[Boatanchors] AM is OUT

Rob Atkinson ranchorobbo at gmail.com
Tue Apr 26 06:18:16 EDT 2016


If you were around in the 1950s and late '40s and read QST or like me,
buy old issues and read them, you know about the ARRL's almost
incessant campaign to promote SSB that went on for years, with every
issue containing some propaganda that beat into the heads of hams that
AM had to go.

The newly converted had the proselytizing zeal of those who just got
religion, sort of like today's QRP fanatics (although a recent issue
of CQ had an article by one of those guys in which he admitted to
operating with a SB200 occasionally--by now he has probably been
turned out into the cold from the QRP inner sanctum).

I had a laugh over this lead in an article on SSB in the October 1952 QST:

Sugar-Coated Single Sideband
by Richard Blanchard W6UYG

'Phone operation as we have known it is NOT on the way out.  It is
already out, if you will take the word of literally hundreds of hams
the world over who have had the chance to see for themselves the
relative merits of single-side band.

The article ends this way:

..."No matter what you say today, . . . just as surely as the sun
rises and sets, the day is not far off when a carrier will be an
illegal part of a 'phone signal . . .  especially since the spirit, if
not the letter, of present FCC regulations prohibits the transmission
of useless energy.  _the carrier has got to go.  The carrier is dead.
Long live the sideband_."

I imagine there will be a point in time when some ham will be writing
an article that says "Analog is dead.  Long live digital."  He'll have
as much luck as Richard Blanchard did.

73

Rob
K5UJ


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