[ADXA] Friday Humor

[patw5vy at gmail.com]

I’m always late to the party but I have a related experience.  My Uncle Bill Patterson, my dad’s brother, lived with us and worked on the farm.  Uncle Bill had a Three Letter call back in the 1920’s when he attended the Dodge Institute of Telegraphy in Valparaiso, IN and held a 2nd Class Radio Telegrapher’s License from the Interstate Commerce Commission….FCC hadn’t been formed at that time.  He was one of my elmers and helped me with several crude receiver projects before I got a Hallicrafters S20R.  Our ’51 Chevy farm truck was equipped with a “Cattle Caller” horn.  The Cattle Caller had a lever strapped to the steering column that started and varied the pitch of the horn. You could manipulate the lever to make a sound like a cow mooing…..pretty realistic. They were advertised in Progressive Farmer as a way to train your cows to come to the spot where you were blowing the horn.  The idea was to train them in the winter while feeding hay then you could “call” them to the coral in the summer to do all the things you have to do to cattle to keep them healthy.  In the summer the cows fell for the trick once but then we had to drive them to the coral.  After I got my Novice  license my Uncle Bill would start calling CQ or send my call on the cattle caller when he was about ½ mile from our house on Hwy 60 east of Perryville.  It was pretty funny….not exactly a chirp….more like a moan.   My shack was about 100 yards from the house and in the summer Uncle Bill would “read the mail” on my CW QSOs from the front porch and later offer comments like “Joe in Cleveland had a nice fist”.  

 

My most memorable CW traffic net experience was when I was at the Naval Communications Training Center in Pensacola, FL.  WA4ECY was the club station on base.  There were a couple of WA4ECY club ops who checked into the West Florida CW Net….think it was called the Florida Fast Net (FFN??)  One night I was asked to be the 4RN rep to CAN for the late session.  I had about ten pieces of traffic for RN5.  Bill Browder, WA5AVO, was the RN5 Rep and we QSY’d to pass the traffic.  The CW station at WA4ECY was a SP600 RX and a Collins TX of some flavor, a tube type QSK widget,  a Hallicrafters TO (tube) Keyer and a Vibroplex Classic Bug wired as a single lever paddle.   After each message Bill would send QRQ,  I think I ran out of range on the keyer (our my proficiency range!) and Bill kept sending QRQ!  Bill; Dennis, W5RZ; Nick, WA5BDU and Sam, WA5HNN/AE5L (SK), are the finest CW Ops I have ever been associated with.  Fun back in the day!  I was making about $22 every two weeks so cheap fun was really good!

 

Photo is the “CW” station at WA4ECY in 1968 with Seaman Patterson at the controls.  Seems like there was another room with a full S-Line.  We had a tri-bander and inverted V’s for 80 and 40. 

 

73,

Pat, W5VY / WA5KAK

 



 

 

From: adxa-bounces at mailman.qth.net <adxa-bounces at mailman.qth.net> On Behalf Of w5zn at w5zn.org
Sent: Friday, September 9, 2022 4:35 PM
To: adxa at mailman.qth.net
Subject: [ADXA] Friday Humor

 

Those of us who were licensed way back in the CW days will remember if you were driving down the road and another ham noticed your callsign license plate or a ham antenna on your vehicle, or you noticed another ham, we would honk "CQ" on the horn. Most times the other ham would answer with something on the horn or wave.

I noted the other day that I never hear than anymore to which one guy responded "We're still doing it but we're using FT8, that's why you don't hear it !!!!!!!!"

ZN

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