[AMRadio] I'm finally back on CW

[Donald Chester]

> From: "Michael C. Marx" <sndtubes at vacuumtubes.com>

> I will say one thing that I find disturbing. ? In 1976 I was 15. ?Most 
> people that I worked were older than me (although I did work other 
> teens). ?Now that I am 52, STILL everyone that I work is older than 
> me.

You just got in on the tail-end. The last major surge of ham  radio 
operators are now in their 60s, a few years younger than I am. I had 
about given up ham radio as a  lost  cause just before I moved up to New 
England following years of living abroad. This was in about 1973. AM had 
all but disappeared from the ham bands following the incentive licensing 
debacle, and so had homebrew rigs heard on the air. So much for 
Incentive Licensing reversing the trend away from technical knowledge 
and skills in the amateur community, which was its purported purpose. 
But I digress - that's another topic for another discussion...  Upon my 
return from overseas, I got back on the air with my homebrew AM KW, and 
could probably count the total number of regular AMers I could work on 
75 on one hand. One of those was Hoisy, W4CJL of S.P.A.M. fame. But 
other than a sporadic few, no AM was to heard anywhere on any of the 
bands, except perhaps on 160, because most of the SSB rigs of that era 
were "all-band, 80 thru 10m" so a lot of top bands ops still used AM.

I moved up to Cambridge, MA and sort of forgot about ham radio, figuring 
it had gone 100% the slopbucket appliance route, which didn't interest 
me at all. Then, a year or so after I  had moved up there, I ran across 
a 1935 HRO receiver identical to the one I had been using back here,  in 
a junk shop for $50. I bought it and took it back to the apartment and 
thought it would be neat to do some SWLing and maybe listen to some 
foreign  broadcasts. Then one day, I tuned across 75 and heard some 
strapping AM signals. Even more surprisingly, these weren't old buzzards 
past  retirement age, but young guys, some in university and others 
still in high school! I started listening regularly and became familiar 
with Timmy, Chuck, PW, Deano, Richaroni and the  rest of the "mob". That 
rekindled my interest in ham  radio. I picked up a copy of CQ magazine 
at a news kiosk, and thumbing through it, I found an announcement of a 
Sunday afternoon auction in Sharon, MA. I went, and many of those guys 
were there, and I got acquainted with them in person. Shortly 
afterwards, there was a national ARRL convention in Hyannis, MA. I 
attended that; they had a very nice outdoor tailgating flea market, just 
like Dayton although smaller. I found some more  goodies and ran into 
more of the "mob". We rented a suite of hotel  rooms at a local motel 
and had a big party after the hamfest that lasted till the wee hours. 
That's where I first met Tim and Cathy. The next spring I drove down to 
Dayton, and while there picked up a Ranger and got it on the air, using 
the HRO receiver.

That was about the time when AM started its "come-back". From then on, 
the number of AM stations heard on the air began to increase, and it 
spread from the northeast over the rest of the country, where small 
pockets of AM activity had persisted in 5-land and on the west coast. 
Not too long after that, I built the homebrew 8005 modulated by 805s 
rig, and used the Ranger to drive it. The antenna was an end-fed zepp, 
strung from the chimney of the apt building where I lived, across 
Western Ave. in Cambridge, to a tree across the street. The rest is 
history.

Those guys, who were mostly in their late teens and early 20s in the mid 
70s were the last wave of young people showing up on the HF ham bands. 
Of course, there were a few older ones too, like Joe W2WAS on L.I., who 
weren't stuffed shirts.  But as time went by,  the same group of people 
remained the youngest hams. There wasn't another wave of younger blood 
following them. Yes, there has been a sprinkling of newcomers here and 
there, but for the most part, the Baby Boomer generation was the last 
generation of life long hams and a major part of the AM community as 
well. We still have small steady trickle of new upcoming AMers, but I'm 
afraid that when my generation passes, the AM community will become very 
sparse. Unfortunately,  the same can be said about the amateur radio 
community as a  whole. Probably the only thing that will save the hobby 
is the increasing unimportance of the HF spectrum, if we can just keep 
it from being totally drowned in hash and garbage from power lines and 
radiation from  consumer electronics junk.


Don k4kyv