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

Sun Aug 9 16:16:13 EDT 2015

I love this email, Hans, SO MUCH!  
It's everything that's good and wonderful about radio and life.  

I do think that both you and N1EA are right.  I think hams ARE special,
not all of us, but most of us - but in no way are we, or ANY ONE OF US
on this planet, any better than any of our "fellow travelers", as you
put it (and I do love that phrase.)  So, my run-on-sentences aside, I
think it's totally possible for you BOTH to have it right and an
amalgamation of both your thoughts is most likely.

Your fellow traveler,

Lahra, KT9X
An extraordinarily humble ham & exhausted Doodlebug mom

On Sun, 2015-08-09 at 18:19 +0000, Radio K0HB wrote:
>                                    
> 
> 
>    “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/
> --
> 
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> =30=