[QCWA] An obituary worth reading-W6AAQ

[Val Erwin]

Howdy George / Frances:
 
Greetings from windy Texas!
 
Yes, we did indeed loose one of the great hams and a fellow QCWA Member with the loss of Don Johnson, W6AAQ. Don was a virtual library of HF mobile operation info and when he got tired of that, he loved to talk about his days in the US Navy........
 
Don and I spoke frequently on the phone about HF mobile antennas and recently more specifically about the Swan 742. About a year ago, I acquired a strange virtually new appearing  Swan 742 HF mobile antenna at a local hamfest but internally, it was clearly not a Swan 742! It was marked as being a "Cubic" product with no model information. A call to Don quickly unraveled the mystery of the strange antenna. Per Don it was what he thought to be a Cubic M45 that had been manufactured by Cubic after their acquisition of Swan around 1976. Don said that the M45 had been built from Swan-acquired parts by Cubic and designed to be auto-band switching between 5 HF bands as opposed to only three for the Swan 742.  I had hoped that Don had the instruction manual for the M45 but he had no additional info on the antenna. (I have yet to find a manual for the Swan M45.)
 
About four months ago, I "attacked" the antenna trying to get it to work properly. It had obviously been worked on by other hams who had given up finding coil taps/adjustments and out of frustration had passed it on to other hams in sequence through hamfests. After about 20 hours of work out on the driveway with the antenna mounted on my vehicle with a card table of test equipment and some incredible patience, I am proud to report the antenna is now fully functional. ................Of course, being the typical ham, I had to modify the antenna!..........Since I rarely use the 15M band, I switched one of the five auto-bands of operation from 15M to 17M by changing the value of one of the doorknob capacitors.
 
I have come to one conclusion about the Cubic M45 antenna and that is that it could not have ever been a viable product as it was too difficult to tune for the average ham UNLESS he had a lot of test equipment and even more patience!...
 
Yes, I was able to communicate my success to Don before his passing............
 
George, hope to C U in Dayton in a few weeks......
 
Best regards, 
 
Val Erwin, W5PUT
QCWA Natl' Director
 


--- On Thu, 4/29/10, George/Frances <groach at storm.ca> wrote:


From: George/Frances <groach at storm.ca>
Subject: [QCWA] An obituary worth reading-W6AAQ
To: "QCWA Reflector" <QCWA at mailman.qth.net>
Date: Thursday, April 29, 2010, 9:42 PM


Being an old guy I have taken to reading the QCWA website
home page "last 10 silent keys" at http://www.qcwa.org

I think you will all enjoy the obit and attached story
re the late W6AAQ inventor of the "screwdriver" antenna
and enlightenment on part of the life of our past
General Manager Jim Walsh, W7LVN.

Cheers

George-VE3BNO

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