[AMRadio] Last comment on the can of worms.

[Donald Chester]

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:38:30 -0400 "Tom Chesek" <tchesek at epix.net> wrote:

I think that there is too much of "what I like is better than what you 
like".  Why can't people talk about and enjoy their interests without others

telling them why they are wrong for not being interested in "what I like"?


Not so much that they are "wrong for not being interested in what I like",
but more "I like what I am interested in better than I like what  you are
interested in".

To each his own... I'm glad everyone doesn't have precisely the same
interests. In my case, I have been licensed since the summer of 1959 and
first got on AM in December of that year. Except for the years I  lived
abroad, I have been active on the air during almost all those 54 years. In
all that time I  have to say, I have NEVER operated SSB. Many of the current
AMers speak of how great it is to "be back" on AM, but I can't say that. I
never got off AM in the first place. There are a few of us around who might
be classified as AM purists; a couple of others I can immediately think of
are Ed Bolton, WA3PUN and (recently SK) Ashtabula Bill, W8VYZ. As far as I
know, neither of those guys was ever heard operating SSB. There are bound to
be a few more still around and on the air. 

I probably would have eventually acquired some kind of SSB capability in my
own station, although I doubt that it would have ever completely displaced
AM, except that in my formative years as a licensed amateur I STRONGLY
RESENTED the orchestrated campaign to coerce everyone to "switch over" to
SSB whether they wanted to or not. My attitude became, "I'll show them...
come hell or high water, I'll stay on AM regardless". That attitude was
reinforced during the era of the great AM vs SSB wars when others tried to
force me off AM with jamming and malicious interference, followed by the
heavy-handed "docket" years when almost monthly, some ill-conceived, poorly
thought-out rulemaking proposal was released by the FCC that would have
adversely affected AM privileges in some way, if not eliminate the mode
altogether. At the same time, the FCC was steadily receiving a barrage of
rulemaking petitions from the amateur community to "phase out" AM. This
caused much of our time and effort as AM enthusiasts back those days to go
into defending our position, detracting from our participation in other
aspects of the hobby.

Sometime in the mid-1970s I actually started building a homebrew SSB
exciter. It was to be a filter unit, starting out at 64 kc/s, up-converting
to the ham band. I actually got the low-frequency stage working, using a
couple of low-frequency Collins mechanical filters salvaged from outdated
landline telephone multiplexing equipment picked up at hamfests,  with a
7360 beam-deflection tube serving as balanced modulator, and a special order
crystal to set the oscillator frequency precisely at the correct spot at the
edge of the filter pass band. It actually had pretty good audio quality, and
when monitored on a low-frequency receiver, probably  sounded as good as
many of the "ESSB" signals you hear on the air to-day. But I lost interest
in the project before completing the up-conversion stages. I  still have the
thing, but last time I fired it up it wouldn't work. It is presently mounted
in a spare relay rack along with some other equipment I am not using. I
suspect  that the very expensive special order crystal may have gone bad
while the unit sat idle on the shelf. Since then I have stayed busy enough
keeping my AM  station going and building my antenna system, and have
entertained no further  thoughts of SSB capability.

Don k4kyv