[Fists] A pardner at the Circle-A Ranch...

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 13:06:27 -0500

I never operated a spark transmitter of larger than about about a kW.

I had several ships that had for "emergency use only" spark transmitters
tuned to 500 kHz.  These made quite a racket when used.  (Officially they
couldn't even be tested on an antenna, but some operators (including me) who
were ignorant of their being spark sets did test them and on occasion you
would hear a broad signal on 500 with or without a callsign.

The use of "we" was an editorial one - speaking collectively of radio
officers on ships, I didn't use dah-dah-di-dit-dah-dah to warn of "high
power coming", but I have on numerous instances used it to tell a errant
ship operator to shut up because a station was sending an SOS, - sometimes
the very station he was calling was on the same frequency as the coast
station.  It was like using RAID on an insect - you sent
dah-daah-di-di-daaaah-daaaaaaaah to attempt to shut up the idiot.

73

DR

73

DR
----- Original Message -----
From: "W1EOF" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2003 2:06 AM
Subject: [Fists] A pardner at the Circle-A Ranch...

>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On
> > Behalf Of Cheryl W. Ring
> > Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 7:54 PM
> > To: Fred Adsit; [email protected]
> > Subject: Re: [Fists] Circle-A in Morse Code
> > Importance: High
> > So we can say to ARRL:  DAH-DAAAAAAAAH-DI-DI-DAAAAAAAAH-DAAAAAAAAAAAH
> <snip>
> >
> > We used to stretch out the dashes!  It was used in the old days of
crystal
> > detectors so that the other operators would have their ears hurt when we
> > turned on the high power spark transmitter.
> >
> > 73
> >
> > David Ring
> > N1EA
>
>
> David - I'm very interested in the history or radio. So your statement
> really piqued my interest: At what job did you operate a high power spark
> transmitter which was received by crystal sets?
>
> 73,
>
> Mark W1EOF
>
> _______________________________________________
> Fists mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/fists
>