[Boatanchors] "Chirp is a Beautiful Thing"

[Whitebear1122]

Agreed, chirp is a beautiful thing !!   I have participated in the AWA’s 1929 QSO Party since around 2001, and I have managed it since 2004.  Now there is an activity to hear transmitter “charm” including mild chirp, outrageous chirp, whooping, clicks, buzzing - literally with guys running raw AC on the plates, rectified AC on the plates, and everything in between.

In the QSO Party I run a push pull 210 Colpitts oscillator.  You can see a picture of it on my QRZ.COM <http://qrz.com/> page.  It sounds beautiful on 80m, with a slight bell like sound, and rock stable.  On 40 meters it has a more buzzy sound to it and sometimes is “jumpy” where it just decides to jump 400 Hz or 600 Hz.  Hard to keep something like that in a 300 Hz bandpass filter :)  This years even the 40 meter operation was rock stable with zero jumping but still buzzy.  Just a comment about that Colpitts transmitter.  A friend from work Paul W9MEH gave me that National Girder split stator capacitor one day and said “here, build something around this”.  It sat on my work shelf for a year before I decided to build a Colpitts transmitter which requires the split stator cap.  I literally mounted the capacitor first and build the transmitter around it. 

My favorite exotic signal:  wind modulation.  The single tube transmitters have no buffering between the oscillator and the antenna, so any movement of the antenna causes the frequency to raise or lower depending on the position of the wire antenna.  I worked a friend in the 29 QSO Party and his signal frequency was slowly rising and lowering several hundred Hz as the antenna wire swung in the wind.  It sounded so beautiful.  

The oddest signal:  the “presence”.  A friend had a single tube Hartley that wouldn’t generate a defined signal or even a buzz.  It was more like he had “a presence on the band”, but you couldn’t really call it a signal or that he occupied some frequency.  Strangest thing I ever heard.  I did make the QSO though.

And we all remember the old chow-pee chow pit DX guys from the 60’s :)

73, Scott WA9WFA
 
> On Dec 29, 2016, at 10:59 AM, Bill Cromwell <wrcromwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Some of the old timers like to howl and carry on about how they used to walk 10 miles to school through chest deep snow uphill both ways. And how they could so easily pick out one transmitter from the many that could be heard simultaneously on a novice band. Those transmitters all had their own, individual voices and combining that with all those individual fists - of course it was easy. At least less difficult. Some amount of chirp is one of the ingredients. The accursed 'yaecomwood' radios are pretty much "sterile" and all sound alike. CW is sent by keyers, memory keyers, and computers. Pretty much sterile, too.
> 
> I have looked at some signals with varying amounts of chirp on waterfall displays and I see a small "j" hook on the leading edge. It doesn't take much. There is no need to sweep a dit or dah across two or three QSOs in progress but a small dose of chirp goes a long way toward individual identification. Put the same amount of 'hook' on the other side and two otherwise identical stations are *different*. I have heard some signals in the past that I know must be from a  small amount of modulation - perhaps FM - on that CW tone. It wasn't enough to identify the source of the "problem" but it was enough to identify one ham and his station - instantly. Operating as NCS in NTS traffic nets I could recognize and acknowledge certain stations from just one character in Morse. It isn't all bad.
> 
> 73,
> 
> Bill  KU8H
> 
> On 12/29/2016 08:51 AM, Dale Parfitt wrote: