacrylic glue to keep things tied down good.
Soldering took some patience. This is particularly true since I went back later and put series of resistors & capacitors & a miniature choke in the box to get over the high-frequency distortion that appears on the receive AF & on the sidetone.
All together it wasn't that big of a project.
Cid was surprised that I didn't have to replace the upstairs screen again. She didn't know about my next plan: to build a touch keyer assembly with a place on that box to run the speaker/mic as well. Again.

One of the big engineering goofs on the FT817ND is the lack of any sort of bale or extension feet to tilt the front of the radio up so the operator can read the display. Not tilding the radio up means that the operator has to scootch down or otherwise twist neck, back, arms and nose to be able to see the display info. This is particularly true when the radio is being operated on top of a cooler full of Negra Modelos or six Coronas.
I prefer Coronas in the cooler as opposed to around feedlines, but that's another story.
Since I wanted to use the K1CRA touch paddles with the radio on the cooler, and since the up and down buttons on the mic will run the paddles of the internal keyer, I couldn't see any reason not to test my patience some more.
That got me into two versions of the same box, the last of which is the keeper. The box has a set of paddles on one side of the front and two holes on the front next to the paddles to jack in the speaker/mic.
All of that hooks to the radio via a cable with an 8-pin mic plug (mates to the side of the paddle box)on one end and an RJ45 plug on the other end. The RJ45 plug picks up the 5VDC power to run the touch paddle circuit. The box & the innards are mounted on a chunk of 1/4" steel plate which, after a week at the beach, has a nice rusty look to it. And it still works and I didn't have to replace the window screen.

In all the speaker/mic function makes the FT817 a lot easier to use in a vehicle and a damn sight more easy to put on the cooler. The paddle set preserves – by way of a cable set – the same simplicity. And I didn't have to replace the window screen.
And that, along with the pictures, pretty well explains the question that I have been begged to answer in numerous emails, santaría chants, various spells and prayers, novenas, auditings, UFO sightings & chupacabra appearances. Between what anyone can make sense of here & what I may well put on the Yahoo.com FT817 discussion group, anyone should be able to duplicate my mistakes.
And maybe they won't have to replace the window screen either.

Now I ask you: Is that overmedicated or what?

Sittin' by the Billabong with Matilda

2007-08-16T05:46:00.000-07:00

One of the first reasons that I became interested enough in radio to really start listening to one involves a language experience.
See, when I was just a little young'n, barely weaned & probably still in diapers, my father used to set me on his lap and tell me stories. I remember the lap sitting and the story telling, but my most compelling memory is visual: the nicotine stains on the fingers of my father's right hand. That and the cigarette smoke.
So there I was, barely past food tube and here my father sat me on his lap, enlaced me in cigarette smoke and told me stories about people who lived in a bus and i kaikaiyim pik na olkain yambo em i rausim long gaden blong pipol. Over the course of time the story telling fell off but the words were still there in my head. Those words and all the Spanish words that Dad used when he didn't think Mom would notice.
Believe me, she noticed.
One of Dad's favorite expressions, second or third only to such common English invectives as "Goddammit!" and "Son of a bitch!" and "Shit!" was the expression "¡Ay chingada!" which Mom's brother, my uncle Ted, was all to willing to translate for her.
"George! I don't want to hear that word again!" Mom demanded, after learning the meaning.
"Yes, Audrey," Dad said aloud and then muttered under his breath "chinga'o."
"George Young!"
"Yes, dear."
The lessons from all these second language opportunities was not lost on me. I soon enough figured out that Dad and I shared a common language that neither Mom nor her brothers would have much save about. Dad & I, mipela save plenti, and Mom was none the wiser.

Of course, having such access to a couple different languages led me to see language in a completely different way from folks who, upon discovering that no one else can understand them, become immediately distraught (if not paranoid) about being out of touch. But for Dad and me, well, it was transparent.
Not only did I learn a bit of Spanish & a pile of Pidgin English from my father, I also learned how to just listen and pick out the meaning from the conditions and situations. To some it's an annoying thing for me to be able to do that. For others it's a saving grace and for the majority of humanity I suppose it's just nothing to worry about.
Until you need a translator. Not that I am one or would ever want to be one.
And all of this led me through my late childhood and early adolescence to be interested in how language works, how we use it, why it developed, what it means to what we think or the society in which we live, how it changes and how some folks down the next holler might not talk the same as you or yer cousin Jebediah.
Such an interest does not pay handsomely, however, so at some point the pressures of living a real life in a real world with a steady job led me to the other end of the stuff I learned from Dad: radio.

By that time – by the time I transferred my attention from language & all its interesting nuances to an interest in radio as a paying situation – I had already started listening because I could hear other languages. First there was the French Canadian radio station that I could hear fading in and out on the old table-top Zenith. Then Dad bought me the shortwave radio and I started seriously picking up bits and pieces here and there.
Radio Habana was a constant favorite for picking up new expressions like "imperialismo yanquí" and "las fuerzas armadas del pueblo cubano" and the all-important "Commandante Che Guevara"
Then there was a Mexican station on the 11 MHz band, XERH. From them I learned the all-important "¡Cerveza Corona . . . la cerveza mas fina de todo el mundo!" That and the mariachi music. You gotta love mariachi music.
I could hear just about any language that would catch my interest. The Voice of America provided me with countless hours of mind-numbing news and propaganda in Hindi, Tamil, Serbian, Czech, Indonesian, Haitian Creole, Brazilian Portuguese, Arabic, Pashto, Persian and Azeri. Radio Ankara had programs in Kurdish, Turkish & English. And if there were any missing, I could catch Radio Cairo, CBC (Canada), BRT (Belgium) and, of course Radio Australia.

Radio Australia used to start its shortwave broadcasts with what's called an "interval signal." Common practice from the days when radios tuned by fudge-factor and a nominal calibration. So a station would start every broadcast day – or broadcast at all on shortwave – with a piece of familiar music that had ethnic or national meaning. Radio Australia's interval signal was the tune "Waltzing Matilda" played on a celeste or xylophone.
"Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda!
"You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me!
"And he sang as he sat beside the billabong,
"You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me!"
And I knew the words to the song because that song was one of the things I learned at my father's knee, encircled by the cigarette smoke, as a baby freshly-hatched some twelve or so years before.
In the nearly fifty years since I first heard that interval signal and listened to that station, the shortwave broadcasting business has taken a considerable slide. Satellite & digital radio, and especially the InterWeb have made the hobby or listening to stations from around the world pretty much old-school. It costs tons more money to keep a 500 kW station (yep, half a megawatt) on the air than it does to run a streaming server to the world. The few remaining shortwave broadcasters today serve a very small group of dedicated listeners who have no access to the InterWeb or the satellite broadcast technology that supports it.
Today I can hear Radio Australia – as well as all the other stations that I used to listen to, with the exception of XERH & a few others – on my computer hosed up to the global, multicultural, dubiously-accurate communications and porn network.
And yes, that includes the Radio Australia Tok Pisin program in the language that my father spoke to me in my infancy. And you can do the same, without the flutter and fading and the vagaries of ionospheric propagation or the strength of a nearby religious broadcaster saving souls in Africa.
Sapos yu harim natink yu laikim tru.

On Watch Again

2007-08-09T09:56:00.001-07:00

I'll be the first to admit that I was hooked on radio stuff when I was a kid. I'll say that because it's pretty near the truth. Dad stuck the mic in front of my face; I said something nominally contextual; the Sears Silvertone wire recorder caught my words; the stage was set. When I was a youngster learnin' to ride a bicycle, there was a kid in the neighborhood who had a "radio bike." This was pre-transistor time, when a couple three tubes could make a pretty good reflex receiver but the three tubes used up a couple different batteries just so the bike rider could cruise along the straße while listening to the noon-time farm report. At least out where I lived they had the noon-time farm report.
This epiphany about radios on bicycles – and I wonder how it was that I never thought about a radio in a car as something special – got me to wondering how radio worked. I figured out all kinds of weird stuff involving cotton balls and steel wool and little pieces of wire that I found laying around & all that. Even taped a piece of #10 solid to the handle bars so I could at least look like I had a radio bike.
Always a stickler for perceptions, me.
At some point I fell across the pages of a book or comic book explaining the beginnings of radio. Heinrich Hertz & his sparks, Guglielmo Marconi & his money, Crosley and his radio factory. The entire history of the discovery was in print & my very tolerant parents arranged for the pages to fall under my gaze.
Of course it took some time before I got from "Oh, that's what happens" to "Dad, I want a crystal set!" with appropriate stamping of feet and whining.
The rest, of course, is history.
Of course, part of that history involves history of the generation into which I was born, part of which was a huge pile of time & money wasted on being a hippie or some other such anti-social, nominally neurotic delusional who thought that simply by dressing weird and wearing our hair long, we would be able to change the world.
As if.
Truth was, the world changes us. I can say that 'cause I know from experience that the world came to change me like a diaper on a newborn. I went from hippie hedonism to the US Navy in one day. Then the Navy turned me from being a completely irresponsible & self-absorbed know-nothing into a radioman. In other words, the US Navy took a perfectly good, nearly brainless appreciation of radio as a hobby and turned it into a job.
Not to be outdone, I then took the Navy's training & turned a perfectly useful job into a pretty goofy & only marginally useful hobby.
Those who sell radios, radio parts, kits &c to radio amateurs and hobbyists will, of course, have another opinion of radio as a hobby. That's how they turn a hobby into their job.
Either way, some folks think it's the Navy that turned me on to radio, such as I enjoy it as a hobby today. Some of them folks might be right. But I really think it started long ago with listening to my father's voice come out of the speaker of that long-ago Silvertone. And having said that, I agree that the USN did give me a very sweet job that has since them days pretty much put the dinner on the table, a roof over that table and my family and clothes on our familial backs.

Of course, the USN that I served in is as long-gone as that Silvertone. The wire recorder got replaced by a Wollensak (Dad just had to have one); the record player got replaced by a series of various record players (Sis just had to have one); the radio got pulled from the chassis & installed in Dad's printshop office (I still don't know how he figured which wires went where in the harness).
Today there are no "radiomen" in the USN. The abbreviation was RM, the initials for the earlier form of maritime radio operator, back then known as a "radio mechanic." Back when radios included things like rotating spark gaps and geared mechanisms for tuning antennas to wide-band spark oscillations. Long gone times, them. The rating how now been redesignated IT (Information Systems Technician), although the rating's insignia is still – for the moment – the familiar "sparks" from which the Navy term for a radioman ("Sparks") comes.
I've reached the point where bringing up service time with young people either gets me that "Why should I do that?" look or I get the "Oh God, not another old guy's lame war stories" look. Those who have never been in uniform don't understand. Those who are in uniform live in a completely different place from the one I lived in when I had salt on my shoulders. This means that I have to shake my head when I see a car full of young men toolin' down the highway as rap music pounds out of the trunk with a "support the troops" sticker on the trunk lid. The five bucks they put into the sticker doesn't quite make it. If they meant what the sticker says, they'd be in uniform. And when I see guys in uniform, well, I've been there in my time. I hope for their continued health and remember when I was young enough to feel that I was immortal.

All the stuff I used to touch and swear at and clean and polish is either deep-sixed or has been sold off to the folks who now throw bombs at us. The crypto gear all got compromised decades ago, at a cost to Gringoland in the order of billions of dollars. You can look on the InterWeb at what I couldn't talk about. All the technology that we thought then was so high-tech and spiffy is bettered by an open-source crypto package available on the InterWeb. The teletype machines are now keyboards & monitors. The rolls of teletype paper kept as logs are now disk space. And one place where I served has been superceded by satellites & digital signal processing. The physical remains of that one place are now busted up concrete buildings in the tropical sun, covered with grafitti and littered with trash. And the ship I served on may someday become a museum. Just maybe.

It's kinda weird to remember all this stuff, being as how it's all been part of my life, one way or the other over the past sixty-odd years. The old microphone, I've still got that. Mementoes of my childhood, some of 'em I've replaced; I'm not too sure that I need to find a replacement of that old Remco crystal set that Dad got me. The radios that I had a hand on in building at the R. L. Drake factory, they show up now and then at the Dayton Hamvention. All those things connect to all the memories and then, from out of nowhere I get a note from someone in uniform who says he's enjoyed reading my egoboo. I can identify with that person by what that uniform felt like but I am completely out of my range when it comes to what that person is doing.
I as lucky.
I was either on an aircraft carrier or I was running radio teletype traffic on a tropical island paradise, even if the locals weren't too sure about us. At sea I was surrounded by grey steel, in the company of a thousand and some guys like myself. Above my head were eighty-odd airplanes and a fire truck. The worst it ever got was slightly rough weather in the North Atlantic and that one months in Athens when we had two engine rooms flood.
A month of 12-on and 24-off liberty looking shoreward to where a virgin goddess' temple measured the wealth of an ancient civilization is nothing compared to the dust and heat of a Middle Eastern desert.
I was lucky. I admit that freely.
But it's my pleasure to be able to say something about radio that lifts the spirits of anybody serving where I never did. It reminds me of my youth and it only underscores what I always say when young folks start talking about time: Enjoy your youth. Too quick it becomes nostalgia and memories.
And above all else, stay safe and sane. We who have lost shipmates know that cost. We know it all too well. It is the bond between my time in uniform and the times of now, as nostalgic as it may be. Puts me back on watch again.

Beachside Radio Coolness . . . Almost

2007-07-31T18:38:00.000-07:00

Something like eight years ago Cindy & I shared a beach house down on Garden City Beach, SC with her brother's family. I went because it made perfect sense for me to go: It was the year of the return of the X-beings from the unknown galaxy, part of the eventual descent of the Stark Fist of Removal and the return of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs. As one in total touch with his inner yeticity and ready for the dispensation of Slack, sitting on the beach on the morning of X-Day with a drink in one hand and the "Dobbs Approved" t-shirt on my less than hairy chest, I was in the right place at the right time for the right reasons.
X-Day dawned and it was glorious.
People had spent hours and days and years in wonder at what the future would hold for those who survived the Stark Fist, the unknown alien beings with unpronounceable names & the dispensation of Slack. Only those of us privy to and schooled in the secrets knew the answer. The future would be just like today, only different.
And different it was.
I had come to the beach with everything that I didn't need. A laptop computer. A greasy hat. A pair of binoculars. Swimsuits. The "Dobbs Approved" t-shirt. But no radio.

The next year or maybe the year after, we did the beach tour with Cid's two brothers' families. That year I brought my radio, a freshly minted K2, some wire, an antenna tuner & some batteries. I talked to a bunch of folks, most notably a guy in Australia, late at night on 17m.
Over the next couple years I sold the K2 and bought two Icom radios and three saxophones. Then we went out west to see where my father and his brother had built their crystal sets and watch the world change around them.
The next time I went to the beach I took a saxophone.

This year I took the FT817ND that my eldest son had given me for Christmas. I also dragged a bag full of batteries, an EleCraft T1 automatic antenna tuner and a Pacific Antenna PAC-12 HF antenna system.
I also brought and wore the official OVTN t-shirt and the "Dobbs Approved" t-shirt. And when things were almost settled & most of the rest of the world was at the beach, I tried some QRP operating.
The results were stunning in their failure.
I talked – or maybe I should say "almost" talked – with somebody in Pennsylvania. I think I had a Q with a German operating portable in Spain. And I know that I had a Q with a guy in Virginia, me sitting on the beach getting sunburned ankles underneath a beach umbrella.
Then a storm came up and we bugged out.

Also during this time I attempted to run the IC-706 using the PAC-12 antenna. I had not a single Q from that on any bands that I tried.

From this all I have learned some stuff that I'd learned a while back but had obviously forgotten, plus some stuff that I'd never thought about before. All these lessons learned came down to a simple couple rules which I now hope to intend to not ignore the next time I want to load the car up with radio gear, a saxophone & my clothes, along with all the other stuff that Cid and the young'n took with 'em.
First on the list is much more realistic expectations. As in: I will not go to the beach with a QRP radio and expect propagation conditions to be anything higher than nearly unfair. This will allow me to spend a huge amount of time not playing radio, which time will then be spent on the beach not playing radio and more efficiently used making Puerto Rican meals and drinking lots of beer. On the beach. Or in the beach house. It don't make no never-mind.
At least it won't be time spent thinking that I can really work somebody in Australia under nearly poor conditions with a radio that produces a respectable five-watt signal in every mod but ISB.
Second on the list is a QRO auto antenna tuner like the AH-4 that I have when I want to take the IC-706 to the beach.
Remember I was at the beach? And I didn't bring the AH-4 'cause . . . well . . . I'm an idiot?
Thirdly, I will get ahead of time enough straps, ropes, coax, AC extension cords, antenna wire on spools and a better way to hold the beach umbrella down in gusting winds. This will prevent me having to steal the extension cord from the rented golf cart as well as trying to tune 30ft pieces of wire to 60m when the antenna tuner just don't do that dance, McGree. Not to mention tying the beach umbrella to my beach chair with rope I could have used putting a wire in the air between my operating position and the row of dunes behind me.
Fourthly, I will bring and use sun screen, whether I am going into the water or sitting on the beach with a beer in my hand, radio beside me or not.
And lastly I will not bring every goddamn cable that I have without testing to see that each and every extra cable that I do bring will do what it's supposed to do. And I'll get a bigger cooler. With wheels on it. For the beach.
I can always go to the fridge if I'm playing radio on the screened-in porch or whatever.

That having been decided, I have nothing more to say about my beach radio experience this year, being as how I learned quick enough that I hadn't packed for the job. And that there wasn't enough beer.

A Nice Little Portable HF Antoona

2007-07-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

Back Hamvention-time I was wandering around the "QRP Hall" and came across the guys sellin' the Pacific Antenna portable PAC-12 multi-band vertical. Nice pile of aluminum, some PVC pipe for coil forms, nicely machined hardware &c, all of which fits into what is, for all intents &c, a bag similar to an artist's large paint brush roll-up. All the stuff & the idea behind it looked so cool sitting on display that I bought one and took it home.
I spent a bit of time winding the coil & in the process came up with a couple mods that I subsequently incorporated in the design. Then I ordered some more coil parts, followed by an order for more stuff, like the carrying bag.
At some point I got most of the stuff put together – the stuff being coils for 30m and one for 60m. After that I figured out a couple more mods to the coils and got enough to build one for 20m/17m and another for 15m/12m. The reason I call 'em "/" is the result of a mod that taps the coils out so they can run two different bands. A small switch at one end of the coil shorts out the coil for the higher of either two bands.
Then I discovered an artist's brush roll-up that closes with a Velcro strap. (The Pacific Antenna bag mentioned above uses two tie-strings.) Once I got that & modified it to do what the PA bag does, I figured I had a pretty sweet system.

Fresh out of the box & unmodified – which means that the mods are good but you don't have to do 'em – the multi-band version provides an antenna system that works from 40m through 2m. Seriously.
The coil set for the multi-band version uses a tapping clip to select the inductance needed to tune things up right.
I can use the multi-band coil and tune the antenna from 40m through 10m.
The stock system uses a little clip on the end of a wire that hangs from the top end of the coil. The manual for the antenna gives approximate places on the coil. I painted each of the appropriate areas on the coil with model paint to mark the bands. Yellow was for 40m, red for 20m, orange for 30m &c.
My mod for the multi-band coil was borrowed from a Remco crystal set that I had burned up nearly five decades ago when I was a kid and my parents were way the hell too patient with me. Instead of the tap & clip, I used a brass ball with a hole in it, sliding along a chunk of brass wire between the top of the coil & an insulating piece of PVC at the bottom. Slide the ball up & down the wire to make contact with the appropriate coil tap.
I can use the individual coils for any band I want to wind 'em for. There are 90+ turns on the 60m coil, which became a bit problematic for me, trying to remember which turn I'd just counted.
The coils and the antenna system itself is also brought to tune by collapsing the telescoping top part of the antenna above the coil. The system will run as a vertical on 6m and 2m by removing the bottom pieces below where the coil goes and screwing the end of the telescoping piece directly into the base insulator part. Adjusting the length of the telescoping part sets the antenna for 6m and 2m. A much smaller piece of material might fit in the holder for the telescoping part for 70cm, but I don't see the need.

That's what the Diamond RHF40 flexible antenna is for: 2m & 70cm.

The neat thing about this antenna is how I can turn it into a horizontal dipole of 6m. All I have to do – and I've already done this – is get another telescoping piece & its hardware and screw it into the ground-going side of the base insulator. This I can then jerry up to a vertical support and, after adjusting the length of the telescoping sections to resonance (or resonant length), just hang it on the support so the antenna's laid out horizontally.
Can't think of an easier way to run 6m SSB from the top of the cooler beach-side.
And if I get really demented or ambitious or appropriately self-medicated, I can rig up a boom & use smaller, cheaper, foldable telescoping pieces to fashion up a two-element beam which can then also get attached to a vertical support. It'd be a bit of hardware and probably have to travel all by itself to the beach, but it'd be a beam, even if I had one and didn't want to go there anyway.
Of course, the 6m beam idea is one for the future. Not that it don't make sense to me one way or the other. I can use pretty much the same design structure as the rest of the antenna, right down to how it might mount on the telescoping fiberglass pole that I've used as a portable beach-side antenna support for the past ten years or so. The front elements of the beam would have to fold into place from whatever I end up using as a boom. And the boom would need to be set up so the base insulator of the basic PAC-12 system could be attached without too much strain on the parts or the person assembling the antenna.
In other words, the 6m beam idea needs to be beer proof.
Not to mention sailor proof.
Which is pretty much the same thing.

My Power Plug Mod for the FT-817

2007-06-07T06:24:00.000-07:00

We're sitting pretty close to six months since Ian surprised me with the Yaesu FT-817ND for Christmas. I've thanked him many times for the gift, expressing my joy at having the little beast and at the few contacts I've had using it. I've thanked him so much that the last time we met, when I thanked him once again, he said "Ok, enough the thanks already. Don't be a schmuck. Drop it, will you?"
To which I responded that I was thanking him on behalf of all the folks make accessories for the radio, whether they know about the radio or not. Like Maxpedition.com, providers of the Proteus VersiPack or Pacific Antenna, who sell the multi-band portable antenna that disassembles to a package barely 19 inches long and a few inches around.
But wait! There's more!
I'm also thanking my son on behalf of folks like Brian Riley who sells a couple nifty doodads for the '817 and other stuff. Brian's claim to this space right now is having given me the idea to build a "power conditioner" for the FT-817. It's a natural and sensible project, especially since conventional wisdom (as in: what a bunch of other folks are saying on FT-817 discussion boards) says the radio plays best at voltages under 12V. And this is particularly true of the RF output.
At the same time, the old guy with the hands that shake, having not yet admitted completely to himself that he's an idiot that way, looks at projects like Brian's and thinks "Oh, I could build on of those myself."
Which I set out to do.
The result was a first time venture on a piece of heavy circuit board wrapped in brass plating & a piece of board for a top. Worked pretty well and it made hooking the radio up a little less of a trip to the cheap connector store. And that's just the first reason to have the connector box thingie: the little 1.7mm x 4.0 mm coaxial power connector on the ass-end of the radio is just a little bit too much like asking for a weakness to develop over a period of use that might well include being banged around a bit. Things like that, things that look like the cheap way out, always make me wish I had the engineering team by the throat.
Like, why would anybody building a radio that's obviously designed for dragging about put such a chintzy-ass connector on the end of it?
Wouldn't a solid piece of serious plastic with serious metal in it make more sense? Even Icom has the brains to put a serious Molex plug on the butt-end of their radios, fer cryin' out loud.

So I set to with building a more "tasteful" version of my first copy of Brian's idea by drawing up a circuit board design that would fit into a Serpac C-series plastic enclosure. I chose that'n 'cause I'd used one before to make the speaker/mic adaptor to run on the radio. (I happen to like speaker/mic stuff, especially portable & certainly mobile.)
I used the ExpressPCB.com board drawing software, made a few physical adjustments to the parts and came up with a board that had the switch in Brian's design on the side of the box (less likely to get bumped to the undesired position that way). I put in an "idiot diode" on the extremely unlikely possibility that the power connectors might get reversed (unlikely 'cause I use PowerPole connectors). Of course there's a fuse (although getting a "self-resetting" fuse in that box was impossible) and I could set the box up to use either fixed power connectors out the edge of the box or via a chunk of pigtail.
The circuit was simple. There was a switch to run power directly to the radio if using a battery or to run the power to the radio through an LM7812 regulator if using a power supply between 13.8VDC and, worst case scenario, 18VDC.
Then I spent $60 getting three test boards made.
Getting the boards made is actually quite easy. I just draw up the circuit board & send it via the InterWeb to the folks & stuff at ExpressPCB, who then send me the resultant "miniboard" board a week or so later. I've been using ExpressPCB for a couple years now. They do really nice work and their board drawing software is just about goof-proof. (Although the goof so far lies the fault of the board designer & not the company.)
And the rest of the stuff I got from Roger's or via Mouser.

The result was a test of my ability to keep track of parts, tools and, in particular, the screws that hold the board in the box against the FT-817 chassis and the screw that holds the box together after I'm finished testing my skills.
My original plan had involved getting the PowerPole connectors down a bit in length so that I would have more room on the back of the radio for cables. PowerPole connectors take up a fair amount of real estate, even they they are small & sturdy. I'd learned from my board & sheet metal version that I had just enough room on the back of the radio to twist a cable around a corner near the SO-239 RF output. And although I could have removed the SO-239 and covered the hole with a chunk of aluminum plate (since I very seldom use the rear RF connector), I left that much stock and decided to make two boxes.
The one box is the "standard" version with the red & black PowerPole connectors sticking out below the key jack. The switch toggle had to be trimmed with a snap of lineman's pliers so it wouldn't keep me from plugging a key back there. I also built one with a chunk of pigtail coming out, with the PowerPole connectors dressed in heat shrink.
The benefit of the pigtail version is having a wire hanging out in the carrying bag that can be hooked to the battery pigtail without taking the radio completely out of the bag. Either way I figured I was a winner.
And it only took me something like eight hours of intermittent cussing, hunting & squinting to put two boxes together. Maybe two days (24 hours) if I add in the time I spent on the board design, finding the parts, keeping track of stuff that I lost and later found and the usual level of muttering, fuming and fit pitching.

After all was done & finished, I figure that I could have bought Brian's box & gone through the joys of doing the mechanical work of fitting his version into the box he sells and fixed that up to the butt-end of the radio. I could have done that.
But I didn't.
I built my own version and had a reasonable amount of pleasure in seeing that, once I'd gotten through all the torture of building stuff as I get these days, the design & mechanical work had come to a reasonably secure & worthwhile end.
I have a box on the end of the radio that lets me run batteries or from an external supply. The power connector that’s stock with the radio is now shielded from mechanical mishap by some small degree & the entire system is thus nominally improved. I say nominally 'cause it's all a crap shoot when thinking of after-market doodads one can add or interpolate to what is after all a pretty good design all by itself.

Next project is use one of the Serpac boxes to build a snap-in RJ45 adapter for the Icom IC-706mk2G so I can run that radio with the speaker/mic. And the result of that will be having the option of running the Icom in the car on trips versus using the '817. A difference of 95 Watts. That and having to run much larger cables, covered in the appropriately temperature-unaffected insulation between the car battery & the power hose that will snake its way to the radio.

I figure that's at least a week of cussin' and losing stuff. Ain't much time. Vacations comin' up and I better get started . . . dammit!

Dayton: Year 35 & Counting

2007-05-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

If you have a ham radio license – which is damn easy these days – and you haven’t attended the Dayton Hamvention, your are probably home-bound or have a lack of adventurousness in your worldview. Or you don't want to drive a distance to be in a crowd of tech-head whiz-kids. Or you just don't like crowds. Maybe.
And if you don't have a ham license, you won't be interested in the Dayton Hamvention at all.
Either way you're missing something.
The Dayton Hamvention is sometimes touted to be the largest convocation of amateur radio loonies in the world. It certainly was in the near past, back in the 70s and 80s when I was a lot less likely to consider going as work. The average draw back then was between 20 and 25 thousand radio loonies & family members. The flea market took up half of the parking lot at the arena. People came from all over to sell junk, haggle over prices & share lies and technical theories. And political theories.
It was a big deal.
Nowadays, considering how the InterWeb has taken the place of the casual conversations on the air that have been part of ham radio since forever, the numbers are not as high. Between the InterWeb, gas prices & the continuing climb in the age of the average ham, fewer people have cause to show up. The just past Dayton Hamvention probably drew about 20k people this year. The flea market was somewhat smaller – even with the beautiful weather – and the usual throng of people looking for the cheap 'n' easy was somewhat thinner.
There were fewer young folks but there were more folks in electric carts. Some of 'em deserved to be there. Others were obviously the type who spend their entire lives in front of radios with a bowl of chips and high-cal dip & a beer by the mic and who,by dint of a stupid diet choices and a considerable lack of physical exertion, are morbidly obese. With some greasy unkemptness thrown in just for diversity.

My first adventure in Dayton was in 1972. I was just out of the USN & learned about the event by way of a chance encounter with WB8GXB on 15m. Mike asked me if I was going and I responded with "what's the hamvention." This after I'd been playing radio in the USN for nearly four years and nearly three years of ham radio during that time. Once I got the story, I went. My father went with me & we had a good time looking at all the doodads and whatnots. We took a couple pauses for Dad to catch his breath & then headed on.
Late into the day or early into the afternoon we headed home.
Next year I went with Cid. We were not then yet married but we did share quarters in such a way that she would go with me most places I went.
We met up with the members of the OVTN at one of the local hotels and enjoyed the goofiness of youth mixed with ham radio. Did that a couple times. Even when Cid & I were married and when we took our first child with us one year. It was a family affair.
Of course, over time the demographics of the scene changed. The OVTN gang got older or wiser or more economically productive or strapped. Either way the meetings of the hippie hams degenerated until they finally disappeared. It was me & a bunch of other guys showing up every year to do whatever.

This was my 35th trip to the Dayton Hamvention. By this time it's gotten down to a science. I no longer – well, almost – forget to get my admission ticket & bus pass before I leave the house Sunday mornings. In fact, I don't get to the arena on Sunday morning until about 10 or 11 most of the past couple times I've gone. Back in the day I was there at 8 a.m. when the doors opened and hung around until the last prize ticket had been drawn.
Ah, thems was the day, thems.
This year I went to the Hamvention at the same age my father was when he and I first went all them decades and a half a go. I like to think that I was in better shape than he, not having to stop every now and then to catch my breath.
Even if I did have to accept a couple sugar-coated pecans from one of the local QRP group loonies to keep from staggering around half passed-out from not eating a decent breakfast. (I had a huge cup of coffee, two sesame cookies & my blood pressure meds for frokost on Saturday morning. And I got there around 10.)
I walked the entire flea market and paused only to look at stuff that I thought was interesting but which, upon reflection, was unnecessary. Nostalgia looks great on paper, yo.
Thus I passed on a very nice condition TCS submarine receiver & transmitter that was still in the RM3/2 book back when I was just joining the fleet. And a SSR1 that would have been fun to have but which would have been a bitch to keep in tune. Let alone tubed up good.
I stopped and talked with a guy selling 50ft of Rohn 20. For $400. The next day I offered him $300. He said he'd sell it for $375 but that wouldn't include delivering it to my digs, 20 miles down the road. We chatted a bit more & I walked off.
For $200 I can put up 40 ft of knock-off.

Simple fact is, the Dayton Hamvention is my version of the hajj with a bit of a bible convention & a chunk of Christmas. I look forward every year to finding more stuff I don't need & stuff I shouldn't have and things I can easy enough avoid. I meet with old friends, talk with a few strangers, spend some money – usually too much – and have dinner with another gang of crazies. Then I go back Sunday morning to say adios to thems what's going home and look one last time at something I might have thought about twice.

Then I go home, take a nap and mow the lawn. Another Dayton is over for this year. Next year I'll be 62 and, if all goes well, I won't be a morbidly obese guy in an electric cart wearing out a perfectly good set of deep-cycle marine batteries looking for something I don't need. Be interesting to see what happens when all the folks I know are too old to show up themselves. Sure hope I keep showing up for a long time yet to come.

Another Side to the AN/TRC-77 Story

2007-05-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

Back in the day I walked into what was then Mendelson's Surplus in Dayton, Ohio, and found a little green box on sale for $15. The box was a HF CW transceiver with a mode switch providing AM receive. It was one of many stacked on a skid of military surplus stuff back in the collection of other doodads that Mendelson's sold. Mom was with me. She was amazed that I'd just reach into the pot and pull one of the radios out and get all excited about what I could do with it.
The name plate on the radio said it was an AN/TRC-77
The transmitter had a six position switch for crystal controlled transmitter frequencies and another six position switch for crystal controlled receive frequencies. In the CW mode the op could shift the BFO around to tune around any QRM on the receive channel. In AM mode, depending on the frequency, one might have listened to SW broadcasts, although that wasn't my interest. According to the spec sheet that came with the radio, it would work from 2 through 8 MHz. And there was a built-in antenna tuner. Young, foolish and on leave from the USN, I bought one of the radios, the matching headset (the connector on the radio was milspec inscrutable) and a book on field radio operations.

I wish I'd bought three of 'em.

A few months later I was holed up in a rented room on top of a hippie hotel in Jacksonville Beach, FL. I had bought a bunch of cheap FT-243 crystals from JAN Crystals down the road in Ft. Myers. Over a month or so of hoarding and saving I had all six receive and transmit holes filled. I got on the air with a 50ft chunk of bell wire strung between window frames, around door jambs and out the top floor door of the building.
John Bush, my landlord, was a very easy-going guy. He helped me string the wire to one of the flue stacks on the roof with some fishing line.
It was a helluva set up. I modified the headphone jack, hooked the radio up to my Ten Tec KR40 keyer and had QSOs up and down the coast and deep enough into middle America to consider myself having a good time.
Very early one morning when I was just getting back to my digs after a mid-watch I turned on the rig and heard a guy calling CQ from California. I responded. He came back with a "QRZ?" I responded slow and easy. He came back with another "QRZ?" I gave him another call. He responded to that with "sri om u vy weak hr." I called one more time. He came back with "sri om u vy weak hr s1 sri 73."
I turned off the radio and hit the sack.
A couple months later I was out of the USN. I'd turned my back on a beautiful woman in Gainesville with whom I was madly in love (which don't make no sense, I know, but it's part of my story) and headed home in a $150 Austin-Healey Sprite Mk II with bad spark plugs and hardly any oil pressure. The TRC-77 was in the space behind the driver's seat. A couple months later I'd killed the radio by hooking it up to the power bus of another American-made car and starting the engine with the radio turned on. It died a cruel and unfortunate death. Then I gave it to WB8GXB, who subsequently passed it on to somebody else.

Like the girl in Gainesville, that TRC-77 is one of my most serious regrets, although in orders of magnitude, leaving Janet Norton without telling her how I loved her is way the hell at the top of the list and the TRC-77 is down more than half way.
Ever since then, while I think of Janet almost every day, I have thought of the TRC-77 often enough for it to be the background for every other QRP radio thing I've ever since done.
See, one of my main targets in QRP is having a radio that I can take into almost any environment and still get to have a couple satisfactory QSOs before calling it a night or getting out the saxophone. Thus any true QRP set-up that I might think of dragging around with me has to meet a few simple criteria:

It must be a real radio with a good receiver with solid, full-bodied AF output.
The transmitter must tolerate moderate field situations like simple wire antennas, nominal temperature variations.

After that the rest are easy:

Battery operation is a given.
Small, light weight & unobtrusive is another given.
Easy tune is yet another given.
Tunable to almost any simple antenna is one more given.

. . . and last but not least, the entire station must fit in a bag no bigger than a small valise or 3/4-size briefcase.

Considering it that way, radios that can fit to those demands are few and far between. To the best of my knowledge, this limits the choices to these:

Wilderness Sierra or NC40 (with very small external ATU such as the LDG Z-11).
Small Wonder Labs SW+ monoband CW transceiver (and ATU as above).
Elecraft KX1 (w/ auto ATU option).
Elecraft K1 (w/ auto ATU option).
Elecraft K2 (w/ auto ATU option).
Yaesu/Vertex FT-817ND (with very small external ATU such as the LDG Z-11).

After that there are tons of little radios that might work for just the fun of it. Such a radio would be the SWL Small Wonder Labs RockMite & HiMite (and ATU as above), or any version of the NorCal 40-o-9er or Kanga FOXX-II and the like. Going up a chunk in size gets you to the Emtech radios or the C.M. Howes QRP transmitter/receiver board sets. By this time, however, there are all the usual problems with cobbling together the radio into a box that will stand up to being dragged out to the back yard picnic table or laid on top of the cooler at the beach.
And even with that the TRC-77 is literally huge compared to the Elecraft or SWL radios, with the admission as well that an FT-817 and an antenna tuner together take up almost as much space as the TRC-77.
Simple up, the Elecraft KX1 or K1 are the most compact of the other radios listed above. Even the ATU demands are answered within the already tightly packed boxes of either of those radios.

So why do I use a Yaesu FT-817?

Well, first, thanks for the rhetorical question. It all goes back to that TRC-77, it's crystal channels & internal ATU. Considering that the '77 was a field radio with crystal controlled rx and tx, and considering that it drew only about 20mA on receiver (seriously) and that it was a CW only box, the FT-817 has the '77 beat. Of course, so do any of the tiny boxes listed above and a bunch more smaller radios not listed (like the IC-703 & its versions). That and my view of what makes a field radio today are considerably more complex than they were in my youthful exhuberance. And it was a Christmas gift.
You can't avoid that prime point.
Although K2 (and yes, I built one) is a solid performer radio (based on all the numbers and charts and graphs from any number of sources, including the manufacturer), I was never satisfied with the AF output. Weak is not the right word. Puny is the only term I can use in gentile company. Simply put, I don't want to turn the AF gain pot full up or have to push the headphones into my ears just to hear an S-3 signal. Such was the case with the K2. Looking over the KX1 and the K1 manuals it looks like Elecraft has goosed the AF up a bit in those kits. But then we run into the other problem.
While it is possible to purchase any of the Elecraft rigs put-together, tested and run out, I am no longer the kind of person who enjoys kit radios, well-built, well-designed & proven or not.
I've turned into an appliance operator. Well, almost.
Compared with all the other tiny & QRP- and portable operations- oriented radios available, the FT-817 is the easiest box to plug and play. And did I mention it was a gift? It and all the extra doodads fit nicely into a Maxpedition Toadstool versipack. Seriously. (The only problem with that, however, is that bag is no longer available from the manufacturer. A bag slightly larger (and with extra room for more stuff) is the Maxpedition Proteus versipack.)

At which point we return to the needs of a small, portable & easy to set up station. The game is to replicate as much as possible the features of the TRC-77 using stuff I got for Christmas & stuff I bought to use with the stuff I got for Christmas. So . . .
Into the bag as part of making a portable/packable station such as would I have with the TRC-77 go the following items:

The radio
The batteries & cables (that being the battery that comes with the FT-817 plus an external 2Ah SLA battery.
Interconnect cable between SLA battery & radio.
The Elecraft T1 auto ATU.
Interconnect RF cable from radio to ATU.
Antenna wire (30ft of Teflon covered #7/16 on a tiny spool) with a banana plug on one end & a tiny alligator clip on the other.
Counterpoise wire (2 pieces of 30ft Teflon covered #7/16 on a tiny spool) with a banana plug on one, common, end.
Speaker/mic & homebrew speaker/mic adaptor.
Touch key CW paddle (adapted for speaker/mic as well).
Interconnect cable between CW paddles & RJ45 jack on the radio.
Interconnect cable between radio AF output & CW paddles (for speaker/mic).
Headphones (small Sony earbuds).
2 Pencils & small pad of paper.
Two meter & 70cm antenna set that comes with the radio.
Auto cigarette lighter/accessory plug interconnect for radio (just in case).
And the bag itself.

That's right. Fourteen items, not counting the bag, in a 10"h x 7"d x 6.5"w space weighing almost eight lbs to replace one 4.5"h x 9.5"d x 10.5"w radio weighing almost 11 lbs.
Which on my planet sounds like an even trade.
And not considering that the FT-817 plays from 150 kHz up through 450 MHz (with the usual holes in coverage so I don't hear the weather stations but can hear the police & fire dispatchers &c).
And while it may sound like I've traded one crystal controlled radio for a multi-band, multi-mode radio by way of adding a bunch of junk I have to unpack, the truth is that the only things that get unpacked are the items that I'd have to have dragged along with me using the TRC-77. Things like batteries, antenna wires, headphones, key & a bag in which to carry all that stuff. Something like nine of the FT-817 list above.
Which still sounds like an even trade.

Yes, I get over 400mA current drain on the FT-817 just in receive as compared to the '77's 20mA, but the battery is a lot lighter, all things considered. And that makes me a very happy panda. Not only do I have a neat gift from my son for Christmas & not only have I made a lot of radio & camping equipment & such manufacturers happy but I've got a radio I can use to listen to Radio Havana on 11.760 MHz.
Just like the old days.
But not crystal controlled.
And if you think I've spent a lot of time dragging myself through all these ratiocinations just for the joy of having a way to explain this wasteful frivolatry, cool. I'm definitely frivolous. Guaranteed.

It's a Family Affair

2007-05-04T06:50:00.000-07:00

The story of my father sticking a microphone in my face at the age of two and my response to that is pretty much a known – albeit probably not immediately accessible – historical fact in the family. For those unschooled in the mysteries, Dad had just bought a Sears Silvertone record-player/AM radio/wire recorder. This was in Amarillo, Texas, around 1948.
So there's the mic in front of me and Dad asking me to say something. My response, based on my infant appreciation for the magic of electronics and radios, was (in nominal IPA phonetics) /seıjәz ә weıdı:ou steı∫әn ın deıjә/. Transposed into standard English orthography would be "There's a radio station in there," the there referring to the innards of the wooden cabinet that held all the stuff that turned the box into a radio.
Many years later, when Dad sprung for a Wollensak reel-to-reel recorder so he could listen to his voice on the radio after he'd done a broadcast, the wire reel was copied to tape. A few years later – and certainly by the time Dad had died & Mom was living under my sister's care – the tape of that recording disappeared. But I always remember how Dad had made a big deal of it and how I had sounded on tape in the long back when the copy was made.
In view of that, and bearing in mind that my uncle, Fr. Joachim Snyder, was a ham, plus some other scientific interest on my part, it makes perfect sense to me that I would have eventually gotten my license. That it took place 13 years and some after my cousin, Keith, had gotten his license, well, that's only nominally important. Keith was a lucky kid: he had loving parents who supported his interests, as I was blessed with my folks. But Keith was a lot more driven to get into amateur radio than I was, possibly because of the kind of person he is and more likely 'cause Uncle Jack was always there to nudge him on.
That's a nice way of saying that Keith got his license when he was eleven years old and I got mine when I was nearly 23. Today Keith is W8KTH and I am W8IJN. We're both Extree class hams. He's into QRO and home brew and all that. I'm into whatever works with the least amount of drain on my patience and my family's patience. Neither of us has had a QSO with the other in all the nearly 40 years that we've had our tickets and been on the air.
Not once.
A search on QRZ.com for Keith's callsign will get you a nice picture of a good-lookin' guy smilin' from behind a huge pile of gear. Two chunks of equipment are the power supply and a 3x1 amplifier that he's built. He has some pretty high-end stuff on the bench too, and a chunk of feedline goin' out the window. It's a nice lookin' set up. And I say that sincerely, since I been there, in that basement.
See, one year when Mom & Sis and I were out at the family homestead near Kersey, PA, I had a chance to see Keith's collection of gear in operation. I must have been about fifteen and nearly as dim-witted as I am today but on the other end of the bell curve of aging. Either way, I asked him to call somebody in Norway so I could talk to him in Norwegian.

As if.

Now, all those years having gone by, I know from experience that such things don't happen. I know this 'cause it was nearly thirteen years after I got my first ham ticket before I had a Q with someone in Norway. It was on CW and I did the Q in Norwegian.
Yeah, I know the CW characters for the å, the ø and æ.
Almost as much time between then and my first ever QSO as the space between Keith gettin' his ticket and me gettin' mine.
But today, when I look at that picture on the QRZ.com site, I see the same place, the same window and pretty much the same guy who was a kid when I was still immature enough to think that you could just tune up somewhere on 15m and call a guy in Norway the way you'd call a restaurant for a table reservation for three.
Thus, I imagine, it is pretty easy to see why Keith & I have never had a Q. I ain't never gone lookin' for him on the air and, I suppose, he's never had cause to go lookin' for me either. Within that frame, our lack of having made contact is pretty easy to figure. At the same time, me bein' 61 and him bein' 56, you'd think each of us would have spare time to find each other on the bands, were it not for his homebrewing and my breakin' perfectly good equipment that works by tryin' to modify it so I can put it in the car & not pull the fuse on the cigarette lighter hole. Matter of intertwining causality & a serious chunk of chaos theory.
As if I understand that stuff anyway.
I sometimes wonder – and of course this is way after the fact – at the number of hams in the family. My father and his brother were spark-gap experimenters in their youth, in Arizona just after statehood. At least that's the claim Dad made about his past, checkered as it was and has proven to be by my research. There's Keith and Uncle Jack. There's a distant relative in Norway, Arne Bull. And if I go searching on the QRZ.com site for particular family names with distinctive spellings, or look under family names for duplicates of names that might exist (like another Keith Schreiber, who turns out to be KC0DIV), I come up with quite a few folks who might possibly be relations.
There are three folks with the last name Dimond, one of whom lives in Allentown, PA, a geographical reference within the family histories. There are a handful of folks with the last name of Moak in the US who may or may not be members of Mom's wide-flung and pretty well researched family history. A couple Proctors (possibly of Cindy's father's family) are hams in the vicinity. I've never met 'em or talked to 'em on the air.
All in all it shouldn't be too uncommon for a family or clan to have any number of hams in the gene pool, at least in Gringolandia. And I suppose it's not too uncommon for clan members to only have infrequent contacts. Arne came to visit one year decades ago and it was at least another year and some before we had contact on the air. In fact, it almost didn't happen.
I was on ten meters working DX like I was cool and I heard a voice behind whoever was talking with me. I said – over the other guy's comm – that the frequency was in use. I finished the Q with whoever it was and heard to my surprise, Arne's voice coming out of the TR7. I felt pretty foolish then, realizing that I'd snapped at Arne about the frequency being in use, but he said nothing of it and we had one of a bunch of QSOs that continued every Sunday morning in Gringolandia until the sunspot cycle diminished and conditions went under.

Now that it's the bottom of the cycle I suspect that future rag-chew & get-to-know contacts with Europeans, relatives or not, will be off for a while. Even when DX conditions do improve, I doubt seriously that I'll just happen upon relatives, distant or otherwise, on the air. Even being clueless about chaos theory and the statistics of probability, I'd put the chances of meeting a relative on the air are probably not much better than me winning el gordo in the lotto.

Unless, of course, there's a net for such serendipitous things and even if /seıjәz ә weıdı:ou steı∫әn ın deıjә/.

Can You Fe-e-e-e-el the Power?

2007-03-29T10:19:00.000-07:00

There's a website about the FT-817 QRP transceiver. Actually there are there are more than one website for the FT-817 transceiver. And there is a Yahoo-based user groups and a Yahoo-based software control user group.
Not bad for a tiny radio only does five watts.
Of course, if you were living outside the cyberweb you wouldn't know and probably wouldn't care about all the stuff that folks have figured out about this radio. And there's a pile of that too, if you follow some of the links above.
So basically it comes down to a learning curve that should be or will become part of running QRP. And if you're a half-ass QRP person like me, you'll go through the learning curve a couple half-dozen times.
And what's the curve about?
Power, yo. Simple power.

Here's the set-up: Most folks run QRP are the kind of folks like to take the radio out into the naturaleza. They figure that it's cool to not only run low power communications with a battery or solar panel or both. True natural radio, yo. Simple and sweet. CW at 2.5W into some wire tuned with a tiny box of left-over radio parts. Have Qs with people all over hell on a battery & some wire in the air.
Sounds downright idyllic, don't it?
Well, it can be.
Sittin' there in the evening dark talkin' to folks in Australia with a wire up a telescoping composite pole & some wire strung out across the beach into the tidal lap. Moon rising over the water. Cool evening beach-side breeze. Very nice.
Done it a couple times, I have.
One thing I learned early on with this reverie is the limits of power. Not presidential or organizational power, but the kind of power it takes to run that little power up a wire & into the air.
Basically, if you are running off a battery, you need to run a battery that will last long enough for you to enjoy the moon rise or until the tide turns. A rack of 1.2V, 2300mAh AA cells in a holder are nice, but there's enough loss through the contacts between butts and noses of the batteries to really damp things down when the battery has the voltage but you're drawin' the last couple mAs out of the rack.
Thus, it logically makes less sense to run a handful of alkaline batteries than it does to run a handful of NiMH batts. And it makes way more sense to run a complete & monolithic block of battery power than a handful of anything made up of individual cells like the rack of 1.2V 2300mAh NiMH cells.
Simple put, if you can find it and afford it, it's easier and more efficient – and much more long-lasting – to get a 12V 2Ah sealed lead-acid (SLA) battery than any collection of batteries in a pack.
Even if it's the battery pack that came with the radio.
At the same time, a lot of this energy – all this QRP operating & its associated setting-up and becoming one with the environment – might better spent taking a walk on the beach in the cool breeze with your wife or girlfriend of significant other or whatever you wanna call 'em. A pleasant & primordially tropical verada such as that should not go unenjoyed.

Even if you think you'll enjoy playing QRP instead.

The irony of it all lies in the weirdness of intentionally running as little power up the antenna as control will conveniently allow versus having enough power available to run the radio & accouterments long enough to be heard and conversed with at the low power level under contention.
It's not quite as bad as a "hybrid" car on an interstate or one of those powered sailplanes that daredevils and the like seem to enjoy testing their actuarial position on cross-country trips with, but it's close. The hybrid car is a gas-miser 'cause it's not supposed to be the long-haul vehicle of choice. The powered sailplane is more suited for worrying about how tight the pilot twisted the thumbnuts than it is to packing the pilot's silly ass from Maumee to Flagstaff. Expecting the best of all worlds out of the minimalist situation takes a lot of delusional cognition and a certain disrespect for the way things really work.
That's why folks who spent the obligatory $900 on an FT-817ND and all the batteries, antenna whatnots &c truly are twisted little peckerwoods. And I say that 'cause I am one. And I'm damn proud of it. With all that gear collected into one pile & dragged kickin' and screamin' into the wilderness just to act like I'm at home with a cat in my lap is a bit much to reason out reasonably. In most cases the operating is not all that successful and the pleasure I get from a few minutes of watching the battery go flat in mid-Q with some guy two states to the west is hardly offset by the expenditure of time & money – not to mention calories &c – I put into it.
In fact, there ain't much difference between ham radio (as an already explained "rich, white man's hobby") and any other economic distraction that we gringos pass off as "hobbies." We spend eight hours a day, five days a week (unless you's my wife or someone who works like her) doin' something that gives us money. We take the money we get from that and feel that we have a god-given right to spend part of it entertaining ourselves so we can say we "relaxed" after work enough.
You go some island in the South Pacific and live with the natives. Then you tell me how much time they spend on their "hobbies."
That's 'cause most of the world ain't got enough money, enough free time and enough pale skin to have all the creatures and comforts we think are so essential to our "lifestyles." Most folks have to work grueling, sweaty jobs – or spent a fair amount of time on chasing down or otherwise finding and capturing their food – just to have a full stomach a couple times a week. Most folks don't have building-code agreeing housing with hot & cold running water, let alone indoor toilets. Most folks on this planet have to spend more time working on staying alive than we do just having something to do so we can have money.
And a fair chunk of folks don't even get to use money that much.
There's a ton of places on this planet where barter is the way things work. One chicken gets you a basket of guavas. A bunch of plantains might get you a half-kilo of monkey meat. And a half-kilo of the wrong monkey meat will get you dead.
Deader 'n that battery got dragged up the hill so the radio would work good enough to talk to somebody in Utah.

The previously mentioned big lesson on that learning curve starts looking pretty insignificant about here. Not that it's gonna stop anybody, least of all me.

See, the kid gave me the radio. I added and collected and built all the doodads. I got all the junk in one bag inside another bag and I can pretty much carry it around anywhere I want. Which I do, believe me. From that I get a couple hours of intermittent talkin' to folks here and there for the fun of it. Soon enough I have depleted my collection of NiMH cells and battery packs. Then, as the dust settles and it's time to think of real things like clearin' the table after dinner or goin' out to pick the neighbor's trash out of my yard, I begin to think about spending more money on a battery that'll fit in the bag with the other junk & run the radio for more than an hour or so. Which idea brings me to reconsider where I put the two solar panel charge controllers that I have from a previous experiment with a solar panel runnin' the radios.
Yeah, I said "the radios." As in: "the radios (plural)."
That's 'cause, from my first days playin' with radios I always thought it'd be neat to take a radio out into the middle of nowhere and play radio with the radio. That's why, when transistors came along, I was right there on the doorstep of the local electronics parts place, itchin' to get my youthful exhuberance around a couple of 'em so as I could build somethin' that I could take into the middle of the nowhere mentioned just above. All of which has been among the prime directives of my radio delusion (or obsession) since them times over forty-five years back.
Further proving that men's toys are just larger versions of the toys they had as kids.
With no disrespect to the way women's toys are just larger versions of the toys they had when they was little girls in pinafores and Shirley Temple hairdos.

So there. And see you on the air . . . if you can hear me.

Remember the Old Calls

2007-03-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

Thirty-five years ago last Sunday I put on my work uniform, went down the ladder to the mess decks, ate breakfast with my shipmates and then went back up the ladders to the PN office. Aft, starboard side. O-three level.
I woke up the duty yeoman & told him who I was. He looked at my ID card, handed me a pen and told me to sign some stuff. I signed. He took my ID and gave me a new one. I thanked him for his havin' been there and wished him a nice life, bein' as how I thought I was special, getting out of active duty and all.
Then I walked back down the ladder, went forward across the hangar deck and up two more ladders and back to the comm div berthing. I took off my work uniform, put on my civilian clothes, put the duty yeoman's pen in my shirt pocket and headed back down those ladders and passageways one more time.
I can remember it like it was a couple months ago. Some of it's a bit this side of murky, 'cause I was such a sure-of-myself little shit. But some of it's as fresh as ever. I still had the duty yeoman's pen.

I spent a day with some friends in Gainesville and then got up bright and early to drive my barely-functional Austin Healey Mk2 Sprite from there to Dayton, Ohio. Took me two days to get there and it was much colder in Ohio than it had been in Florida. Fact is, it was rainin' by the time I left Chattanooga in the morning and by that afternoon in Ohio, it was freezing rain.
For reasons only conscionable by insanity, I'd left lovely women friends, shipmates on the Saratoga, the warm weather of Florida, my entire sea bag, and a typewriter behind to end up crashin' out on the couch in the front room of a house full of hippies. I may as well have been in an open-bay barracks on some camp-stinking-desert island full of Marines.
No privacy.
No money.
Nobody I knew from when I'd joined the USN was the same person when I got home. While I'd pined about not being "home" with my "buds," my former hippie friends had gone on with their lives, much as anyone would have, when I wasn't there.
And it completely slipped my mind that I had gone on with mine. Even if I still got up every morning at 6 as if reveille had blown over the 1MC and the ship had come alive with the sounds of sailors getting underway for another day. I'd learned skills that nobody home (except my parents and my father in particular) would understand. I'd learned a mode of dress, speech, behavior and conduct that was as foreign to my erstwhile home buds as a papal audience is to an atheist.
I had been a sailor.
And I'd missed the entire show.
Even if I still had the duty yeoman's pen.
But there I was, piece-by-piece hauling my home life back into place among the hippies. I put my ham radio set up on a table in the kitchen and tried to talk to people in other places, just as I had from the ham station on the ship or with the QRP set-up that I had in a one-room efficiency apartment on the beach.
I called CQ on CW and talked to a couple Russian guys.
I worked whatever magic it took to get on SSB on 40m and try to have radio conversations with whoever answered my calls.
And I spent a few hours of every day looking at the calendar, counting down the days to when I would no longer be eligible to re-enlist with no loss in rank or pay.
Seriously. I thought about that too.
Then one of the guys who had been more accepting of me than the other hippies suggested that we go back down to Florida. He'd never been there and I still figured that somebody down there might remember me.
After all, they had become my friends down there while I was stupidly pining to be with my friends back home in Ohio.
So we went.
I saw Janet Norton again and we talked in our usual circumspect way about how we should have been able to come right out and say that we were in love. But didn't.
I saw Joy Eastman, met her beau of the moment, Harris, and hung around with the usual crowd of Florida hippies.
Never crossed my mind that these people, these people in Florida, were my friends and that nobody I knew back home in Ohio was anybody I knew.
So my friend and I drove back north to Ohio and life went on.

One of the things that I'd gotten quite used to over the three years, eight months and twenty-six days of my formal enlistment in the USN was the need to keep things in shape. Thus I was always screwing around with some bit or piece, connector or setting on whatever radio crap I was running. My station at the time of this memory was an SB401 transmitter more or less lashed to an SB310 receiver.
For those outside of the Heathkit loop, the SB401 is a SSB/CW transmitter with a 5 MHz IF and two 6146B tubes in the output circuit. It's good for about 100W on CW or SSB and it was at the time one of the best Heath radios you or I or any other swabby could spend on a transmitter. The SB310, on the other hand, was not a ham receiver. It was billed as a middle of the road receiver, capable of tuning the lower three ham bands (75/80m, 40m, 20m and 15m), at least in the build that I had put together in Puerto Rico. The two pieces were not necessarily compatible.
All the interconnects from the back of the SB401 didn't quite mate up to the SB310's tuning system. That made it necessary for me to run the two radios as a separate transmitter and receiver. There was no way to link them so they would behave like two isolated pieces that made a single transceiver.
So I was always dickin' around with 'em. Adjust this, tune that.
But one afternoon I was sittin' at the microphone, calling CQ. I believe I was on 15m. Maybe 40. Either way I let go of the mic switch and heard in the dim clutter of noise & static someone calling me back.
"WB8IJN this is WB8GXB . . . over."
So I called WB8GXB and told him who I was and where I was: outside of West Carrolton, Ohio.
WB8GXB responded by telling me his name was Mike and he was in Centerville, Ohio.
We were probably three miles from each other.
And before turning the mic over to me, Mike asked me if I was going to the Hamvention.
Hamvention? What Hamvention? I no savvy Hamvention.
So Mike informed me: when, where, how, why. All that.
Mike & I talked a bit here and there for a while and then I signed off. Eventually we did meet face to face. I was an older guy; Mike was in high school. It was cool.

Having learned from Mike about the Hamvention, I asked my father if he would like to go with me to check it out. After all, Dad and his brother had been probably two of the first unofficial radio amateurs in Arizona, when he was a youngster. He had told me before about building crystal sets out of the heavy metal talus dumps of the local lead and copper mines around the Yavapai country out there.
Dad said he'd be delighted to see what "modern stuff" they had in ham radio "today." When the day came, Dad and I set out in his car for the Hara Arena where the shindig was held. We rolled up at the window, bought our tickets and then went from booth to booth, checking out the stuff.
As we were walking into one of the arena's display areas I looked at one of the representatives for the (now defunct) Brown Radio Company. It was a guy I'd known on the ship, an aviation electronics technician 2nd class. I knew his name then; I don't remember it now. I said hello and he recognized me immediately. I introduced my father. They talked for a while, GI style (for which Dad was always ready) and then Dad & I moved on down the rows of displays.
At that time Dad was 61. His hair had gotten grey while I was in the Navy but he still had a good sense of humor and he was always interested in what I'd done, what I'd learned, all of it. He thought that I should have made a career of that life but he also knew that I was pretty bull-headed (having gotten that trait from him, I must admit he was right). After we'd seen a fair chunk of stuff, Dad asked if we could sit down for a while to let him catch his breath.
We sat and talked about the stuff we'd seen. After a while we got up, looked at some more stuff and then shambled out to the car and went home.
Until that day, sitting there watching him catch his breath and set himself up for a few more looks around, I'd never noticed before how much work it was for Dad to keep up with me. He lasted another ten years.

This year will be my 35th attendance of the Dayton Hamvention. I've gone every year since Dad and I went back in 1972. He never went to another one with me; Cindy went with me a couple times when we first met. But every year I've remembered Dad and me going through those displays and over the last couple times I've remembered how Dad had gotten winded. He was 61 then. This year I'll be attending as a 61-year-old father of two sons. It's an anniversary, you might say.

A couple days ago I got an email from WB8GXB. He has been showing up for the Hamvention himself for the past 35 years as well. He graduated from the University of Dayton's engineering program many years ago. He still lives in Centerville, not far from where his folks lived. He was writing because he'd seen my name on the list attendees for the QRP ARCI "Five Days in May" symposium, a presentation of technology put on by the more technically involved members of the low power community.
The past couple years I've gone to the QRP Banquet, held the Saturday night of the Hamvnetion. Mike ('GXB) has never done the banquet.
If we're lucky, maybe we'll meet on the air to commemorate his having gotten me to my first Hamvention back in '72. Thirty-five years ago, when Dad was the same age I am today.

And I still have the duty yeoman's pen.

Not Back on the Corner with Strangers Again

2007-03-15T07:05:00.000-07:00

In perfect harmony with my contention that amateur radio is a rich, white man's hobby, I would like to report on the acquisition of numerous items subsequent to my eldest son's having given me a Yaesu FT-817ND transceiver for Christmas.
Here's the list:

W4RT "One Big Punch" audio compressor board for Yaesu MH-31 microphone ($50).
Elecraft T-1 automatic antenna tuner ($135).
Yaesu CT-62 Computer Interface Cable ($30).
Radio Shack Speaker/Mic ($13).
MaxPedition "Toadstool" Versipack (no longer available) ($40).
LA Police Gear Tactical Bail Out Gear Bag ($40).
LDG AT-100AMP automatic antenna tuner ($130).
Various NiMH AA batteries (guesstimated total: $100).
Homebrew Speaker/mic interface (guesstimated total: $25).
Homebrew speaker/mic & paddles interface (includes CW Touch Keyer board [$20]; guesstimated total: $50).
Various cables, connectors & assorted other doodads (guesstimated total $25)

All of which comes to something like $650, just about the price of the radio itself. That means that my son's Christmas gift (which also segued into my birthday gift, bein' as how my birthday is 7 days after Mithrasday) churned up $650 worth of business in about two months. So the gift eventually was a gift of $650 spread out among a list of folks, not all of whom are mentioned above.

This wouldn't be so bad, were it not for the fact that I've probably had two CW Qs on the radio & a couple 2m Qs. And I'm sittin' here thinkin' about getting the $100 500 Hz CW filter, just for kicks.
Not to mention the resurrection of a previous solar panel & charger contrivance that I used for a very short period with three different QRP radios which I no longer own. The net cost of the solar power system would be zilch, were it not for the simple fact that I ain't got enough batteries.
"Not enough batteries?" I can hear you ask incredulously.
Yeah, not enough batteries.
See, the '817 takes 400mA on receive with not much going on. Number goes up when I turn up the volume & the number goes way the hell up when I start talking. Something like 2A on a good day ain't got no Ls in the week.
Two amperes won't last long, even if I do run 2300 mAh AA batteries. And it makes no difference whether I use a nominal 9.6V battery pack such as comes with the radio (and which I also get if I load the battery holder with eight AA NiMH batteries) or a 12V camcorder battery or any other SLA battery.
No matter what I power it with, the radio only puts out 5W max, especially when I use the internal battery pack. When I run the internal power, the output is configured immediately to be 2.5W. About the same power as a Ten Tec PM3 but with a better receiver.
So I need the batteries, to which end I am looking at a couple eight-cell AA holders to which I can attach a connector to either charge 'em off a power source (such as the solar panel) or park 'em at the back of the radio connected by a Yaesu-approved power connector.
Of course I'm gonna use fuses.
You think I wanna blow this radio up?
Whaddaya, crazy?
And we ain't even considering the amount of money that I've spent on all this QRP/Beach Radio goofiness over the past ten or fifteen years. I'd have to add in the IC-706, which is big chunk of cash, along with the fiberglass composite antenna pole, the AH-4 autotuner, the wires, the homebrew Z-match, all the hoses & interconnects & modified crap. Hell, there's at least a kilobuck and some right there in that. Aluminum shell suitcase roadcases & all that. At least $1.5k in just that altogether, not counting the FT-817 rigging. At least.

All those folks who've built, sold, processed, packed, shipped & delivered all that stuff to me, to my front porch, to the Dayton Hamvention, all of thems, they've been the beneficiaries of my largess and, ultimately in this case, my son's beneficence. I'm afraid, actually, to even think of what this has rung up over the nearly 35 years since I got out of the USN and began spending civilian money on this hobby.
Like I said above, it's a rich, white man's hobby. Pretty much down the line, solid & unswerving.
That would be enough for most folks – especially folks who don't have this radio active addiction – to think that I was very narcissistic and self-absorbed.
They'd be right too.
What else could it be, if you pause to look at what it means in the most common mode: it's a hobby that involves messing with technology so I can talk to other guys (mostly guys, although there are a few tens of thousand female ham radio operators around the planet, I'd guess), pretty much anonymously about messing with the technology.
It is, yes, a technical culture, deserving of all the academic scrutiny it has ever gotten and might in the future receive. It is extremely self-indulgent. And the only come-backs to any claims of narcissism or self-absorption or whatever are basically along the usual bullshit about how ham radio serves as a back-up comm system in the case of emergency or whatever. And a source of potential technologues who could be pressed into service by world governments in case of emergency. Nominally trained semi-professional guys with radios ready to help out.
Which many do.
But if anyone were to look at ham radio as closely as Kirsten Haring had (note book link above), all anyone can say about ham radio is that it's a hobby that operates pretty much like a religion.
There is a priestly class; there are various grades of initiation into the mysteries, a sense of power & deserved respect and a flashy show of potential power and a generally easy con of us being more schooled in the mysteries than them (them being those who don't have fancy two-way radios in their bedrooms and a yard full of antennas threatening to drop upon the unsuspecting at any moment &c).

And yet . . .

It is fun to know how this stuff works. It's fun to see it work in various & unsuspected environments. It's fun to know how much potential fun it can be, how the complicated system of communication via chancy reflection of radio waves is fascinating for the lush vagaries. It is.
If that's an unbelievable sentiment to you, fine.
But I still enjoy it.
And, as Cindy's mom says every time anybody brings up the cash I've wasted on this stuff, at least Cid knows where I am and whom I with.
Even if they are crazy people just like myself who have too much free time & absolutely no reluctance to clutter their living spaces with all the trappings of electronic doodads and frippery.

You gotta love the frippery. All two thousand & some-odd dollars of it. Whitey.

R on Superfluidity, OM . . .

2007-03-04T15:26:00.000-08:00

Back in the days of my long-since childhood, not too long after I got interested in radio, Dad bought me a Morse code key that was part of a "learn the Morse code" kind of deal. The key was – to my memory, a J37 sort of deal – hooked to some kind of buzzer. Ran off two C cells in a metal clip holder, all of which was mounted on a piece of wood with a chart of the Morse code alphabet (for English) pasted on top.
I potted around with it for a while, trying to figure out how I was going to learn to receive Morse code by sending it. It wasn't that I was that philosophical about it. It was the simple & obvious fact that I could send all I wanted but if no one sent to me, I wasn't going to learn to receive the stuff.
My cousin, Keith, he had already learned the code a year or so earlier. He had a ham station in the basement and all that, across the street from a neighborhood park in St. Mary's, PA. Back then St. Mary's was a company town: most of the folks who lived there worked at Stackpole, the company that made almost all the resistors and capacitors that went into any radio that had saved the world from Nazi and Japanese imperialism before I was born.
When I'd go visit Keith & the rest of my mother's extended family in that northwestern end of Pennsylvania, I would always end up in the basement staring at Keith's collection of radio stuff & marveling that he could send CW and even understand what he heard other people sending to him.
To me it was a simple fact: he had the touch.
I didn't.
Eventually I gave up on the idea of learning the Morse code and with that getting a ham radio license.
Back then every ham radio license required sending and receiving proficiency in Morse. If you couldn't do the code, you didn't get the license.

My how things have changed.

A couple weeks ago the Morse code test was dropped from the list of requirements for getting an American ham radio license. Now you answer a list of questions, the subject of which determines which of three ham radio licenses you can get. Closer to stone country simple it couldn't get.
But it weren't that way when I was a young'n.
I wouldn't otherwise think of this except that I really haven't spent that much time with the key or keyer paddles in my mitts for a number of years now. When I do get on the air it's usually on phone, mostly on 75m with the OVTN maniacs and occasionally on 2m with one of the guys at work. The chances to get on CW are pretty slim, mostly 'cause I have developed a very solid knack for wasting big chunks of time (and money, in some cases) just sittin' around the house watching the cats sleep.
It takes a bit of time to get into playing CW on the radio. The conversations are generally a lot more truncated and brief. Folks who have the tendency to engage in long-winded conversations about the superfluidity of PostModern art or the most recent hypothetical studies in the physics of laser-generated super-surfaces don't get on CW. It takes a helluvalot of time to even send the word superfluidity in CW; it even takes time to say in on phone, but then most folks will just blank out and not worry about it later. On CW it might be an important word, which once missed, makes the entire transmission a moot point.
Spend a couple minutes just sending a sentence like "We gathered the data from the superfluidity convectors and fed it to the oscillation probe interface computer" and then have the other guy come back with "repeat all after data" and you'll see what I mean.
Actually you won't see shit. You'll know by ear what I mean.
Thus most folks any more must get on the air with a microphone in front of their drooling chops and that's the way it goes. Proof is on 75m after about 10:30 p.m. local, your area. Try it. You'll see.

Lots of drooling.

Which is another thing about CW: if you get in a QSO with somebody on phone and the subject starts to get bizarre or you get a call to come downstairs and put roasted garlic in the mash potatoes, you don't have to wait long for the other guy, even if he is an expert on the superfluidity of counter-intuitive macroprocesses in schema theory.
You ain't got that kind of quick repartee on CW.
And people who are long-winded on phone are hell on CW.
So I think we have the three main points covered: CW takes time to learn and time to use. CW is not a conversational mode, even if you have reduced it to text messaging (which CW greatly resembles on paper). And CW has a natural propensity to make any communications between operators a sort of "Hi. It's me & thanks for sending my callsign wrong three times in a row" deal.

Now this would all be spiffy and CW would be shortlived in general, were it not for one very simple and absolutely unarguable point: CW is so damn simple even two batteries and a buzzer will make a transmitter. I know 'cause I learned that first thing.
I'd be in my bedroom with the key & buzzer thingie, sending away, and my sister wouldn't be able to hear her rock and roll music station 'cause the buzzer was "inadvertently" coupled to the wire that went from the antenna hole on the back of my shortwave receiver to the antenna that I'd stretched across the top of the clothesline poles in the back yard.
A simple CW transmitter can be one tube & some parts or one transistor and just about the same parts. The receiver is a little more arcane but one tube at most and a handful of parts will do the job. Same-same transistors, although you can build a brute-force, gut-bucket simple CW receiver out of two ICs and a couple coils &c.
Thus, as any military comms person who served before the invention of satellites and cell phones will tell you, CW is a perfect emergency back up system.
Which is why people are still pushing to have it remembered and practiced often, if nothing more. At least that's what ham radio ops who are confirmed and dyed-in-the-wool CW fanatics are saying.

For me, CW is just another opportunity to spend time and money on radio stuff. Since I've already spent the money to have at least 18 different radios in one place, the only thing to do after that is turn on one or the other of 'em, hook 'em to antenna and plug in the key.
Most of my radios are CW only radios. And all of my CW only radios are low power radios. So I'm in this position of having radios that run off batteries or otherwise make it possible to use them in the middle of pretty much nowhere. Thus the radios are all the sort of radios you would use in an emergency situation, 'cept that I don't have radio emergencies.
That's what cell phones are for.
Thus, when I fire up one of the CW radios, since I don't use CW that much, I have to spend some time getting my hands and ears back into shape. It's not that I've forgotten how the CW thing works. It's just that the days when I could sit down at the keyboard of a manual typewriter and hit one key after the other as the letters came out of the headphones are long gone.
I used to be good for about 25 wpm, about five times the CW speed for the most minimal of ham radio licenses. And about twice of what used to be considered "fleet speed." Now I'm good for about 13 wpm and tend to send CW, especially with a straight key, at less than that. Which means that most folks with whom I get in conversations don't stay on long with me. Takes too long to say "Hi. It's me. I'm in the middle of a swamp in Alabama and my radio is made out of alligator skins and a couple toaster handles." Even at 20 wpm that's a bit of work.
But when I get on the air now with the key in my paw, I always look for folks who are obviously sending slow 'cause they want to or 'cause that's as fast as they can copy. Such conversations, however, are somewhat memorable. I end up talking to 15-year-old kids who just got their license a couple weeks ago and they still haven't figured out how the entire thing works. Them and old guys like myself who had been able, at one time in their lives, to blow the doors off Soviet spy ship's radio operator but who, at this time in their lives, don't want to jangle their nerves on high speed fleet comms. Guys on blood pressure meds that mess with their concentration. Or guys who have already had one coronary & a bypass, thank you very much, but who also know that they still liked playing radio with the old hand key.

So here I am, closing in on my 35th trip to the Dayton Hamvention at the same age my father was when he & I went for the first time back in 1972, on blood pressure meds & trying really hard not to get all tight in the neck when the other guy cranks up the keyer to 20 wpm just to show off.

Good thing I keep this collection of former-Soviet straight keys around. And I never abbreviate words like superfluidity 'cause, at 10 wpm, it takes forever & one mistaken character & I'll start all over again just out of meanness.

Adios Señor Morse y Su Clave

2007-02-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

If you've been listening on the CW portions of the any ham bands over the past couple weeks you may have noticed that there's a fair amount of activity. Some of that, I am sure, is the result of people "bandwagoning" the CW spectrum space in reaction to the upcoming end of CW testing for ham radio licenses.
You didn't know that CW (Morse code) was toast?
Where you been, cracker? Back in January the FCC said it was turning off the need to have CW exams for any ham radio licenses. So come Friday morning at 00:01 on somebody's watch, there will be no more testing for CW proficiency.
That's all it means, yo.
Come Friday morning (which otter be tomorrow by my reckoning) you'll be able to put the CW drills away and concentrate on the theory & legal parts of whatever ham license you're going after.
And now there's only three: General, Technician & Extra. And that started last year, December 31st think.
So if you were working on getting a Novice, it's too late. Go get the book for General and study that. Technician still has a license test focused on the VHF & above chunk of the spectrum. Extras get the whole bag. General class licensees get the VHF & up range & a sizeable chunk of the HF spectrum but not the whole bag.
You get the picture.
You will if you know what ham radio is. If you don't know what ham radio is, then you've stumbled into a blog that explains little more than what I've just said. Go to the American Radio Relay League website to figure it out.

Now that CW is toast for exam purposes a lot of folks are birthing cows for fear that the CBers are gonna come screw up the bands and it will all descend to the depths of hell out there in the electromagnetic spectrum. The other group – and I see it as three groups of folks – are happy that they don't have to go through the hassle of learning that antiquated old fuddy-duddy Morse beep-bitty-beep stuff. And the third group is folks who just figure it's another change, although they may lean one way or the other into the other two groups a bit here and there.
A lot like Baptists, Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox Christians havin' a picnic and somebody showed up with a box of bread cubes and wine-flavored fruit juice. It's always somebody else's blasphemy gets things working.

Back in the day I used to play CW a lot. When I was in the USN, being a radioman meant you had some CW training. Some guys were good at it. Other guys were, well, passable. And then there were some who already knew it going in & they just sat around and watched everyone else try to keep the qualifications up.
If you play CW a couple hours every day with folks who send reasonable CW, you're gonna keep your quals up. If you only get at the key every couple weeks or months at a time, you're gonna be at 12 words-per-minute for a long time there, Sparky.
Me, I used CW all the time 'cause it was, well, fun. I got to the point where I could sit and listen to CW as a conversation. Two guys going back and forth on the air at about 20 wpm weren't a biggy. Like I said, it was kinda fun.
With that background you might think that I look at this loss of a CW requirement as some sort of heresy. Like Hell. I look at the end of CW testing as the end of CW testing. A bunch of people who used to run the multiple-choice answer & test game for the CW test will have one less thing to do. Which, when you think about it, makes perfect sense.

The original CW test involved using a Morse sending device that ran a tape through a mechanism. The mechanism produced the beeps and bits of the CW message. The applicant listened to the CW and copied down whatever was sent. The more of it copied correctly, the more chance the applicant had of passing the test. The game was to copy one solid minute out of a five minute test.
For the old Novice test that was five words-per-minute. A character about every two seconds. Incredibly slow, once you got to copying at higher speeds. The General test was a weird 13 wpm, which was about a character every second. The 20 wpm test was for the hard-core. The USN considered 20 wpm high-speed telegraphy and only the guys who'd passed that course in radio school were allowed to carry that badge.
The last time I took a CW test (back around 1975), exam went from tape recording some stuff in front of a civil servant examiner person, which recording was subsequently reviewed by a real radio examiner in some FCC district office. That and a piece of paper copied by hand, which accompanied the tape & all that. It was horribly expensive in time & man/hour statistics. It's no wonder they wanted to be rid of that.
At some point – and I know not when – the CW test became somewhat comical. The applicant listened to five minutes of CW. It was usually a CW conversation between two guys. They'd give their names & signal reports. Weather & location. That sort of stuff, the kind of stuff most ham radio ops talk about up front.
Then the applicant would answer five multiple-choice questions covering the previously heard CW conversation. Names, locations, weather. Answers right there on the paper the applicant had written while listening.
Yeah, a multiple-choice test. And some number of completed sentences & words written on a piece of paper. That was the CW test we're gonna lose on Friday.

Big deal.

If that was the only thing keeping the barbarians from the electromagnetic gates, then we are a lot further gone than we can think. Between that and the multiple-choice test on rules, regulations, technical stuff & operating theories, life can't be more easy.
Using modern "teach to the test" methodology in preparing for any ham radio exam, most folks, properly motivated, will be able to get a decent grade on the third or fourth try. Given as how there are many online ham radio tests (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 &c), anybody thinking of getting into ham radio will have very little trouble getting the basic drift of how the tests work & memorizing the important stuff that doesn't just "make sense." Once you figure out how the hobby works, the hobby works pretty effortlessly.
All in all, it's really a matter of money, the permission of whoever you share living spaces with and whether or not your neighbors are gonna want to come over in the middle of the night & hacksaw your tower down.
Don't laugh. It has happened.
So once you get the cash & the local permissions, you get a book, a box of flashcards (or the CD ROM versions of same) & you read a couple magazines. Couple hours study after that and you're set.
Looking at it that way, of course, makes it sound like a cake. The only things that slow most folks up is the amount of energy they have to spend learning arcane stuff like frequencies, band limits, various arcane stuff about space radio & satellites (Extra class exam mostly), a couple different low-rent algebra equations & stuff. But the multiple-choice test makes that easy, if you only read the right answers. Anything but the right answer will be culled by your brain & you'll know what the real answer is.
That's probably the main reason that ham radio still has people interested in playing. It's not cheap and it's not exactly easy & you will have to develop strategies for scrounging (unless you're one of those folks gotta have the brand new, shiny &c out of the box kind of stuff). But it can be an interesting thing to do. Computers used on the air with radios is pretty sweet. Playing with amateur radio satellites, which use both computer stuff & a bunch of robotics for antenna steering, is a wonderful way to scare the shit out of your neighbors & keep the aluminum tubing industry appropriately paid off. Low power operations, including backpack radio (and a subgroup within that who play amateur satellite radio from frozen mountaintops &c) are another marvelous collection of crazies. And home brew radios. Kits. Modifications. All of that. Kids or older folks interested in how electrons really do work: they all get into it.

And now that they don't have to learn that old beep-bitty-beep stuff . . . well, you figure it out. But if you wanna complain to me about it, abandon all hope right now. I don't care about opinions on CW. I used it a lot before; I'll use it a lot again. And if I don't get to that right this very goddamn minute, well, tough.

It's a hobby. Not a religion.

You Kids Have It Too Easy!

2007-02-14T17:18:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna tell you that I am a spoiled little white-bread gringo. Serious. Spoiled like a kid been allowed to slap grampa in the chops at dinner time for months on end and never get much more than a "Oh, Johnny! You're sooooo mean to your pawpaw."
But I never slapped grampa. He was a sweet old guy and I was barely ten when he died. In his own bed after being incapacitated by a stroke. Old guy was sixty-two. He and his sons and daughter (my mother) and his wife May had a farm in Elk County, PA. Cows, chickens, orchard, bees, all of that. I don't think anyone ever knew him would have been as spoiled as I am today. He had to work too hard, him and his family, to keep things up and running. Up with the chickens and off to milk the cows.
But me?
Well, let's be real: I love this technological world we have today. Sure, some day it will be old hat fuddy-duddy stuff, like we look back and think when we see an old steam engine freight train in a museum or look through a book on the makings of a 1920-vintage Marconi shipboard wireless station.
Ain't never seed one yit? Well, Jasper, it was like this: they used sparks. Tubes were just being integrated with the crystal set receivers that Marconi was so damn fond of. That and his sense that by going lower in frequency & goosin' up the power a couple kW he could talk around the world with it.
Funny thing is, he did it, too. Talked from Britain, I think, all the way to Australia. Maybe the other way around, Australia to Britain. Either way it was amazing. Here's this guy figures out how to make his own lightning, for all intents and purposes, and he uses that sparking and consequential electromagnetic "oscillation" to send a radio signal over great distances.
The first big-time distance Marconi managed was from Britain to a listening post in Newfoundland. That was in 12 December 1901. The transmitter site was in Poldhu, Cornwall. The receiver site was on a hill outside St. John's, NL. It almost didn't come off 'cause a wind storm took out the receiving antennas. Marconi's team had to use a stretch of wire held aloft by a kite.
Damn good thing they weren't in the way of a natural static machine like a thunderstorm, although I'd bet the wind static voltage accumulated on that chunk of wire was pretty vicious too.

Either way, radio used to be a lot of work.

Today we're all spoiled children. Hell, if you count all the stuff that the military of the world has figured out in using garden-variety radio stuff, we've been spoiled a damn long time. At least since the beginning of WW II. By then we had tubes and semiconductor diodes and we could pretty much sheet-metal and bailing wire our way up to and back from the ionosphere with ease.
So you're probably wondering how I figured I'm spoiled, having been in the USN and all that. Well, it's like this: I used to have to peak and dip the output circuit of a transmitter. I had to turn the preselector knob to get the input circuit of whatever receiver I was using resonant on the frequency of intended reception. I had to manually go from transmit to receive. I had to use patch panels for AF and crypto and whatever else it took to get a signal from ship to shore and back again.
No, it weren't like shoveling snow. But it weren' like today.
Today I have a radio that changes its own diapers. It tunes the input circuit on its own, controlled by a little computer inside the radio. Hell, I never had a radio with a computer in it. I never had a computer until about twelve or fifteen years ago. Before that computers were huge. Now they sit on your desk. They sit on my desk. They do everything but tell me where to go at work . . .
No, they do that now too . . . See? I told you I was spoilt!
But back in the day, radios were mechanical. Seriously mechanical. The ol' WRR2s that we had in racks in Puerto Rico had this convoluted gear and toggle mechanism to show you where you were, frequency-wise. The idea of a digital read out was way the hell in the future, unless you wanna call turns-counting mechanisms with numbers on wheels digital displays.
I never saw a real frequency counter like with digits that changed when the frequency of the source was shifted until, oh, maybe 1972. And the first radio that I ever saw with that display also had a circuit that gave you a warning when you were attempting to transmit on a frequency for which the radio's use in ham radio was not intended. A Yaesu, I think it was.
And even then the radios were still mechanical.
And transmitters! Goodness, golly, gee whiz Mr. Sparksman, we had all kinds of knobs and switches and shit on 'em. Right up into the days of the early Argonaut radios that Ten Tec used to make. Back in the day.

So now all I have to do is sit down at the desk, turn on a power supply and then a radio. I can pick my antennas with push-button switches that run out to a set of latching relays in the shed. From there the radio gets connected to an automatic antenna tuner.
Yeah, an automatic antenna tuner. Like you put a signal into it and within a few seconds it has tuned the antenna to resonance & set up the signal path so the radio "thinks" it's transmitting into a perfect, reactance-free 50Ω load.
Although we had some sort of automatic circuit in the tuner boxes at the bottoms of various antennas hooked to the old T2 transmitters on the USS Saratoga (PBUH), most of the antenna & transmitter combinations I worked with in the USN required the fiddling of switches and setting of dials. Either way it was still pretty serious "hands-on."
And I don't remember ever seeing anything like a truly "automatic" antenna tuner until about 1985 or so when LDG Electronics came out with the Z-11. And I had to build my own antenna tuner a couple times. And that was a learning experience too, all the sheet metal work and hole drilling that I did. And the big knobs on the front that turned the shafts on switches, capacitors & a rotary inductor (which I thought was particularly spiffy, being as how it came out of an old TDS submarine transmitter/receiver combo from before my time in uniform.

Yeah, you young kids got it too easy . . .

Now I wouldn't be thinking of all this stuff if I hadn't just finished boxing up an LDG autotuner so I can use it with my FT817ND, which is another story. Hell, everything's another story.
Now, should I find myself beach-side again within the next foreseeable future, all I'll need to do is set the radio out on a table, run a power line from a junction box to the radio & a control/power cable to the remotely positioned AT-100, hook up some antenna wire and a decent chunk of counterpoise. Turn on the radio, pick a frequency, push a button on the control box & key the radio for a couple seconds. Zip-zap-zowie, the tuner reaches resonance & the little LED on the control box goes out.
All it set & Frank's in his heaven.
I can talk to whoever can hear my 5W signal.
You'll notice that the autotuner is out there away from the operating position somewhere. A four-wire cable takes power, function control & a LED feed-back indicator so I can command the autotuner for one of three modes & the LED tells me when the tuner is ready to tune & when the tuning sequence is over.
No knobs. No switches. No roller inductor.
And the radio's even simpler: turn it on, pick a band or frequency using the digital display on the front of the radio. I can set the keyer speed if I'm runnin' CW or set microphone levels & a bunch more stuff on the radio using a couple push-buttons and a detented knob. I don't have to set a preselector for resonance or anything like that.

Turn it on & play with it.

See, I told you I was spoilt. All this beats the pants off that old Argonaut for functions & extra doodads like two VFOs & various filter & passband tuning options. Hell, I had to build an external AF CW filter for the Argonaut I had. And a keyer, well, that was a long story involving various kits and finally the Ten Tec keyer board – which I still have in its box ready to play CW the nominally old-fashioned way.
If you don't count a straight key as old-fashioned too.
Nope. I'm spoilt. And I like it. So there . . .

Gimme That Ticket Now!

2007-02-07T10:41:00.000-08:00

One of my friends from the long-back wrote to me the other day about how she's going through the song-and-dance of test prep with the kids in her class. This teach-to-the-test crap drives me nuts & in my reply email I said exactly as much.
Most of the exit exam crap that's being thrown at kids in school today has been dreamed up by politicians who have heard from parents that the kids aren't getting a good 'nough education. These parents, most of whom have very little to do with education and couldn't give a shit less otherwise about their kids and their kids' education, have convinced the political hacks (and they are in this case the most obnoxious form of hack) that exams will fix this.
Thus we get politicians dreaming up tests for coursework, most of which the politicians themselves couldn't survive, that is supposed to prove that the politicians have fixed the education system.
Makes no nevermind that the politicians are lower than pond scum on the evolutionary scale when it comes to cognition and learning. And it makes no nevermind as well that the parents who do the loudest complaining are the parents who have no idea whatsoever about how teaching and learning works. Most of the time the kids get home from school and have to bring dear ol' pappy his beer and cigarettes. And any homework just interferes with the kids having to bring the beer and cigs.

Thus we get the "teach to the test" phenomenon.

And where else might we find this phenomenon? Well, let's see . . . Certifications for various online or correspondence school curricula sold as a way to advance a career or get started in a new one. Petty licensing schemes like the written parts of driver's ed and certainly the "ham license in a day" that has surfaced in recent times.
All of these programs are set up to drill the obvious and sometimes not so obvious answers into the learner's head so that when the test magically appears in front of 'em, lo and behold, the answers pop out like that alien thing in the movie. From then it's estimated success.
Depending on who you ask (a, b, c, d), the success rate is something between 38% and 60%. Depending on whether or not the source admits to any numbers at all. Which ain't unusual, seeing as how much folks spring every year for all the test prep programs available. PSAT, MSCAT, all them AT tests, they all cost money and the providers of the prep services charge money on top of that. Either way, you can win. If you pick the right program, it's properly administered and completely involved in setting you up with an environment to learn.
Or you could use flash cards.
That's what I did: flash cards. Seriously. I bought a big box of flash cards from one of the ham radio sales points that shows up at the Dayton Hamvention. I sat down with those cards and one of the Extra class license booklets and spent about fifteen minutes a day flipping through the cards and testing myself online. At some point I managed to pass the online exams with enough frequency that I plunked down the cash with a regular VE bunch, took the test and came out with the license.
A young fellow who had tried before to win the Tech ticket didn't do so good. I told him about my method and wished him luck.
Then I took the pile of cards and the book and gave 'em to Frank. Figured he would use 'em. He did, for a while. Then he waited for the Advanced ticket guys to get "grandfathered" (which you and I both know ain't gonna happen). Ain't heard peep one out of him yet about it beyond that.

In the meantime, you can get your ham license in a day. Knowing this and knowing how this works is not that big a deal to me. There are many people who look at ham radio as a public service first and an economically-encumbering affliction second. They want to be the disaster drill communications guys. And if you look at what stands for CB and try not to laugh about FRS, it makes perfect sense to see ham radio as a way of being a volunteering public service kind of person.
Of course there will be people who look at the "test in a day" schtick and get that little rise in the chest that marks a rise in blood pressure.
For those folks – the high blood pressure folks – ham radio is a technical hobby first. Everything else is 'cause, well, hams understand how to put up an antenna and build a radio out of a spoon, just like Captain Midnight. The thought of getting a license without being forced to learn CW (the Morse code) or memorize the formula for building a half-wave dipole just seems somehow sacreligious.
Sacreligious, of course, means that ham radio has the aura of priestly tradition behind it. And it does, easy enough: time was when the only guy could fix your Atwater Kent was the crazy shit next door with the wires comin' out his windows. Hams were the technos of the long-back, back before the InterWeb and PostModern spelling conventions.
But the simple fact to me is this: ham radio is a hobby, not a religion. Being a ham is fun. Being a ham requires a certain intuitive relationship with the laws of physics and electromagnetism. Being a ham is about having gut feelings about how radio waves ripple through the air and space around us, which gut feelings hams can use to actually communicate with each other over distance big and small. Being a ham, of course (and as I have said before) takes money & time and not a small amount of personal education. Sometimes hams teach each other but in the end it's the individual ham who does the studying and goes through the testing and, if successful, get the license to get on the air.

But being a ham, despite the petty priesthood that is considers itself to be, is not a religion. It is a hobby, a pastime, something you do with whatever extra cash you can steal from the family larder so you can spend time which you steal from your family or social obligations messing around with wires and parts and radio waves. That's all it is: a hobby. A pastime.

At which point we get back to the "ham license in a day" subject, my opinion being thus: Let it come down.

Ham radio depends on people getting into the hobby. The need to learn CW is today pretty much a cold fish. It's nice to know CW. It's not easy to learn CW. Some folks will forever suck at copying CW or even sending CW. CW is out of service around the world in even the most common emergency and general needs purposes. The US Coast Guard doesn't monitor CW emergency frequencies. Most of the world's governments have eliminated CW from ham radio license requirements. CW is ok, but it ain't gonna make ham radio a "clean" or "respectable" hobby any more than learning how to use the j operator in some calculus equation.
Hell, I don't even know what it means, that j thingie.
But if ham radio is gonna survive into the future, where CW don't mean jack, where public service means something, it's gonna have to get there by attracting people to the hobby.
And yes, there are folks who want the ticket dirt cheap and country simple. Thems you're always gonna have around.
But for the kid who didn't pass the test the same day I passed mine, perhaps the "ticket in a day" program is the way to go. The kid certainly seemed motivated enough. He took the test. He paid the fee. If he'd been able to pass the test, he might have gotten on the air with a little more enthusiasm than he will ever have three tests down the road when he finally gets it.
So for peeps like that, the "ticket in a day" schtick is just fine by me. After all, with me and my flash cards and my online pre-test and test prep, I ain't much different from the guy who plunks down the cash, does the day-long and then gets the 70% passing score to get on the air.
I just took a little longer going from Novice to Extra, that's all.
The only disparaging thing I can say about the "ticket in a day" thing is how much the one-day wonders will miss by way of having been around hams often enough to know how the rest of it works. No test will ever give the beginner the hands-on experience of really talking to somebody else. No test gives the beginner the basic background rules, the etiquette, the operating procedural and protocol practice that comes from plain out listening in.
That listening in, of course – and I'll gladly accept the critique – is not necessarily missing from the "ticket in a day" program. Maybe the one-day wonders have already listened in. If so they win the prize. And ham radio gets a beginner with some time behind the speaker.
And another person who wants to be there, on the air.
Just like I was once, over three decades ago.

What's the Bag Here?

2007-01-15T11:03:00.000-08:00

I'm still working through the part where my son plunked down what must have been close to $600 for a ham radio doodad for which he really has no need to know what's up and then handed it to me on Christmas morning as if I were gonna say "Ah, gee! Thanks, son! How whatever."
Simple fact is, it don't work that way.
I'm still flabbered and aghastulated. The FT-817ND is a tremendous little radio. It's as good as anything I had QRP-stylee back before the son in question was born. It beats the Argonaut I had and it's at least as good as the HW101 I had when he was born. I can hear people talk on it and I can talk on it myself. It plays all the bands I grew up with and it gives me 2m like I learned about when I was working at Drake and didn't even have the cash to go for a TR22 back then. Plain & simple it's a nice radio and an absolutely wonderful Christmas surprise gift.
Small & portable. I can take it to the beach & I can listen to Radio Habana.
And yeah, I like it.

Only one big problem, though.

Everywhere I look for some kind of kit bag to put it in I keep running into the same damn problem that's part and parcel of what's up in ham radio today: ain't no bag big enough for a radio this small.

The two kick-ass aluminum brief cases that I have – both about the same size – are, for want of a better word, too big. Yeah. I have two boxes with aluminum all over 'em look like I'm a mule for the Mongolian mafia that have so much room in 'em that I can put two compete '817 stations in one of 'em. Of course, into those two same cases I can put in each a complete IC-706Mk2G station, were it not for the fact that one case would hold the radio, power supply and AH-4 automatic ATU and the other'n would be tied up in cables & whatzits to make the contents of the first case work nice together. And if I get really whacked, I would put the brand new linear power supply (a nice & heavy Samlex SEC25) in the car just to balance the load & have a grand time at the beach being mean to the electrons.

Now, if I want to take the FT-817ND to the beach, that's simple. One case all by itself will hold everything, including a 3A linear supply. (Are you getting the impression that I like linear supplies, mainly 'cause they work quietly, even if they are heavy as hell?) But that's just the deal: I'm looking for something a little more portable. As in: I want a bag or whatever into which I can put all the stuff I need for the '817 beach-side next to the cooler full of Negra Modelos.
Yeah, I know. There's those rig bags you can get from the Power Port Store what are supposed to hold everything but the solar panel you're taking on that walk in the altiplano next week when you look for the ghost of Che Guevara in the Andes. I've seen 'em. No, not the ghosts. Just the bags and I'm just a little bit too close to wimpy to think of putting one of them doodads on my back where I can't even see the radio.
I gotta be able to see the radio.
So I've looked and I've seen and I've tried to get some idea of what the hell it's gonna take for me to be able to just pull a bag up next to the beach chair under the umbrella next to the cooler and have some radio fun. And to be quite upfront about this, the WorldPackII just looks too much like I'm doing that hike up to Machu Pichu.
All, however, is not lost.
First there is a wide variety of bags a normal dolt can find by forgetting about the name or the type or service the bag is supposed for form.
There are camera bags, such as the Samsonite Journey camcorder bag, which is a nice bag and which will hold all the equipments except the antenna poles &c. It's cheap (about $20) and it's a very tight fit.
And there's the Kodak portable printer bag which has the necessary room but which, like the Samsonite bag above, does not put the radio & ancillaries in a position for "immediate" operating.
I'd have to pull the various bits of the station loose from the bag & hose 'em up together, which, although not a problem for transportation, is a problem for ultimate & easy "on the air" immediacy.
There are also "flight bags," which apparently come in a variety of general sizes and levels of suspicion. I can get a flight bag for just about any budget, up to and including the $200 price range. Yipes.
And last but not least, there police tactical bags.

Seriously.

There are at least three manufacturers of heavy duty, multi-pocketed, multi-use bags and baglets focused on providing a once-and-for-all stash for everything I would ever want, were I a member of the gendarmerie.
The main operator in this field is Maxpedition, a company whose sales slogan is "hard-use gear." Most of their stuff is pointed at the military & law enforcement part of the societal ethic. Heavy duty canvas bags and pouches that can be folded, zipped, pinned & posted to other bits and pieces of the product line.
My favorite is the Versipack line, out of which the "Toadstool" pack looks the most interesting, if only 'cause they show it worn as a belt pack facing forward (with one of their other products appended). Unlike the run-of-the-mill camera &c bags, this stuff is expensive. At least if you buy 'em from the manufacturer. Deals exist in the electronic outlet mall.
Another doodad that looked interesting comes from another firm. The "Tactical Bail Out Gear Bag" has enough room for more stuff than I'd think of. And at $40 it ain't too bad of a price. The sales point is the bag having been designed for and put into use by the Los Angeles police department. Simple up: there are a bunch of pockets front, rear and side into which I could put just about every damn thing I have for the portable station.
The main draw for me is being able to put the Maxpedition bags into the Tac bag and then just hauling out the pre-set stuff from the larger bag, knowing that all the other crap I have would fit in there.
Except for the DK9SQ fiberglass antenna mast. That one still has to travel in its own personal bag, although I could always use the straps on the tac bag to hold it to the top. And that's just that one tac bag.
'Cause there's also the 5-11 Tactical Patrol Gear Bag, available from L.A. Police Gear. This puppy ain't as big as the other tac bag but it's got these imposing places for your badge & ID, plus other stuff. And it's a little more self-contained (as in: the pockets are inside as well as outside, balanced, you might say). And it cost's $50.

So maybe by now you can see my problem: I can't make decisions based on JPGs. Yeah, they look nice on screen & all that, but I still have to see how the stuff goes together. I gotta touch it to believe it.
This doesn't leave me without a vision, however.
First off, the "Toadstool" bag/pouch gives me the option of loading the radio & ATU & antenna wire (and probably key &/or mic) into one bag, which subsequently gets put in the larger tac bag, along with all the necessities. Things like battery charger, extra batteries, extra manual ATU, extra antenna doodads (including the Maldol miniature antenna system), various cables, adapters &c, and maybe even a small solar panel.

Yeah, a solar panel.

See, what I'm shootin' for here is a complete station in a bag. Self-contained, nominally self-sufficient, nearly field-reparable, one-shot set-up. I just plunk the main bag down, pull out the station in a bag, hose up the antenna wires & the mast even and then sit down next to the cooler under the beach umbrella with my clip-on sunglasses, ready to watch the traffic.
Did you say "emergency"?
Yeah, right.
I'm about as much into "emergency" radio as I am into putting out flight deck fires with cow blood proteins. It ain't that I don't think I'm gonna do that; it's more like I figure there are lots of youngsters out there with ham radio tickets, a handful of dedicated CBers (and the FRS emergency freaks [as if]) who can do the job straight up.
I did my time in the USN, thank you very much. And the last radio I blew up was the HW-101 in the middle of a blizzard traffic session on the OSSBN. 'Bout 1975 or so. One loud pop, a puff of smoke & that radio was toasted up good.
Never got it workin' again.
It's pretty obvious to me – bein' as how I don't get involved in emergency comm stuff any more – that I'm doing this 'cause of a childish dream I had back around 1969 or '70 when I was in a tropical paradise with a cheap station & good weather most of the time: I wanna sit on the beach & play radio.

With a solar panel, a 2Ah battery, the basic radio layout & some wire up the pole & into the air. Talk to Ivan in Byaloslavinsk Prefecture about his ex-soviet hegemony station and how he has fun finding tubes to keep the damn thing running.

Or have you not read my rant about ham radio being "rich, white man's hobby"?

Well, it is. And any proof you need of that is in Kristen Haring's book Ham Radio's Technical Culture, which I am recommending yet again to anyone who's been in the hobby long enough to learn to shave and use an electric tooth brush.
And if you think this is beginning to tend toward the oligarchs & the egalitarians again, you're probably right. Worst part for me is having to admit that I am playing a rich, white man's game with a rich, white man's hobby 'cause I am a rich white man with time and leisure suits enough to even think of going to the beach to play radio while people are getting hacked to death in Thailand 'cause they ain't Muslims.
Yeah, that too.
In the end I'm going with the "Toadstool" bag and then getting the tactical "bail out" bag, all of which should hold just about everything I need to sit beach-side, drink a couple Negra Modelos over the course of a late morning and talk to Sven in Umeå about his adventures with misogynist religionist foreigners raping school girls who don't dye their hair black so the rapists will leave them alone. Scarfs and all.

Got that?

Time Machine

2007-01-06T13:49:00.000-08:00

Back in 1972, probably near the end of it, I had saved up enough cash to get a Ten Tec Argonaut, one of those "high-tech" solid state radios just coming out around then. I'd known about the radio since 1971, when, in the middle of the ocean blue, I still had a subscription to QST" and could read the adverts. There were another couple hams in the radio gang and we made occasional comments about what we might be able to do an Argonaut. None of us imagined that we might be able to have a solid signal QSO with anybody. It was more a pygmy in the imagination.
So there I was, in my parents' basement, with an Argonaut hooked up to a couple lantern batteries & a 75m dipole fed with 300 Ω television cable. I had just gotten off work a few minutes earlier and was sitting in the basement, tuning around, on the off chance that I'd find some interesting conversations going on.
At some point I came across a couple voices that sounded like they might be folks my age. Of course, "my age" at that time was chronologically 26; cognitively I was probably about 12 or 13. Slow learner.
The folks I heard sounded like a bunch of hippies. They were pretty free thought, go-with-the-flow sorts, conversationalists who didn't spent much time on ham radio technobabble. They had obviously known each other for a while.
I gave a call at some point during a lull in the conversation and one of the folks came back to me. Just as I was about to respond, one of the voices came in loud and clear, asking another voice what the hell they were talking about.
The other voice responded with "Shut the hell up Gary! I'm trying to talk to some guy runnin' five Watts."
That would have been me.
So I had a few words between different members of the group, including Gary, who was suitably surprised at my meager, yet audible, signal.
It was late; I was tired. I went to sleep.

That was it, pretty much, for the rest of the small amount of time I spent playing radio at my folks' digs after I got out of the USN. I probably ran into the gang here and there over the course of the next couple months, but eventually I lost track or didn't have an antenna that would cover the distance.
QRP SSB on 75m is not for the faint hearted or easily disappointed. It is great for arch-pessimists and cynics like myself. But still, I didn't keep track of the gang or even the frequency and my life went on its merry, befuddled, blundering way through marriage and the birth of my first son in March of 1975.

Then one afternoon as I sat in front of my badly assembled but still miraculously functional HW101, I ran into the gang again. This time I caught 'em on the air with a real net. Like a regular net with a NCS and a bunch of folks "with or without traffic please call" and all that. After the net was over – since I didn't have traffic & was not disposed to even think of helping with the passing of any – I called one of the other stations and checked in with the post-net hangers-on. Which was a sizeable crowd.
I joined in the conversation a bit here and there and signed off when dinner time at the hacienda rolled around.
The next night I was on the air again with the gang, this time checking in on the regular net. Sometimes the traffic was pretty obviously self-generated, as if the statistics of net operation submitted to the local net coordination guru might really be of significance to anybody but other folks who took the set up more seriously than most of us on the net obviously did.

Once I was a regular in the gang, I showed up for net time and for the fairly frequent "Late Night Radio" sessions where we all sat around in various states of cognitive dishevelment and ranted about whatever we thought was goofy enough to deserve comment. Not being as witty as some of the gang, I generally just laughed outrageously at the jokes and took notes on the arcane abbreviations we used to discuss our adventures in psychodelia-land.
The day after the first child was born, I announced to the group my change of life status and got a self-generated message from one of the guys which added to the net operations statistics and congratulated Cid & me on our change of fortune.

That was thirty odd years and some ago. By this time the son for whom Cid & I were congratulated by Zeke is thirty-one, sneaking up on thirty-two. Just a few days earlier he had surprised me at Christmas morning by giving me something totally unexpected.
Back in September, when the subject of Christmas presents came up, I'd suggested that I'd like a time machine. That's what I was expecting, since the suggestion had been answered with a "I can fix that."
Instead of the plastic time machine kit that I'd expected, I opened up a package containing a Yaesu FT-817. And now, thirty-odd years later, here I was, responding to Rick on a radio that runs five Watts. Made for a very interesting evening as I switch back and forth between the '718 and the '817.

Even Gary had to admit that it was pretty phenomenal hearing me with an S-9 signal from my little surprise box radio. Sometimes, no matter how far you go, you end up back at the beginning again. Even with a time machine.

Holy Shit! A New Radio!

2006-12-27T09:32:00.000-08:00

I'm still in shock. Seriously. Of course, if you'd been sitting where my son was on Christmas morning you might have thought that I'd cut off my fingers opening presents. I told somebody about it this morning and said that I cussed like a sailor for five minutes I was so shocked.
Now that the kids are old enough to have more patience we can sleep until about seven or eight on Christmas morning. Before that, when the kids were more greedy, we'd have to go through the "Go back to bed! We'll get up in a minute!" and the "Jesus Christ! It's three in the morning! Go back to bed!" at intervals between five minutes and eight minutes, starting at about midnight.
The eldest used to get so wired up about Christmas and what he might be getting that he'd get sick to his stomach on Christmas eve and spend the whole night throwing up.
Seriously. He was that serious.
Over the course of something like ten or twelve years that behavior was replaced by the common mode of a more adult psyche, someone who might wake up about six in the morning but would have more sense than to come bother the parents. That meant that we'd be awakened up about seven by the sound of someone sorting through the presents so that all the boy's gifts would be on one side of the tree. Tested by rattling, of course.
We are thus so lucky now.
If Cindy hadn't had to get up to start the roasting and baking of large chunks of meat for the family gathering, I probably could have slept until nine.

After Cindy got the roast in the oven and had turned on all the cooking appliances to check the power line drop to the hacienda, and after I'd helped bring all the cold stuff in from the outside cooler (the trunk of the van in the garage), Cid fixed breakfast. Pancakes, sausage, coffee. All of that.
Then the eldest and his wife got up, the young'n (now 19) got up and came downstairs and, after breakfast, we sat around and opened our family gifts.
Cid passed out the stuff.
I've learned to wait until everybody's got theirs and then turned to on the stack next to me on the floor and on my lap.
First thing I opened was a Samlex SEC-25 power supply. I'd asked for that 'cause I was getting tired of having to go through a million modifications and little doodads connecting this to that when we went on vacation. I figured, all else fails, it could power the IC-718, which has been running on the old PS7 supply that I've already rehabilitated a couple times. I opened that one and set it aside.
There was a book. I knew it was a book by the way it was wrapped. You can tell. The spine rounded out and those shape edges of the outside corners on the paper. I'd forgotten that I'd asked for it: Kristen Haring's Ham Radio's Technical Culture (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007). I'd seen a blurb on Amazon about it and thought that it might make interesting reading. Something besides the mythic background to the Judeo-Christian delusion &c. Ain't got started on that one yet 'cause I'm still working on the Bible.

And there was that next gift.

Early in October I believe, maybe in September when we celebrated Cindy's birthday with the young'ns & their connections, I'd put out my wish list for Christmas. It was simple. It was only a range of things, and I would take one out of all if that's all they could manage. Didn't look that bad:

A time machine.
An end to religion and superstitionism throughout the universe.
A Yaesu FT-817 QRP multimode/multiband transceiver (with suggested vendors)
An Elecraft K1 transceiver, even if I did have to build it myself (with ordering information).
Forty to fifty feet of Rohn 25 tower (with vendor directions).
Forty to fifty feet of Universal Aluminum Tower, with a vendor suggestion.
A Samlex SEC25 power supply (with vendor suggestion).

I submitted this list, as I said, rather early. When the subject came up at the birthday dinner, my son said that he would look into the time machine. Cindy said there was not going to be any tower put up in our backyard (she has no idea how wrong she is, or was, even back then or now). She also said that I didn't need another goddamn radio. So I figured I was in for the power supply.
Which is why I had no problems opening that package.
Then I picked up the box that Ian had handed me.
Owing to my son's abilities, I figured that I would either get a cardboard box with a clock on it and some dials and badges with the claim that the box was really a time machine. That or Ian would hand me a box with the parts for a plastic model of a time machine such as had been used in one or the other of the movies based on the H.G. Wells story, Time Machine, one of which movies I have seen and the other I have not, even though I have it on DVD, mainly 'cause they don't take me to movies any more.

I freaked out in Toy Story, OK?

So I pick up the box from Ian. It's heavy but I know he's good at loading stuff up. It didn't rattle – not that I rattled it, although I did notice that, because of its heft, it didn't seem to contain loose parts. So I laid it on my lap and read the card.
I pulled the ribbon off. Evidently they'd done some serious work on making this wrapping job look professional. Or at least hard to undo. So the ribbon was off. Then I tore a piece of the paper away. Then another piece. Then I saw the label on the box.

My first reaction, which, if you ask Cindy is common mode for me, is to burst out in curses. Blue, heathen, vulgar, horrible, indecent, unspeakable, vile, deep-down-and-dirty sailor French curses such as you might hear from a raging drunk on a pier. And that's what happened. My blood pressure went up. My face flushed – I could feel the heat of my blood at the surface of my body – and I cursed. Goddamn sonovabitch Jesus-Christ-Almighty-on-a-Venusian-lizard-boy's-scrotum cursed. Unbuckingfelievable cursed. For at least two if not five minutes, goddammit. Jesus. I could not believe my goddamn sonsabitches fawk! eyes.

I had in my lap a box containing what I consider one of the more interesting and probably fight-starting pieces of low-power ham radio gear anyone can spend their time and money on. And I didn't have to build the little goddammit.
It was a Yaesu FT-817ND.
From 160m through 70cm with various holes demanded by international law & whatever else drives the consumer electronics and ham radio manufacturing business. AM, FM, SSB, CW, and via the holes in the back of the radio, data, RTTY, digital computer card modes & all that. Two hundred memories. Already programmed for the 60m band, channelized & all that. Microphone, "ducklette" antennas for 6m, 2m & 70cm. Wall-wart power supply/charger, 1400mAh battery pack (& the plastic doodad to hold eight 1.5V AA Alkaline batteries [or eight 1.2V AA NiMH batteries of my own choice]). All of that. Like as such you could put in your car and not have to build a separate mount for an extra alternator to keep the battery used for the radio charged, which is where I'd be if I were serious about using the IC-706Mk2G in the car, which I ain't.
Goddammit.
Jesus.
Frank. Hell, yes! Frank even for cryin' out loud I could have kissed the boy. Ok, man. Ok, young man but not that kind of youngman.
Sitting in my lap. The radio. Not the Youngman. Unbuckingfelievable. Shit.

After I got over the surprise and took the box & its contents upstairs so I could play with the goodies before the rest of the family got here, I figured out how to get the battery doodad in, set it up to charge & whatever else.
Then the food was ready, everybody was here and I was still surprised as hell. Shocked even.

Cindy & her brother, Don, had spent Christmas Eve in the kitchen. Cindy's a dynamite cook, an art learned at the hand of her mother & grandmothers, women who's families on the farm knew the value of keeping people warm, fed & healthy. Don obviously picked up the talent too. He's the barbecue master of the clan, a former meat department manager at a variety of locally-owned grocery stores (the sorts of places that are getting wal-marted, meijersized & cubbed to death these days). Together in the kitchen, Don & Cid can churn up the most remarkable feasts. At Christmas time – especially during die Speisezeit ("eating time") of the year – they are probably jointly responsible for all the hyperglycemia-induced nodding-off post-dinner comas in the family.
Between the kitchen & the dining room, Cid had set out the roast beef, baked ham, potato soup, green bean casserole, a couple trays of cheeses, pickled veggies, Don's fancy meatballs, different kinds of bread & various smør, devilled eggs (brought by Debbie, Cindy's youngest brother's widow, as every year just like Doug liked 'em), wines & glasses and silverware & plates & all the other trimmings.
Eating like this is a family tradition, see?
But there was this radio upstairs callin' to me.
Every once in a while I'd go upstairs to make sure I wasn't dreaming, fiddle with the knobs and buttons and realized that I would have to program all the channel/frequencies on the other two radios (both Icoms). And that I'd have an extra 100 memory channels to play with. And that would mean that I could put the entire HT memory block (all the local 2m repeaters & the commonly-used 2m FM simplex frequencies) on the '817 too.
I think it was about then that I realized that I now have two radios with the same last three digits in their nomenclature, transposed end-to-end: the IC-718 HF transceiver (about which I cannot say enough) and the FT-817 transceiver (about which I am still learning, four days later). I took a quick look online for the owners manual in PDF, downloaded that & looked at a couple other things and then I went back to the food.
Don & Fran had given me a couple books: Amir D. Aczel's The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World (Harcourt, 2001) & Joy Hakim's The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way (Smithsonian, 2004), the last obviously published against the grain of Afrocentrism's claim that the white man stole all his knowledge from the black man, muthafuh-er, shit.
Gordon & Brenda, knowing that I be the cat lady o' Medway . . . Sorry, I have a hard time slippin' out of ideological Ebonics, cracker-ass mutha . . Gordon & Brenda gave me Cooper & Noble's 277 Secrets Your Cat Wants You to Know: A Cat-alog of Unusual and Useful Information (Ten Speed Press, 1997) and Claire Bessant's The Cat Whisperer: The Secret of How to Talk to Your Cat (Barrow's [London], 2001). Cid grabbed the Cat Whisperer 'cause she always watches Cesar Milan's "Dog Whisperer" program on the tube, mainly 'cause I think it tells her how humans screwed up wolf society good with taking in the animal as a companion. Somethings – like cats – should always keep their wild side out front. Dogs don't get to do that. So the cats stay away from Cid, unless it's to steal heat from her at night by sleepin' on her.
Debbie gave me a bottle of hooch for my coffee, matching a bottle of irish (whiskey) cream that Don had made special for the day.
And my son gave me a $600 radio.
Just like that.
And I'm still in shock.

Such was our Christmas. Surprised the hell out of me. And now, when Cindy goes walking with the GPS doodad I got her – she's always getting lost in the woods – I'll be able to take my '817 along, just in case I need to talk to somebody in Australia on a sunny but chilly afternoon in the middle of a western Ohio wetlands project. And I'll be able to play radio at the beach & the Samlex power supply that I'd bought mainly to take the IC-706 to the beach (since the remote line to the AH-4 auto ATU radiates the other Samlex switch mode powersupply noise) can stay at home.
Nice radio. Stay.
Goddammit.

73 & Happy Whatever You Call Make No Never-Mind to Me.

Your Signal Is Weak & Puny; It Has No Honor!

2006-12-18T12:26:00.000-08:00

I remember once getting my Hallicrafters S38E tuned up on the bands above 15 MHz. I remember that probably because I was able to tune in Radio Sweden. I thought it was interesting that I could hear Radio Sweden but I never heard Radio Norway. Here I was, home from school 'cause of the weather and here was Radio Sweden coming out of the speaker. But no Radio Norway.
Hearing Norwegian was one of the main reasons that I weedled and squealed and whined until Dad bought me the S38E, but I never could find Radio Norway, or Norsk Rikskringkasting as it was known in Norwegian anywhere. Eventually I did hear NRK, but only through horrible auroral flutter. I could just barely make out a word here or there. Nowadays I don't have to tune the S38E to NRK. It ain't on the air any more.
I can hear perfect Norwegian online, even if I can still only make out one word here or there.
But that morning listening to Radio Sweden was not without its teaching moments. I think it was right about then that I began to understand how absolutely mercurial HF propagation truly is.
Sure, I knew about the ionosphere. Everybody who read Popular Electronics and had a WPE callsign did. Heck, we knew more about the ionosphere and radio wave propagation then than any group of humans had ever known before. It was the International Geophysical Year, see, and every time we turned a page in the magazines there was another lesson on physics sitting there waiting for us. That the same information – albeit wrapped in the precision of high-ended mathematics that confuses me like a Mongolian mind-meld to this day – was being discovered and reasoned out by scientists wasn't really all that impressive to me.
I was impressed by hearing radio stations from the other side of the world. I was impressed with the way Romanian sounded like Italian spoken by Bulgarians and Greeks. I was impressed by the tons of weirdly titled and inscrutably boring books that Radio Peking sent me, among which being a copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung which I have to this day, paper tiger reactionary though I may be.
And yet, for all that I was impressed and for all the strange political views that I heard and thought about (which scared my parents big-time), and for all I thought I knew about propagation, when the bands went to shit after the stunning conditions during the IGY, I was, to put it quite bluntly, madder 'n hell.
It just didn't seem fair that my radio would become nothing more than a warm sheet metal brick a couple years after hearing Radio Sweden in the morning, day after day, dag efter dag. I went outside to see if some government agent had cut down my antenna, puny though it was. I got another radio & did comparison testing. I tuned and listened and got to the point where it just wasn't worth it any more. Then I went to college.

I remember those particular moments in my attachment to radio today mainly because what I should have learned then I have never learned to this day: ionospheric conditions change daily. Hell, they change by the hour and the minute. It's only by luck that we manage to keep up with this crap and have long-haul shortwave communications systems at all. And, if you get real tough with yourself over it, vagaries in the reflectivity of the ionosphere are the main reason that we now have all those cell phone-watchin' communications satellites in space.
If you can't count on the ionosphere, why the hell not have your own personal ionosphere up there, ready to repeat back to earth any damn thing you say to it. And aside from the fact that those satellites have cost us billions of dollars, it's been a pretty good deal.
I can listen to NRK on the web now, knowing that the sound of norsk som det snakkes is crystal clear & there for me to listen to as long as the computer's on and the satellites are working. And we all know how well they work . . . at least until the sun pukes out a finger of radioactive gas and a stream of subatomic particles and bulletholes everything between it and you and me what ain't protected by a magnetic field.

And before I get sidetracked by the simple fact that this planet has life because it has an active geology and a fairly reliable magnetic field, just think about the poor little hunks of metal to which we have entrusted our communications systems, our banking systems and our general all-around knowledge databases.
We can't trust the ionosphere so we put up satellites.
We can't trust the ionosphere because it is horribly well-linked to the output of the sun on chunks of the spectrum that we've only known about for the past fifty years or less.
We can't trust the sun because, after reaching its middle-age as stars go, it is starting to sputter a little bit more than it did when the dinosaurs walked around and the moon was 10,000 miles closer to the planet and days were less than 20 hours long.
And since we can't trust the sun, we have to worry about the health of our satellite systems, which we put into space because we can't trust the ionosphere because we can't trust the sun, which lack of faith reckons with our attempts to have our own private ionosphere in the shape of communications satellites.

You still with me here?

Now just a couple days ago the sun spit out a fairly big gob of radioactive stuff. By the book it was an X3.5 solar flare. To quote the source for you,

"Energetic protons >100MeV began arriving at Earth less than an hour later, traveling a good fraction of the speed of light.
>30MeV is considered ionizing radiation. On the sunlit side of earth right now, the D-layer is highly ionized, causing a total HF blackout to 20MHz"

The effect of the flare blew all the ionospheric reflectivity out to end of the electromagnetic spectrum where TV stations used to live (before cable). The possibility that the proton stream (and that was only part of the flare's output) would get through the magnetic field and down to earth with the rest of us squishy little organic meatsacks means that we could have had power blackouts and radiation exposure that would make last summer minor sunburned shoulders look like uncooked fish. The fact that along the way it silenced scientific satellites meant to keep track of such solar events is one thing. That it could have blammoed the power grid is another. That any such event – or, worse yet, an even stronger one – would be potentially life-threatening is enough to make anyone with any sense see the fragility in the sun shine.

For the you-and-me types who just want to get on the air and talk with their friends, the effects of the flare were frustrating. People whose signals are usually right up there above the noise & the lightning crashes were barely above mental telepathy. For folks like me, with less than 100 W of power into a crummy antenna, I could only sit and listen to the evanescent voices coming and going in the background noise before turning off the set-up and going to bed.
But I was struck even more by the memory of that long-ago winter morning when conditions were so good that listening to Radio Sweden was like listening to the local 50kW broadcast station. But then Radio Sweden ran a 500kW transmitter into a very directional antenna system. Under even moderately good conditions I would have been able to hear them, although not as solidly as I did that morning.
And there's your only answer.
When ionospheric reflectivity is moderately good, my 100W transceiver is good copy among the folks with whom I converse late on Friday nights most weeks. They can hear me well enough and I can easily hear them.
Most of the other folks are running at least 500W and many of them have much better antennas than I will ever get money to waste on. Some of the folks have home brew amplifiers capable of much more than the legal limit of 1.5kW peak envelop power. This is because, when you get right down to it, building an amplifier is a very simple thing, once you get past the cost.
The circuitry for a grounded-grid amp, probably the most simple HF amp anyone can build, is just easy to put together. Sure, you need to pay attention to voltage ratings of the parts and you have to use the right size pipe for the inductors in the tank circuit and the power supply voltages will kill you quick. But beyond the $800 tubes and the $400 tuning capacitors and maybe the $2000 worth of power supply parts, anyone can put a grounded-grid amp together.
I've built two. The first was a three-tube 200W amp for 11 meters. The other, well, the parts were pretty much assembled in the box for me by the previous owner of the parts. It wasn't a bad amp. It's still around. All I have to do is clean it up some & do some maintenance on the low power wiring and the input circuitry.
And there are always people who have built some amp and are willing to build another for someone else. Just like I did.
And then there's the ones that show up on eBay.

When I come across "big" amps such as the one linked to above or the one that I wrote about earlier, I kinda cringe. I cringe mainly because I know that, if I had the money & no family obligations, I'd succumb to the purchase price pretty easily. Some of the folks on Late Night Radio have said they's spend that much easily, were it not for the fact that they have already spent that much easily for what they got.
Looking at one of these beasts, I think of how nice it must be to have a collection of tools (like a complete metal working shop, drill press, lathe & assorted punches, pry-bars and all the necessary electronic test gear [including a 2.5gHz spectrum analyzer]) would make putting something like it together. It really does look that simple.
All you need is the tools and the time.
And the money to afford the tools, time & sales of the end product.
Which is where my nimble fingers fail me & all I can think is how much goddamn work it would be for me to put something like this together. And certainly not in one afternoon of frenetic activity & violent cursing.
Nah. Too much work.
And yet, there it is, something like 10kW of hard-core ionospheric testing, sittin' on a floor somewhere out east, waiting for someone with less self-control than I (and a hellluvalot more disposable cash) to just drop by with the truck and take it home.
So the neighbors could hear it.
And that's where it stops me.

One of the horrors of ham radio is having neighbors who, for want of a better explanation, have their own sound systems or telephone systems so cheaped up that any little RF outside of the microwave in the kitchen and the WiFi crap on their computer gets blammoed by 100 W of RF. Even with a beautifully clean & well-tended antenna system and all the highest caliber equipment meeting and often exceeding all the specs that the government puts on ham radio gear, somehow the neighbors hear it.
They hear it on their hifi.
They hear it on the telephone.
They hear it and see it on their television.
They hear it on the toaster and the oven and the cat and the dog and half of the teeth in their heads and sometimes on the electric tooth brush too.
They hear it all the time.
Even when I'm not on the air.
At which point we get back to "he said/she said" where I say I wasn't on the air and they say that I'm lying and the next thing I know they've hack-sawed all my stuff into pieces in the back yard where their sociopathic children try to sneak up on my cats and strangle 'em for kicks.
And that is why Cindy doesn't want me to put up a tower or fix the 1kW amplifier or even get a 500W one: 'cause we're moving.
She's been talking about this moving for the past couple years now and every time I get started on making something more or less permanent as antennas go (like a tower), she starts talking about how we're moving.
The last place we lived at I don't think we were there for five years and I had a tower and we moved.
This place we've been at for 21 and I don't see us making any true effort toward moving, other 'n that 1000ft2 dumpster that we rented a couple years back and filled up to almost over the top. That's as close as we've gotten to moving.
So this summer, like it or not, amplifier or not, I'm putting up a tower. And fixing the amp and getting another one to sit here on the desk and keep the room warm.
'Cause you can't trust the ionosphere 'cause you can't trust the sun & I didn't get into ham radio 'cause I needed a cell phone. And you may ask me now and maybe get an answer later, but eventually it all comes down to this: if I'm really lucky I'll get 20 more years good. In that time I intend to have as much fun as I can, which includes collecting coins and old radios, playing saxophone as much as I can find time for and getting on the air with a bunch of old codgers like myself until it's time for the estate auction. And when I get to that, I won't be aware of anything from that moment forward and the rest of it will be somebody else's problem.
But I'll have fun getting there. And all because on some winter morning over 45 years ago I ended up listening to Radio Sweden, something that make for a strange and subtle irony in the stream of subatomic particles that swirl through space and make life interesting for the Late Night Radio crew. So there.

Late News on the Morse Code Front

2006-12-15T19:41:00.000-08:00

It's a nominally cold December night. My son & his girlfriend are downstairs watching Cid watch the Cylons bargain with the humans over who gets to go home first. One of the live-in female cats jumped on my lap and vented plasma, for which she ended up on the floor quick. The other cat is torturing Christmas tree ornaments or estimating flight speed to leap from the floor to the top of the window frames.
The bands are broke between here and here, somebody has a diathermy machine running somewhere around here and there was an aurora last night. Bets are off on whether or not there will be a session of LNR this evening, what with the band bein' broke and the new band allocations having just come into effect yesterday at midnight-plus-one.
Look here for the exact details in living color.

And then there's the grand news via the American Radio Relay League that the FCC had mentioned, just as the office doors closed for the day, that they were going to eliminate the Morse code (CW) test from all amateur radio licenses in the very near future. (More information in a more expanded sense is available from the ARRL website link above.)

One way or the other, the CW thread has been beaten and flayed so many times by so many individuals and organizations that it's hardly worth even worrying about. From the hither-and-thither nature of the InterWeb we know that many countries do not worry about the Morse requirement for amateur radio licenses.
Why should they?
Kenya, New Zealand, France, Japan, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and even Papua/New Guinea no longer demand CW proficiency for amateur licenses with HF operating privileges. (If the tech-talk is over your head, I'm sorry. That's what Google is for.)
In addition, the ITU ended the Morse competency requirement for commercial radio licenses many years back. Nobody stands emergency CW watch on 500 kHz any more. Nobody listens for distress calls on 3.106, 3.120, 4.140, 4.790, 6.330, 6.210 or 11.205 MHz any more. It's not required by international law. Satellite emergency beacons that hang on the side of every life boat are more reliable and just as effective. Unless you're dealing with Muslim pirates in the oceans around the Arabian peninsula, which is another story.

So CW's dead. Or so you would think, should you happen to be one of the folks who see this as a curse upon ham radio and a blot upon the American way of life. Maybe.
To me, it's the end of an era, yes.
To me, it's like my father's realization that everything he knew about printing, everything he'd learned about setting type by hand, running a Linotype machine, hand feeding a platen press, all of that experience and time spent learning had been replaced by web fed offset presses that worked faster & cleaner than anything he'd ever seen in his 50-odd years of being a pressman and journalist.
He'd shake his head in dismay if he saw what I can get out of this machine today, this box of fan-blown dust-eating off-the-shop-floor computer & a printer I got for $50 surplus. He'd be amazed at the color photography that Cid can do with her Vaio and her fancy photoprinter & camera.
And he have to smile & want to try his hand at the colors he could print, one up, one time through the machine. Who knows what he'd think of the InterWeb & all the marvelous (and admittedly horrible) typography that hangs out there in space 24/7, just waiting for someone to want to know how to make baklava from scratch or when the last moron blew himself up in a market stall in the middle of a stinking desert.
Yeah, the times have changed.
I've still got the cast iron press in the garage, type & paper & ink and all. Sometimes I even use it to print something. But I don't need it for envelopes any more and I barely need it for letterhead stationery.
And when you get right down to it, this computer does a damn sight better job of Morse than I ever would be able to see. You can tell that by the way it takes hand-sent CW and turns it into text. All the messed up inter-element spacing that turns K into T E T or H into I I. Such distinctions you and I (presuming you and I can copy CW in our heads) pass off & accommodate. Not so this computer.
And I suspect that, were I to be caught listening to CW from a computer and not a hand at a key or keyer, I might find the computer's precision just a tad bit to hard to copy. Not that I've tried.

If it does turn out that the CW requirement is toast, it'll be one more sign of the changes that are taking place in the hobbies of technology. Simply put, radio is pretty much old hat today. The old sales point of VHF & 2m repeaters as emergency points where a propertly-outfitted ham could just call for help with the touch-tone pad on his HT is gone and buried by today's cell phone technology.
Sure, when the WTC towers fell & all of New York's communications systems went to toast, ham were the only ones around to restore comms between emergency units & commands.
But they didn't do it with CW.
Even the present-day version of the ARRL's National Traffic System is old-fashioned in the light of text-messaging and international cell phones. And yes, I know that hams have all these new digital modes to play with. Sure.
But they're still not CW.
At which point we can only guess at what the end of CW as a requirement to a ham license is going to mean. Some will say that it means the CBers will be able to get licenses and the bands will all start to sound like 11 meters (and the chunks of spectrum space above and below 11 meters where the pirates and bootleggers hang out). Maybe.
I suspect that the clannish nature of ham radio will prevail in the main, with more folks getting on the air and discovering that "improper procedure" doesn't get you entry into an on-the-air conversation. (And don't ask me what "proper procedure" is. I've seen at least three changes in the way folks talk on the air since I got into ham radio in the late 60s. Used to be ham radio mimicked the military and commercial procedures. Now I'm not so sure, being as how the military I served in had radiomen with sparks on their sleeves. The sparks remain but there are no more "radiomen" in today's Navy.)

I expect – and so far my expectations have not been disappointed by reality – that hams in the US are going to be up in arms about the end of CW. Some will moan and pout and whine about how this is going to let the riff-raff in. Others will likely say that it's about time and nobody really uses that stuff seriously any more (which is to my mind almost true). Between the complaints and those who really don't give a shit, I'm betting that the end of CW will not do much more than slow down the inevitable day when ham radio will be a handful of folks on the air 'cause they just enjoy playing with the ionosphere, building their own equipment & terrorizing the neighbors with antenna projects. CW will remain a small faction of its own, as it really has been since about 1980 or so, when the world began to change in the face of the InterWeb and the rest of ham radio will get along with it. Nothing will change but the demographics and the numbers. Fewer people will get licenses. Fewer people will care. And the consumer-driven electronics market will adjust to the folks like me who enjoy the experiments & the awe of space weather and the weekly meeting of old friends on the air 'cause, basically, that's how we're geared.
Will I still play CW? Yeah, probably. I know it's the only way to really play QRP. And for all the challenge and fun, QRP itself is very easy. Very easy.
What will be is gonna happen. As an individual radio amateur, I could complain. I do feel it's a shame that this is happening, but I do know that this is just another inevitability, another peg in a game.

If ham radio survives as it is today and all is well in the future, fine. I won't be here to worry about it sixty or so years from now – unless I'm put in suspended animation and cryogenically preserved so some future ham can ask me what it was like when dinosaurs worked CW on 40m. The simple fact is that nothing human is going to stand, not in the long run. The Acropolis in Athens, the Hoosierdome in Indianapolis, the grocery store down the street, the Wal-Mart across from the Meijers in Huber Heights, even Huber Heights will not be here in another hundred thousand years. And in half a billion years from now this planet will be a blistered, cratered ball of dust facing a huge red star. No one will be here. All the Morse keys in the world will be melted down to sludge and soon enough there will be nothing to show of anything in this corner of the universe but a faint, blue, glowing cloud.

And that's a lot more important to me than the inconsequential nature of a silly little CW requirement for permission to waste time and energy having fun will ever be.

Antenna Time

2006-12-13T08:52:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite parts of ham radio is building, assembling and otherwise trying not to kill myself with antenna projects. For some reason stretching wire across the yard and, from time to time, getting it up in the air so I don't hang any of the neighbors is nearly as much fun as having a late night radio session with the truly but not criminally insane.
To see things any other way is, well, delusional.
There are only three things about antenna work that really get me pissed. The first is not being able to get wires, ropes, gin-poles, string, weights, slingshots, crossbows or any other contrivance to push a wire into the tops of the neighbors' trees to do the goddamn job I've collected them for. Nothing is more frustrating (or scary, if you're one of my neighbors) than to spend two hours trying to put a simple string with a weight on the end of it up and through a collection of easily-seen tree branches. It's so damn conniptionizing as to make everyone in the neighborhood collect their children and small pets into their houses & pull down all the window shades.
The second thing is having to restring, rewire, resolder, retie or re-anything that I've already done seven times in the past two hours. This is even more troubling if I have just spent that time trying to do anything in the "first problem" category.
The third thing that will make me damn near homicidal about antennas is having to stop in the middle of whatever the hell has already gotten me completely livid to the point that I can hear the blood whooshing through the veins around my ears. When I start a goddamn antenna project you better goddamn well not interfuckingrupt me or I will come right up to your face and stuff a ceramic insulator so far up your goddamn ass that you'll shit antenna parts for the rest of your goddamn shitty little life, do you hear me?
Well, do you? Goddammit!
And talking about all the shit that pisses me of when I work on antennas pisses me off almost as much as even having to think about getting pissed off working on goddamn antennas that should shit themselves into place just because that's what they're fawking supposed to do, goddammit to hell!
Jesus H. Christ Almighty Screamin' Shit! Don't you morons know anything?
I’m out here trying to put up a simple goddamn dipole with a plastic insulator in the middle and a chunk of open wire line hanging from it and every goddamn tree in the whole stinking neighborhood has to put every single leaf, twig, root and branch in my way, goddammit! Shit!

The only thing that's better than antennas is building antenna tuners.

Antenna tuners are such simple devices that you'd think building antenna tuners could be a national hobby to such an extent that no one would ever have to build an antenna tuner, it's so easy. All you need to do is find the right coil & capacitors with enough plate spacing so that they won't arc like a shipfitter's welding stick just checking for current.
It's that simple.
You get a coil with heavy enough wire and of the appropriately large enough diameter, with enough windings to tune a drafting pencil down to 173kHz. You get that.
Then you find a couple capactors as I have described above.
You take all that stuff and a couple wide-space ceramic wafer switches rated for, oh, let's say, three to five kilowatts. You find a nice front panel that you can mount all the stuff one and you get a chassis that will hold all the stuff and still give you clearance for things like insulators (for the antenna leads and the parts that must be held away from ground so they don't arc.
You get a 100 to 150 Watt soldering iron, some silver solder (which melts at a much higher temperature, which temperature you can expect to be on any contact surface within the circuit you're building) and the usual accouterment of hand tools.
And a drill press.
And a break and a shear. Those are real handy. Especially a heavy-duty shear that'll cut, well, rack panel.
And some hole punches.
Having that sort of stuff makes it easy to put together a really nice antenna tuner. Oh, and toroid cores. Lots of toroid cores. I use them for baluns, of course, but I also found that they are handy for the inductors in an ATU all by themselves. A handful of good size toroids, suitable for one to two kilowatts (the 2.5 inch diameter ones are good but expensive) will make a copy of the "Universal Transmatch" (pgs 583-585 in the 1978 edition of The Radio Amateur's Handbook [ARRL, Newington, CT]) so sweet that I almost forget how many times I burned the living shit out of my fingers with that sonovabitch soldering iron and those toroid sonsabitches. Dammit.

I know that there are people who think that messing with antennas is a real drag. They don't like being out in the sunlight, I guess. Or out in the middle of someplace when it's raining just enough so you slip and fall on theirr ass just going from the back door to wherever their station is with wet feet and all that. And I'll be the first to admit that its happened to me a couple times too.
Most of the time folks know to stay out of my way when that happens. Kinda like they do when I'm outside in the sunshine trying to get 35 ft of steel and aluminum pole to stand up straight just one goddamn time jesus. I never have understood why it is that I can't get a simple piece of metal to stand up straight, even if I did measure out the guy lines before hand and all that.
And I could understand their not wanting to be in my way or even out in the same yard when I get like this, putting up some sonovabitch piece of wire goddammit shit won't even sonovabitch jesus.

Maybe that's why I like working out a good system for my antennas. I never have felt that just one antenna was enough. Thus I go by the old saying "too much is always better than not enough goddammit!" Of course, it would be much easier if I didn't have to do all this shit all by my self.
All I'm askin' for here is just a little bit of assistance.
That and every goddamn thing in the yard not to get tangled in the wires and ropes and all the metal to fold damn near in half before I get it even off the angle of repose. Shit. It ain't nuclear physics here.Maybe I'll stop messing with antennas and try building an amplifier.

Egalitarianism Don't Count for Nawthin'

2006-12-09T15:59:00.000-08:00

Somewhere along the path between ham radio in the 1970s and what's left of it today is a quote of dubious origin, claiming that ham radio was the original Internet. It sounds nice to the ear and it makes ham radio seem a little less elitist, but it's not quite the truth. Ham radio was never like the Internet.
The only thing you need to get on the Internet is a computer and a telephone line. After that it's all software and passwords, all of which come on the computer when you go to the local Big Box Store and pick one out from the rows of flash and glitter.
It takes no special skill to hook up the phone line to the computer modem and most of the software will lead you through the steps in reasonable order and with a minor amount of expertise. Once the line is hooked up and you've set up your ISP account, the world is open to you. Everything you ever thought you wanted and tons of stuff that you never knew existed is at your fingertips. Porn. Religion. Cults. Islam. Build-Your-Own WMD, Racism, Music, Books, Weird Friends, UFOs, Frank. All there in front of you at the tap of a key & the paying of a check.
Ham radio, however, requires a license.
If you don't like the license, there's CB radio & bootleg.
And the comparison falls completely apart if you go back to when ham radio was getting geared up good, right after WW II. Not only did you need a license, you needed all kinds of extra crap. Transmitter, receiver, microphone & key. Antennas. Oh yeah, the antennas. And the room to put all this stuff together in hopes that the neighbors didn't have a television yet.
That's the way it was until about 1980, when hams began to figure out that they could use the computer their kids do chat on to do chat with RTTY.

At no time did ham radio ever take less than a license. At no time did it ever require the brute-force simplicity of even the most mediocre 486 µP. Ham radio always demanded a serious pile of equipment, interconnection and the obvious antenna, support, feedlines, tuners & all.
Looking at it that way, ham radio is to the internet like ET's "phone home" was to the Arecibo radio telescope.
And looking at it that way and even deeper, the egalitarian, open-for-business-sailor kind of free-for-all that the Internet has become bears no resemblance whatsoever for the ham radio license structure (especially in the USA) with it's frequency coverage privileges & "incentive licensing" elitism.
You can buy everything you need to get on the Internet at Sam's.
Even if you buy everything you need for a reasonable station at the Dayton Hamvention, you still have to have a license.
And every single license has its privileges and restrictions . . . unless you have an Extra Class license which pretty much lets you loose on the electromagnetic spectrum with whatever you can afford.

So ham radio is not now and has not been for a long time anything like the Internet.

Now I bring this up 'cause there's a gang of us ham radio loonies who have somehow survived the 60s and the ravages of time such that we have Extra Class licenses and enough free time left to get on the air. Almost like it was in the "good old days" (when we were younger, invincible and self-medicated).
It's the remnants of the former Ohio Valley Teenage Net, started somewhere in the 60s after the Kent State killings. The net used to meet on 3.968 MHz after school.
Our choice of frequency was based in large part on the fact that the gang we hung with at least had phone privileges. We ended up on a frequency that any of us could operate on and we had a good time.
As the principal players got older, graduated from high school, made it through college and otherwise entered the "straight" world of "normals" going to work, the OVTN principals decided that the term "teenage" didn't fit any more. After an afternoon of insane giggling, gibbering and discussing the idea through clenched teeth while still holding our breaths, the OVTN became the Ohio Valley Teratology Net.
We still met on 3.968 MHz in the early evenings. We still passed traffic and acted out the part of being a real NTS communications group. Slowly but surely the group started to fade out. One of the principal organizers had a run in with the law. Another couple guys moved away and got real jobs. The net fell apart and nobody noticed too much that we were gone.
But the original gang still got on the air occasionally, fighting for the frequency that had been our location for years. Since most of us had Advanced tickets then, we ended up moving to the less populated band space. As we advanced in license level, we moved again.
But time she go by and we all get older. A fairly strong-willed and obsessive handful of us upgraded to Extra. We had access to frequencies that anybody could use, as long as "anybody" had an Extra ticket. So we hauled off to 3.775 MHz and left the ordinary WOGs (to borrow a term from William Burroughs and L. Ron Hubbard) behind in the spectrum dust.

Recently the FCC figured out that, as part of a license restructuring move (to be discussed quickly below), it would be nice to put the beginners (Novice licensees) on the air with the Generals and move the phone privileges for all license classes below Extra around a bit. Thus the spectrum space that once was privileged territory for Extras is now available to Advanced class license holder and the Extras were moved into even more privileged electromagnetic real estate.
In other words, the Extras have just as much room to play as they ever did, but now the Advanced guys might be able to get on the air with the Extras, were it not for the fact that the Extras can now move their ham radio operating into a patch of frequencies still unavailable to any license classes below Extra.
So the Extras can move to new territory and the rest of the world is again left behind in the dust.

The reasons for this "re-farming" of the spectrum as pertains ham radio is pretty easy to figure out. First is the tendency of all hams to upgrade their equipment when they upgrade their licenses, especially if they have disposable income to do that. Secondly, the days of home-built gear have nearly died out. Sure you can get a kit & get on the air. You can even get a very respectable kit, build it and get on the air. With this move to more "appliance" operating among the ham community, the possibility of increases in sales of ham gear – as a component of the consumer economy – fits the present US administration's state of mind.
And there are regulatory considerations.
If the license structure is fiddled with so as to make it simple to administer (testing & enforcement), it will be possible to make the ham radio hobby seem a little less daunting. Tied to this obvious driving force is the other, less openly announced program within the US government to keep making it less and less regulated so as to make the entire system become a free for all.
Starve the baby 'til it dies, I think it's called. Which is pretty weird when you think of how vehemently anti-abortion and pro-life this administration acts in public.

In the end, it all comes down to elitism.

Hams are better than CBers. Internet wonks are more technically savvy but they don't have antenna farms. Thus hams are better than internet users (as opposed to geeks and hackers, most of whom show the same basic interest in technology that used to drive the technological corner of the ham radio hobby) and the CBers.
And Extra Class license holders are the cream of the crop, with Advanced license holders not far off. General licensees are welcome to play but they don't get to hang with the hot shots. And Technician ticket holders, well, let's be real: they aren't serious. If they were, they'd pass the five-word-per-minute Morse test and get on the air with the real men.

And so we end up with the Ohio Valley Teratology Net planning on moving from 3.775 MHz to 3.675 MHz on 15 December, when the new FCC rules go into effect.
Thus a group of hams who were once quite willing to hang out in General class license space have gotten so big for their knickers (and now are old enough to be able to say they remember knickers, even if they weren't born when knickers went out of style) that they don't care if Generals & Advanced licensees can't talk with 'em.
Meanwhile the 3.968 MHz frequency goes pretty much uninhabited until about 6:00 pm when some guys between Iowa and Indiana get on and badger each other about which radios they aren't using.

Me personal, I'm gonna hang out around 3.968 MHz and see if anybody cares. The rest of the gang? Well, I can go up there, I supposed. Or down, depending on which way you read numbers. Maybe I'll find some folks my age to talk with. Maybe I won't. But at least I won't be one of those oligarch reactionary paper tigers that Chairman Frank used to talk about. And I won't worry about it one way or the other.

And ham radio still won't be the original internet.

Transistors & My Sister's Radio

2006-12-03T09:00:00.000-08:00

The first transistor I ever saw was the CK722. It was the first transistor you could go into an electronics store and buy with real money. It cost about a buck, if memory serves. It came in a little cardboard box. It had three wires coming out of its rectangular plastic body. It was a very, very early piece of the technology that's in the computer screen in front of my face and all the stuff between it and what my fingers are doing right now. If you put three CK722s together in a fairly simple circuit you could hear all the local radio stations. If you put five of them together in a somewhat more complicated circuit (one that required adjustments of coils and capacitors before you tuned anything in), you could probably hear stations in another nearby state. And if you were so self-indulgent to put ten of them in a much more complicated circuit, you could listen to shortwave stations on a good night with a really big antenna.
I know this because I had, at one time, two CK722s. I put them together in a circuit that I fit inside a clear plastic box that my mother had kept pins and needles in. I got the idea for putting the circuit in that box from the pages of one of the technology magazines of the time, probably Popular Electronics. In one of the issues of that magazine there was a front page picture and a long article inside on how to build your very own five-transistor superheterodyne AM receiver.
The same kind of receiver that people were paying $25 dollars for at Sears. The same kind of transistor radio that my sister whined and weezled about for days before Dad got one for her. Which she promptly dropped, which broke the ferrite bar antenna that was crucial to the operation of the radio itself. Which is another technological story.
Back in that day I think no one knew what was coming next. Most of the population of this country (the USA) was not technologically aware enough to do much more than change the vibrator in the car radio. And you have to remember that this was the post-war era of radios that had, in military service, run on mogens, a motor running at one speed fed by a specific voltage with was then turned into higher voltages and current levels by a generator spun by the motor, such as would run a tank radio or a comm system in a jeep.
Transistors were just gleam in the divine blink at that time.
Transistors were so completely outside the realm of day-to-day casual conversation that they were treated with that knowing grin of complete amazement that anyone would waste time on something so unproven.
We'd proven everything during the war. We had atomic weapons. We'd beaten the Evil Japanese Empire. People were building garages. And bomb shelters. Who needs a 99¢ transistor?

Evidently everybody.

No sooner was the CK722 put on the market than it was replaced by another transistor with an even more arcane name (2N107). Which was replaced a year or so later by another transistor (2N396). And then another (2N404).
And then "scientists" figured out how to make an NPN transistor. They discovered that you could make a transistor that ran in the common configuration of tube circuitry: ground at negative voltage and the B+ moniker (as was used to explain the voltage/current path on the plate of a tube) to the power rail.
The CK722, you see, was a PNP transistor. It's ground-going connection (the emitter) took a positive voltage. You had to wire everything up backwards with an PNP transistor. It was like an English sports car: positive ground. And good, solid-citizen American cars were all negative ground. Just like the radios in tanks and comm systems in the jeep that Dad had driven during the War.

And there I was, a rich man in the technological world. I had two -- count 'em: two – CK722s to play with. Two!

Of course, I was absolutely clueless as to how they worked or where I could get 'em to do whatever was promised by the articles in PE and my copy of The Boy's First Book of Radio & Electronics. That didn't stop me from reading the articles and getting all fired up about what might be possible.
By the time I got the CK722 (1956) I was ten years old. I soon enough had built a half-dozen different crystal sets, most of which worked nicely enough, being crystal sets & my antenna system being less than perfect for crystal sets in the first place. But it was a start. Soon enough I built a crystal set with a transistor AF amp.
Actually, I probably built ten or fifteen of those.
And then I discovered the reason for my batteries lasting so long: the diode in the crystal set was evidently providing the power for the transistor. At least it seemed that way. It never occurred to me that the transistor had become just another detector. Either way I took that radio (built on a plank of wood with wood screws as connection points [I hadn't discovered solder yet]) apart and built another one using another circuit.

Today I have a radio about the same size as the first transistor radio that my sister dropped with more transistors piled into one chip than that dropped radio boasted of. The radio of today can hear further in more modes, with a digital dial (no more dial cord breaking in the middle of a night's searching for elusive DX) and a transistor transmitter that puts out 100W as easy as Sis dropped that long-forgotten magic popularity builder.

Interesting to me today about the CK722 is the price: it cost about $12 in 1952 when it first showed up. By 1956 it was down to a buck a piece. By the late '50s you could get 10 CK722s for a buck surplus.
Sure wish I'd held on to all the transistors I blew up back then.
A couple CK722s went on eBay back in May of this year and the highest bid came to $24 or so. Who knows how much the little buggers would be now. The later replacement 2N34 is listed at between $17 and $20 on some websites.
I guess it would have paid to pay attention, if somebody else had been paying attention back then: invest in transistors.

One of the selling points of moving from tubes to transistors back then was the size. Tubes are notoriously more fragile and they required at least two if not three batteries, the largest of which was used to burn up the filaments. For all the work that tubes had done in the war and in science and radio and what eventually became television, they were expensive to run. And in computers they had another trait: heat. By the kBTU.
You have to remember that in those early years of computing (made possible by the use of early analog computing systems in codebreaking and cipher technology) what sits on your desk today would take up a multi-story building with airconditioning not for the people in the building but for the tubes.
Even when I was in the USN (1968-1972) they used to tell us that the radio and comm spaces were airconditioned not for us but for the equipment. In the middle of the Atlantic heat would turn off crypto gear automatically. We lived in comfort but the equipment was much more comfortable. And, unbelievably, there were tiny little tubes – remnants of a last-ditch effort to keep tube technology alive – in some of the gear we ran.
So the eventual end of tubes – at least the low power ones we had become used to after the war and in the interregnum of tubes moving to transistors – was preordained by the advances in chemical engineering and the early process of "growing" crystals. From there it was a slow advance to diminishment in size and power demands. And from there it was a simple process made possible by the advances of film technology in Japan – our former bitter & hated enemy – that led to the deposition tech that gives you the computer & the LCD screen on your desk making this communication possible.

Still, I wish I had known enough to invest in transistors.

What happens next is your guess as good as mine. We've already gotten to the point where we don't even need wires. The traces on the circuit boards have taken care of that. The bits and pieces between those virtual wires have lost their legs and leads and the chemistry of building resistors has grown out of the chemistry of growing crystals so that today everything is smaller to the point of machines, not people, putting the stuff on the boards so we can play this electronic game.
But for ham radio, it's been an absolute blessing and an absolute terror.

You simply cannot fix your own gear any more. The parts are almost completely surface-mount and what little is left of "thru-hole" tech in the radios isn't worth messing with. Add to this the inability for older hams to just casually throw a circuit together ('cause the SMT parts are so tiny that shaking hands make building a frustrating, if not impossible chore) and you can see ham radio becoming an appliance-and-user hobby.
Of course, there are hold outs: the QRP side of ham radio still allows building radios with what's left of thru-hole tech. A radio that runs between half a watt and five watts is still possible. There are a few firms, mostly run by other hams for QRP builders & the like, that provide kits in various forms to fill the thrill of building your own stuff, even if it was designed by someone else, more familiar with SMT than the average on-the-air radio amateur.
But the days of Heath tube radios are long gone. Although the parts are still available – often in estate auctions and surplus electronics stores – most hams today don't even think of getting out all the tools and test equipment to build a five tube receiver or even a single tube transmitter. It's just too much work, more like the building of oak kitchen cabinets (as opposed to the verneer & paper covered stuff you can get cheap at the local Home Depot/Hardware Whorehouse).
Where this will take us all is the usual unknown.
There are firms working today, with technology that make miniature SMT equipment possible, to build implants so that the blind can see again or the paralyzed can use remote or attached mechanical appendages to replace frozen or missing limbs. And you can bet that's one area where the hobby experimenter will never tread, if malpractice suits are any sign of the future themselves.

Sowhat up, my little transistor buddies? Are you hiding out in the darkness of the lab, planning to take me over, cell by cell, until you and you alone are in charge of the planet? Will the next revolution be truly digital? Or are all these really rhetorical questions?

Hmm . . .

Nils