[SFDXA] From K9YA Telegraph

[Bill]

K9YA Telegraph
Robert F. Heytow
Memorial Radio Club
www.k9ya.org

“I think it’s
Morse code.”
Baby Boomer DXers
They Can’t Do That on a Cell Phone
John Swartz, WA9AQN
M
any of us who started
our amateur radio ca
-
reers in the 1950’s and 1960’s
began as children listening
to ordinary broadcast trans
-
missions. With our families
gathered around for the week
-
ly episodes of our favorites,
we were thrilled to listen to
Dragnet
,
The Shadow
or
The
FBI in Peace and War
. We
laughed with our parents or
grandparents and siblings
when we heard Jack Benny,
Burns and Allen, or any of the
other greats, Louis Armstrong,
Benny Goodman, and the others.
It didn’t take too long to figure out which of those
knobs set that warm, amber glow; nor did it take
long to figure out which knob got us to
the programs and voices that absorbed
us for hours on end. Sometimes, we
could sneak away and turn the set on by
ourselves, and lie on the rug, listening
to the lowered volume while our parents
and siblings may have been absorbed in
another part of the house or apartment.
We found out there were crystal sets,
which magically pulled those signals
out of the air without a battery or being plugged
into a wall outlet. With the help of a skilled parent,
we wound the coil, set the pins of the headphones in
the Fahnestock clips and listened to those amplitude-
modulated stations across the country. We quickly
discovered that those and, if we were really lucky, the
new “transistor” radios, could be secreted under the
bed sheets and our parents would be oblivious to our
midnight radio pursuits.
Some of us had parents with the foresight to buy a
radio
that included a knob labeled “SW1, SW2 and
SW3.” In the crackling and static heard when we set
that knob were strange accents.
There was London,
right where the dot was on the dial, and Paris, and even
Moscow. If our parents’ set didn’t include that Magic,
the neighbor may have had one, or our grandparents
did, but that was a feature that certainly caught our
attention when we spotted a set not quite the same as
the one in our own living room.
So we graduated to short-wave receiving sets, both re
-
generative and superheterodyne, and were introduced
to the news from different parts of the globe. We could
actually hear people in the countries we read about
in
National Geographic
, and there were photos of the
places named on that dial.
Then, one day, Sputnik went up and we read in the
newspaper that you could hear its signal on a short-
wave radio. We went out to the park to check if we
could see it. If our radio dial didn’t go that high,
one of our buddies probably had a set with the right
frequency on it. So we tuned, and we sat there listen
-
ing, and if we waited long enough, we could hear the
“beep... beep... beep...” not too far from one of
those spots on the dial marked “Amateur.” And, of
course, we had to listen to what Radio
Moscow had to say about it.
We were learning things about other
places and people not being taught in
our classrooms. We could tune across
those parts of the radio spectrum
designated “Amateur” on those dials,
and sometimes we heard with much
crackling and thumping, faint voices in
different countries and they were actually talking with
each other. Or, if you could hear only one of them,
you knew he thought he was talking to someone else.
Who were those guys?
“What’s that thumping?” “I think it’s Morse code.”
And we knew what that meant. We had our secret
decoder rings.
What kid wasn’t intrigued by codes? We decided
very quickly we could do that stuff we heard on the
radio. So we found surplus stores and radio stores
with books about license exams; 78 rpm records that
taught Morse code; shelves of really, really fancy, neat
receivers, transmitters, VFOs and microphones; boxes
of crystals; Vibroplex™ bugs; speakers; headphones;
and matchboxes (whatever those were).
Volume 11, Issue 10
Robert F. Heytow
Memorial Radio Club
www.k9ya
.org
t
elegraph at k9ya.org
Copyright © 2014 Robert F. Heytow Memorial Radio Club. All rights reserved.
3
Place Art
work Here
Novice Amateur
Radio Station
So we started building some of those kits. The trans
-
mitters looked pretty easy, some of the receivers didn’t
look quite so easy. We plunged in. On weekends when
our parents would let our pals sleep over, we got up
in the middle of the night in our pajamas, plugged
in the soldering iron and worked some more on that
transmitter. The smell of the solder... “Boys, go back
to bed...”
We got our tickets. We found some kindly old guy
who had a basement full of all that neat stuff we saw
in the stores and in the photos in
QST
. But his stuff
was plugged in, cabled together, and really worked.
He had walls covered with cards from all those weird
places, the Belgian Congo, Sikkim, Japan, Turkey,
Russia, and Bolivia, even Tibet. We learned more
geography from the radio guy than we did from any
teacher in the classroom. Actually, he wasn’t just a
kindly old guy. He had a look in his eye like he was
possessed by some magic. You could see it when he told
you how he had tweaked the wires on his big cubical
quad antenna and that had straightened out the lobe
and brought it down four degrees, and that meant he
was going to be stronger on the DX end and, well,
that’s getting ahead of the story. But the glint in his
eye told you something...
“OK, let’s practice first. Are you ready? I’ll start with
some V’s. Here goes.” “V V V BT PACK MY BOX
WITH FIVE DOZEN LIQUOR
JUGS....” “Did you get that?” “Yeah,
what does it mean?” “It means you
passed... here’s the written test....”
“We rushed home from school every
day for weeks, it seemed, and finally an
envelope arrived from the Federal Com
-
munications Commission. Our own real
callsign... we hurriedly signed the paper
to really make it ours (we couldn’t turn
on that transmitter with a real antenna on it if we didn’t
do that first, could we?). We were genuine Novices.
CQ CQ CQ went into the log, and it seemed like
page after page of nothing but CQs. In those days,
you had to keep a written log that included notations
when you had called CQ, even if no one answered.
Of course, being crystal controlled, some other Novice
might have answered 75 kc away and you might never
have heard him or known.
We were so excited when we encountered our first DX
station. “Why won’t he answer me?” It was frustrat
-
ing. God forbid we should tune that transmitter for
an ounce more than 75 watts DC input to the final
amplifier tube! We had visions of the crystal exploding,
or that black car would park in front of the house and
a man in a black hat, black suit with a skinny black
tie and a badge would knock on the door, “Ma’am,
is little Johnny on that radio of his? We measured his
signal and he is running 75.23 watts... I’m afraid he’s
going to have to come downtown with me....”
“We had to shed those Novice restrictions. The
really good stuff wasn’t listening for our crystal-
controlled signals up in the
Novice bands. So, we studied,
and we practiced the code
some more, and we rode the
train into the city and found
that dark office tucked up on
the highest floor of the old
federal building. And there he
was, the government guy who
never smiled, wearing a green
eyeshade and a white shirt
with that skinny old Govern
-
ment Issue black tie.
“OK, you passed, who’s next?”
“Mom, I’m home. I passed.
I’m a General, I’m a General. Can I get that VFO kit
and the microphone so I can be ready when the license
comes from the FCC?” “Oh, dear, shouldn’t you wait
until it gets here to be sure?” “But, Mom, the man
said I passed.” “You had better ask your father when
he gets home....”
We learned that sometimes it wasn’t so
easy to actually hold a conversation with
someone half way around the world,
but we tried. Even clipping along at 13
words per minute, it took a long time
to tell someone he was 569 in Chicago,
Illinois and that your name was John,
especially since it was drilled into us
to repeat all that drivel, and for good
measure some of us sent it three times. No wonder the
guy wanted to make contact with someone else! He
was probably falling asleep listening to our repetitious
patterns of information. Some of us took French, or
German, or Spanish in high school and actually tried
to use them on the air, in Morse code. But, we were
hooked. There, having all that cool, high tech gear was
our goal. If only our parents had allowed us to put up
real cubical quads instead of just stringing a dipole to
the tree at the back of the yard!
We took up the challenge. We were going to do it,
even if we didn’t have one of those big antennas. We
learned which bands were open to which parts of the

Volume 11, Issue 10
Robert F. Heytow
Memorial Radio Club
www.k9ya
.org
t
elegraph at k9ya.org
Copyright © 2014 Robert F. Heytow Memorial Radio Club. All rights reserved.
7
Place Art
work Here
“...Playboy
magazine was
generally taboo.”
world at which times. We studied propagation. We
did not have the Internet. The DX Summit was not
even a dream. We learned these things on our own,
from ARRL publications, from conversations on the
air with more experienced DXers and at our local club
meetings. We did not have “Reflectors” or “Bulletin
Boards.” We had telephone trees to alert our buddies
when a “new one” came on the air. We read monthly
DX bulletins. We studied the propagation charts in
QST
on a monthly basis, and learned what the WWV
sunspot numbers meant. But, in large measure, we
had to listen on the bands to find out what conditions
were; there was no Skimmer to report that our “CQ”
could be copied on three continents and 27 states.
“Why aren’t they answering me?”
And here we are, half a century later and we’re still act
-
ing like the teenagers who just discovered radio. What
was it that actually hooked us into this madness? Was
there some subconscious drive at work? Through the
development and use of technical abilities and skills,
we learned we could find real friends beyond our own
street, our own neighborhood, beyond the playground
and schoolyard. We discovered an avenue into a world
beyond the geographic confines of our other experi
-
ences. And that is what remains unchanged.
Amateur radio, and DXing in particu
-
lar, has brought us a world beyond our
school chums and teammates, college
friends and fraternity brothers, our grad
-
uate school networks, our professional
colleagues, friends, clients and even our
families and lovers. The Internet, chat
rooms, cell phones and email weren’t
there to distract us. In the amateur radio
world, we didn’t have the proliferation of
repeaters and VHF/UHF gear to focus our attention
locally. Our focus was well beyond the horizon. Yes,
we wanted to be a little bit different than the kid down
the block. We sure succeeded in that!
I recently sent a test radiogram over the NTS traf
-
fic system to a friend on the West Coast. She was
thoroughly surprised. She must have told her friends.
One reportedly remarked, “You mean they still do
that stuff? Haven’t they heard about cell phones and
the Internet?”
I am still trying to figure out how to get the guy on
the DX side to tell me what it looks like out his shack
window. What does he really see? There’s that magic
again when he tells me and I realize that all that way
away, with a different language, different food, differ
-
ent clothes, styles and cars, he’s really not much dif
-
ferent from me. No, you can’t do that on the Internet
or a cell phone...
1.
Years later we may have realized that we had not
outsmarted our parents at all; it was they who had
outsmarted us. Maybe they were taking advantage
of the audio distraction in which we were absorbed
in order to have a very pri
-
vate conversation between
them!
2.
The
National Geographic
phenomenon is curious.
We had access to a wealth
of information about peo
-
ple and places all around
the world. We could have
stacks of them openly avail
-
able, in spite of the fact
that there were occasional
photos of bare-breasted,
brown-skinned women and
girls, while
Playboy
maga
-
zine was generally taboo.
We never had to explain that we actually read the
articles. It is doubtful that feature had anything to
do with our becoming DXers, however.
3.
This character must have been the
model for the guy who later appeared in
much less sinister form as “The Man With
No Eyes” in the Paul Newman classic,
Cool
Hand Luke
.
4.
Latin was a lost cause. In more ways
than one.
5.
Parental consent was a complex issue:
Mom: “Won’t that ruin the look of my
garden?” Dad: “It’ll cost what? And a tower? Oh,
yeah, I don’t think you want to spend that kind of
money when you’re only going to be here another
two years before going away to college. What will we
do with that thing then?” Ham: “But Mom, Dad, I
have already saved about half the money by cutting
lawns and shoveling snow. Please?” Dad (with final
-
ity and hope that Ham can’t do it): “Let’s talk about
it when you have saved up enough to pay for the
whole thing...” Mom, knowing that Ham can do it,
shudders, “Dear, I really think we need to talk about
this a bit more, don’t you agree?” Ham, interjecting:
“But Mom, please?” Mom: “Really, don’t you think
it would be wise to save all that money so you can
pay for your college, instead?” Ham, exasperated at
the lack of progress: “What’s for dinner?”