[CW] Thank you, Zenith Radio Corporation - it's been fun

[Radio K0HB]

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  --- Arthur C Clarke



               I’ve spent the bulk of my adult life involved in things which can generally be termed “technology”, and for fifty-odd years I’ve played in a “geeky” hobby called ham radio.  

Growing up in the 1940’s and 1950’s on a small rural farm not even blessed with electric lights or a telephone (let alone a refrigerator or a television set ) does not seem a likely incubator for a lifelong vocation and avocation in electronics, radio, and telecommunications.  So how did that transpire?

It was all the result of a stew made up of a mix of adolescent boredom,  curiosity, the romance of “far away places”, and an old six-volt Zenith radio.

In our “front room” (“living rooms” were for town people) on a convenient table next to Dad’s chair stood a large Zenith radio set .  Everything on a farm serves some purpose, and this set served to provide the daily 5PM news and weather report from WDAY in Fargo.  It wasn’t used a lot for “entertainment”, with the exception of the Thursday evening weekly episode of “Dragnet” to which Dad was addicted.  Beyond that, the radio stood idle.

Now besides the usual AM broadcast band, the old Zenith had 3 or 4 additional “short wave” bands.  Despite a long wire antenna which stretched from the house to the top of the haybarn, those short wave bands were the home mostly of static and very weak foreign sounding stations.  

With one exception.  On dark quiet winter evenings the “4-6 Megacycle” shortwave band would sometimes contain a lot of squeaky/squawky morse code signals.  I knew that our mail carrier was something called a “ham radioman” so I asked him about those signals.  He said that they were probably messages being sent back and forth from ships at sea.   

To a preteen kid on an isolated farm in the middle of the great plains, he might as well have told me that they were messages between Venus and Mars!   I was determined to learn Morse so that I could eavesdrop on the secrets that they were exchanging.   

Turns out that those “secret messages” were mostly about mundane things like position reports, weather reports, and expected arrival times, but thus began my love of the magic of radio.

Now, having said all of that, I need to take exception to the notion advanced by N1EA in another thread that ".... most CW operators to be exceptional people and of a greater quality than the "others"".  Hams, CW operators or not, are just another group of hobbyists, no more, no less, just like stamp collectors, piccolo players, mountain climbers, flower growers, and X-Box manipulators.  Other talents, other interests.  We CW operators are not some super-smart cultish group with a secret code, and knowing how to send and receive those beeps is a talent easily gained by most anyone with a little interest.    And while some licensees might well be autistic, I expect that is a "dubious blessing" shared in equal percentage with the rest of the population, which Mr. Ring calls "others" and  "the outside world".  In fact, we are no better as a group, and no worse as a group, than all of our fellow travelers on this little blue dot called “Earth".

Life is a bright window open very briefly between two long dark eternities.  It’s far too short to isolate yourself as somehow "special" as compared to the rest of humanity who share your time in this short window.

73, de Hans, K0HB
--
"Just a boy and his radio"™
--
Proud Member of:
. ARRL - http://www.arrl.org
. RSGB - http://www.rsgb.org
. A1 Operators - http://www.arrl.org/a-1-op
. Minnesota Wireless contesters - http://www.W0AA.org
. Arizona Outlaws contesters - http://www.arizonaoutlaws.net
. Twin City DX Assn - http://www.tcdxa.org
. Minnesota Amateur Radio Technical Society - http://www.mn-arts.org/
. Lake Vermilion DX Assn - http://www.lvdxa.org
. Royal Naval Amateur Radio Society - http://www.rnars.org.uk/
. SOC - http://www.qsl.net/soc
. CW Operators Club – http://www.cwops.org
. SKCC - http://www.skccgroup.com/
--
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/cw/attachments/20150809/f339cf85/attachment.html>