[AMRadio] Cw

[Rob Atkinson]

The lack of interest in vintage rigs in the CW world is made obvious
by simply looking at who advertises in ER vs. CQ and QST.   I paged
through the display and classified ads in ER looking for Vibroplex,
Bencher, and other CW related businesses and found nothing.  But in
QST and CQ, I found those two plus ads for key books, a key museum and
a code practice oscillator museum (no joke; both on line) and CW study
materials and probably one or two other things I've forgotten.
Obviously these folks know that most CW operators think they have a
vintage station if they're running a J36 with an Elecraft rig.  If CW
ops were all running vintage tube rigs in numbers matching AM
operators, there would likely be CW product ads in ER.   I hope CW ops
recover what most of them have lost before it is too late and the
knowledge is completely gone.  The Classic Exchange is a big help I
think.  I operated this morning for about 90 minutes on 40 with my
Knight T50 running at most 25 watts, WRL755, TO Keyer and 75A-3.
Worked W8TM running the Heathkit SB twins and another ham who's call I
now can't remember (sorry about that) who was running a HB 813 rig and
HRO 7.  The WRL755 is almost like a rock.  I can zero beat a modern
synthesized rx to it and come back two hours later and find the 755
has drifted so little the rx is still zero beat to it.  (The secret is
to never turn off the 755.)

When I got back on the air 13 years ago I thought I'd try contesting
again because back during the first few years I was licensed, I envied
the "big gun" stations and figured I could make something happen in
North American contests at least.  I proceeded to read up on the
Sweepstakes rules, and ran off copies of the log  and dup sheets.
Sharpened a few pencils and all that.  The contest started and I was
overwhelmed.  I simply could not keep up.  The pace had tripled since
the '70s, with the average 3 QSOs/minute.  That used to be a rate that
was super hot with a QSO (I learned the in-crowd call them "Qs" --
saying three letters is too much trouble and evidently un-cool) per
minute being more typical if I big station is CQing.  I gave up on
logging and quit after a while, very disappointed.  Then I learned
that in the years I had been QRT, the world of contesting had vastly
changed.   The previously enormous stations were now average with some
hams sinking millions of dollars into their stations if you add up the
cost of the land, buildings, antennas etc.  There's a guy in Canada
who owns a _crane_ so he can work on his 80 meter yagi.  On top of
that, I discovered it is more about crafting robotic stations--they
have computers running two stations on two bands at the same time,
computer logging, rotator control, packet radio data, QSL generation,
log submission via the internet, everything.  If you get into that,
you seem to spend most of your time fiddling with the automation (read
computer).  I found it absurd and almost anti-social for ham radio.

Todd, tnx for signal report--when I first started out I was only
running 50 watts--amazing.


Rob
K5UJ