From the RAT Files Circa 2004: Bed Time Fan Syndrome!?!

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following was originally composed as radio copy for air on JANUARY 24, 2004 over THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO, North America's premier amateur radio audio news service. Please click on the following - http://www.twiar.org/ for additional details. Bill.

I have a confession to make. You all shall be my Fathers' and Mothers' Confessor. So here goes. At night. When I go to bed. I sleep with a fan running. Yes, that's right. I sleep with a fan running. All night long. All year long. Even during the most frigid sub-zero winter months. I sleep with a fan running.

This particular fan has been running each and every night for the past twenty-four years. I am not sure how much longer it will continue to run. It was a bargain at eight dollars and fifty-six cents from the Caldor Store that's now a Home Depot over on Central Avenue in downtown Albany. Funny how this particular fan outlasted the store it was actually purchased in.

Specifically, this particular unit is a model number KH-06CX, 120 Volt/ 60 Hertz/ 25 Watt UL-listed six-inch diameter clip-on fan manufactured by the Kuo Horeng Electric Industrial Company out of Taiwan, the Republic Of China. That it was made in the "Republic" of China makes it something of an eBAY specialty item since all cheap junk nowadays is generated in the P.R.C., the People's Republic of China otherwise known as Communist China. In twenty four years, I have never lubricated this particular fan. I did had a second clip-on which I used at my place of work for about two or three years but after several lube jobs, that particular fan had finally succumbed to terminal bearing seizure and died an ugly death. However, the second fan has not been touched but has had quite a few momentary seizures of its own.

So far. So good. Having suffered these statistics, you might, under incredible brain pain, wonder why I have a fan running each night. At first, I did so because at the time I was living with my Mom who was a vicious three-pack-a-day smoker. This particular fan was variously employed to either draw in fresh air or blow out foul air depending on the need. Now before you say to yourself just what the heck kind of a nutcase this N2FNH guy may be, consider what I have just learned recently concerning a few other people relatively close to this program.

Please consider that our esteemed technical director here at This Week In Amateur Radio, George Bowen W2XBS...both he and his wife Cheryl...enjoy the luxuries of an ocean-sized water bed properly festooned with a large industrial-grade metal 30-inch diameter box fan rumbling nicely at the foot of said bed.

As a sidebar, I myself own a fabulous Patton brand model U2-1487 120 Volt/60 Hertz/ 1.5 Amp UL-listed stainless steel high velocity floor fan which runs in tandem with the clip-on during the summer with even more rumble and fan-blade white noise. But there's more.

Cheryl's sister Nicole has been visiting with the Bowens for the past few weeks and she has her own six-inch diameter table fan by the bedside spinning happily away with its own little rumble and fan-blade white noise. Actually, she's on her second fan, because the one she brought with her ran out of spin. But there's more. George and Cheryl's kids go to bed each night with a fan running on the bedroom dresser. But there's more.

In discussing Bed Time Fan Syndrome with the Bowens, it came to light that Cheryl's Mom also retired each night under the all-encompassing low rumble and fan-blade white noise. It would appear that many people live otherwise normal lives but secretly sleep with Bed Time Fan Syndrome. I take BTFS one step farther. I usually hit the sack around 1AM local and catch a few minutes of Coast-To-Coast-Am with George Noory and Art Bell on the AM radio and then at some point, I'll reach over an punch up a blank memory on the Sony 2010 tuned to 100KHz and doze off accordingly. Thus a dual-density white noise curtain lodged between my ears and the overnight universe doing a damn good job of filtering out...what?

Nighttime anxieties? I currently live in a neighborhood where police and ambulance sirens are commonplace, where young street punks with their bow-wow wubba-wubba woofers ooze on by...you can't hear the music and you can't hear the beat but you can certainly copy the mechanically traumatic vibrations from their little rolling rice boxes. But this is nothing.

When I was married, I lived in in a house where my backyard was the New York State Thruway, precisely at mile marker 144.4 northbound. Twenty-four hours a day of Peterbilts, Mac Trucks, Greyhound Buses and miscellaneous bad mufflers. Where my little clip-on came in handy the best was in the dreadfully deadly, nighttime pure country silence living in a little lakeside cottage in the low mountains of Sand lake and perhaps here is part of the key.

If it's too quiet. Who can sleep? If it's too quiet. You may start hearing your own heart beating. If it's too quiet. Your own breathing becomes obnoxious. As does all of your own internal bowel noises, gurgling gases, and rumbling tummies. But once you adapt. There could be other things.

Nighttime anxieties? In discussing Bed Time Fan Syndrome with the Bowens, some rather disturbing theories began to surface. If you have ever just dosed off, not quite asleep, not quite awake, and heard at some imprecise moment, a voice whisper in your ear. A word that sounds like: "Trapped!"

My own Mom experienced this many years ago and freaked out enough to fall prey to a similar syndrome, BTRS or Bed Time Radio Syndrome where AM talk radio plays continuously and where the real voices will hopefully mask out the unexpected and unwanted sounds of the "Pillow People". "Pillow People" is a phrase I first heard from George's sister-in-law Nicole. I did a search on "Pillow People" on the Internet but found that there was nothing that related in this way but the nationally syndicated late night talk show hosts George Noory and Art Bell frequently discuss "Shadow People" and "Night Spirits" who may come to visit you at your bedside. From where? Another dimension? A parallel universe? The afterlife? That other place?

At the risk of being declared slightly schizoid, I do believe I can lay claim to hearing one or two instances of the "Pillow People". It would seem that someone or something may be attempting to communicate by way of some unconventional peer-to-peer medium or perhaps through some electromagnetic manifestation currently not type-accepted nor licensed by the Federal Communications Commission. So, in other words, what we are really talking about here is: A firewall. A filter. A choke. A means to keep unexpected and unwanted probes or unsolicited unknown communications from reaching your otherwise unprotected psyche when it is at its most vulnerable.

This would appear to be a strictly analog thing but maybe its not. But somehow, the purely analog, purely functional but not so purely white noise of a rumbling fan or a blank crackly AM or FM radio channel appears be a perfect solution with its roots firmly entrenched in rich 1950's tradition. How many times did your Dear Old Dad doze off in the Lazy Boy in front of the Crosby, the Zenith, the Motorola, the Sylvania or the RCA securely firewalled from alien intrusion through the marvelous blocking effects of a local TV channel that has signed off for the night with nothing left but a shimmering white screen and a shushing white hiss.

I believe this is where Bed Time Fan Syndrome may have first arisen from the noise floor because cable television, with its hundreds of channels...with its hundreds of twenty-four hour a day channels, is a visual medium with many gaps of audio silence where much is said with a wink or a nod or a graphic. Too many chances for the whispers to get though. For the same reason, those junk box white noise generators from the Sharper Image or the Spencer Gifts. Here, the noise is too thin. Its cheap sounding and disturbing and not an effective firewall at all. Too many chances for the whispers to get through.

Fans may be harder to find at the Wal-Mart during the winter so a quick jog over to the Odd Job or Big Lots may turn up an inexpensive but highly efficient table or clip-on job to hold you over till warmer weather. Larger fans such the Patton stainless steel, because of their physical size may generate an audible hum in addition to the blowing white noise. This may not be a disadvantage though since you can train your subconscious ear to regard the hum as a pilot tone which should put you out like a light in a matter a seconds and hold you there until a much louder alarm clock goes off in the morning.

But if a rumbling and spinning fan is the firewall. Then a Ouija Board is the network router. However this, my friend, is a whole 'nother story. And a can of worms best left unopened. At least for the moment. But more on this device. Maybe at some future date. This is Bill Baran N2FNH for This Week In Amateur Radio. Oh. And before I sign off, this would be a good time to switch on the Patton stainless steel UL-listed...(click!) Pleasant dreams! - 30 -

Keep Your Eyes To The Skies! SETI, Don Ecker and a RAT!

This week! On This Week! Keep your eyes to the skies! And keep your ears to the speakers! The second, and apparently last but not least, long lost Don Ecker This Week in UFOs tape has been skillfully cleaned up, repackaged and spiced and spliced throughout with classic effects originally heard on such television and motion picture programs such as The Colossal Man, The Jetsons, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Fantastic Voyage and SeaLab 2020.

Whereas Program number one addressed the top secret government facility referred to as AREA 51, this edition focuses on SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence plus some historical retrospective on alien transmissions allegedly intercepted by such radio pioneers and luminaries as Tesla and Marconi on their Dawn of Man receivers. Here's hoping that George W2XBS can dredge and excavate additional recordings produced by Don Ecker from his unblievably equipped but also unbelievably packed production studio!

So download this week's This Week in Amateur Radio Ham Service and the TWIARi Broadcast version, or even better connect to: http://www.twiar.org/n2fnh/RATParts
Look for file number RAT081027_ECK2.cab, right click and "Save Target As" to your hardddrive. Use your WinZIP or IZArc to extract the select RAF audio WAV file inside!

Blocks!

From the RAT Files Circa 2003: We Talk On These Radios Tonight! OR! Cease Communications Immediately!

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following was originally composed as radio copy for air on November 22, 2003 over THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO, North America's premier amateur radio audio news service. Please click on the following - http://www.twiar.org/ for additional details. Bill.

My Dad had always wanted me to become an amateur radio operator. And that's because he was a ham himself. It should run in the family, he thought. My Father got bit by the radio bug during his time as a radioman in the post-World War Two Allied occupation of Japan in 1946. Five years later, he got his Novice license and then secured his General ticket in 1952. In fact, in recent years, I had learned that my Mother had also become a Novice just to help him achieve that goal, although she had never renewed nor upgraded after that.

I finally became a ham operator too. But many years later in 1974. The Old Man had always envisioned the two of us having CW QSOs on 75 meters, an HF band perfect for the cause since at the time, he was living in Edison, New Jersey and I was living here in Albany, in upstate New York. I still have some heavily cracked and yellowed Eastman Kodak color snapshots of me, maybe four years old, sitting in a big wooden chair, my feet dangling and not yet touching the floor and wearing a World War Two vintage headset in front of a humongous Hallicrafters SX-48 receiver and an equally ominous Collins 32V3 transmitter. Out of sight and on the roof at 35 Elberon Place was a banana antenna. What exactly a banana antenna was, I couldn't tell you but I heard it worked fairly well.

Ah, but the road map I followed into the hallowed halls of amateur radio hamdom was along a completely different course, totally different than being a Sparks on a South Pacific destroyer in the Land of the Rising Sun. I'm guessing my first internship with any sort of wireless communication began with the chubby, blond-haired and freckled-faced kid across the way on Morris Street, maybe around 1964. Kurt Hackel, one or two years my junior, materialized on my front porch one bright summer day with a pair of Clarion Citizen Band Walkie-Talkies, complete with three-foot steel whip and a little instruction manual on how to use them. There was something about 27 Megacycles and amplitude modulation but we didn't know what any of that meant. Anyway, Kurt jammed one of those things into my hand and said with a conspiratorial tone: "We talk on these radios tonight!". And we did.

But with some effort. These Clarions were pretty good radios but they were constructed with super-regenerative receivers. This meant we would hear everyone and everything at once. Of course, we didn't know this at first because we didn't know anything about channels. As such, many, many voices were all talking at the same time and although I could hear Kurt through all the chaos, it was not an easy thing to do. So after a few more nights' experiments, the plan was deep-sixed.

At some indeterminate time later, I came across more walkie-talkies. My Uncle Bill, an ex-patriot from the South Bronx, was living with his Mother, my Grandmother, out in the countryside near a little town called Clarksville and so just about every weekend, especially during the summer vacation months, we would hightail it out to the house. In my Uncle's study on his desk were two tiny slate gray-colored Lafayette CB walkie-talkies. A couple of 100 milliwatt jobs like the Clarions. I couldn't tell you the model number. My Uncle used to raise wild dogs and every so often one of the vicious killer whippersnappers would go AWOL and we would then summarily tramp through the backyard forest in search of the escapee. Mind you, this was in the prehistory of deer tick and Lyme disease where I could actually walk in the woods with shorts on and return unscathed and not pick up any alien hitchhikers or equally alien and equally disgusting diseases. It was kind of cool going on reconnaissance, looking for crazy dogs with a walkie-talkie in hand, communicating with my Mom or my Grandma back in the kitchen.

But unlike the Clarions with the big telescopic whip, the little Lafayettes had maybe a 12-inch stick along with the requisite super-regen receiver. The range was probably under a half mile at best. Then, some more years passed and then one day and I'm supposing 1969 now, another friend of mine by the name of Tim produces a pair of very shiny, very very hefty, very heavy but very cool Lafayette portable radios. He hands me a DynaCom three-channel five-watt, I say again "five watt", CB walkie talkie crystalled up on channel 10. We decide that: "We talk on these radios tonight!".

So it's an early Friday night and we hit the block outside and the trek begins, wending our way down Sycamore Street and then out onto to the expanse of Hackett Boulevard. And beyond. Tim says he'll head for Delaware Avenue toward downtown Albany and that's about a mile and a half east. I embark and sally forth toward New Scotland Avenue about the same distance heading west. Prior to the safari, we agree to use a Johnny-on-the-spot prefabricated official sounding CB call sign which we then use on each and every transmission. But who knew that by the late 1960's, no one was really using call signs anymore so therefore, we were quite obvious.

A couple of kids in the neighborhood were drawn to the unusual-for-the-CB radio chit-chat and asked many probing questions like: "Hey, man! What's your handle?" And "What's your 20?" Who knew what a handle was? Much less a "20"? But we persevered, plunging deep into the early evening cloak of darkness, marred only by an occasional street light, and remarkably, by a shimmering silver-green flowing curtain in the northern sky, an Aurora Borealis, only one of two I have ever seen so far.

By now, Tim had arrived at the New York State Thruway overpass at Delaware Avenue and I finally got at the Thruway overpass at New Scotland. The eavesdropping CB kids announced they were taking it to the streets to see what this was all about, going mobile on their ten-speed bikes with walkie talkies in hand. Tim had became alarmed! Who could blame him? Fearing the worst, he began shouting into the radio: "Bill! Do not meet them! "They will steal the radio!" "Cease communications immediately!" "Cease communications immediately!" And now, I was not so sure and so withdrew into the nearby brush and waited for the posse to arrive. Upon seeing them, I figured there'd be no real problem. I was a big kid at eighteen and these three guys, Joey, Marky and Mikey were much younger and much smaller and thus posed no real threat. Tim was still a little more than concerned. He still thought these guys would rough me up and make off with the goods.

As we stood by the bridge, we could hear Tim's voice through the hashy static and crackle, the immortal words playing over and over again: "Cease communications immediately!" It was quite apparent that Tim was jogging along at high speed. He finally caught up with us maybe ten minutes later, out of breath with antenna bent. So exciting was this that I couldn't wait to play with the now-officially-borrowed radio tomorrow. But the next morning, now Saturday morning, I grabbed the radio, flicked the switch and heard: A horrible mix of voices and squealing noises wailing from the speaker. Who knew that this was a thing called "skip". There would be no local chit-chat that day. But this focal point became the springboard into doing radio big time. With the complete catalog inventories of Lafayette Radio and Radio Shack just a few blocks away to help fuel the newly ignited bug, that little bit of Magic and let us flag that Magic for later review...antenna farms began to grow furiously. The Lafayette Rangeboost Two half-wave vertical ground plane gave way to a Super Magnum, a CLR-2, an Astroplane and then on to the Starlite three-element beam and beyond..to a gargantuan 25 foot long Radio Shack five-element Yagi. And then...the ultimate acquisition, the stacked Pal Vee-Quads, full-wavelength delta loops for 27 Megacycles, which was starting to become Megahertz in those years.

In time, I was able to con, er, well, convince my Dad to loan me the use of his Collins 32V3. "NO CB RADIO!" he said, so I used it on the freeband which technically was not CB radio. More equipment train wrecked into the radio room. a second set of Vee-Quads, one of which was converted to 55 Megacycles so I could get WCBS television Channel 2 out of New York City just for the great late night movies they offered long before infomercials and cable TV. An unusual radio, an SBE SB-36 250 watt single sideband ham transceiver came on board, along with its warm glowing rosy pink Nixie-tube frequency readout display, heavily crystalled for 25 to 30 Megahertz.

Megacycles now officially passe'. Needless to say, Dear Old Dad was quite dismayed. In the end, we would never have those 75 meter CW QSOs that he had wished for. I was having too much fun on 13, 11 and 9 meters and when I did finally become a ham, I came in as a technician, armed with very high frequency two meter radios. I did get my hands on a Swan 250C six meter sideband rig, in fact I traded away the SB-36 for that. The 55 Megahertz Vee-Quad did double duty and functioned fairly well for six even though it was not cut for the band. And I did try to convince my Father to invest in six meter SSB and CW. I was making fairly regular contacts with stations in the Metropolitan New York area and figured with antennas optimized for the band, an Albany-to-Edison path might actually be quite doable.

But alas, the Dear Old Man, while comfortable with his HF, was not to be swayed on the world of VHF communications, although remarkably he did make a minor concession to his son's radio idiosyncrasies and installed a mobile citizen band radio into his 1968 Volkswagen type 311 and became known as the "Blue Baran" while plying his way along the Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway. This was quite a shock!

And this brings us back to that little flag we marked, that bug or that Magic that got us all into this eclectic hobby. I now have my own son, Zachary, who at this writing is eight years old. He owns his own Nintendo Game Cube and his own SEGA Dreamcast, numerous portable GameBoys, and his own computer, even though it's a 486, secretly loaded with so much more than the games he likes to play on it, Zachary has the bug and he has the Magic but the calling is for the game and not the Far Speak. He will routinely grab the mobile two-meter microphone and even uses Family Service Radios when we go shopping but the Magic for him is not there. He even has a shortwave radio of his own, a gift from his Godfather. You know this man already. He's Bill W2XOY. Zach listens mostly to sappy FM radio music and occasionally to Mike Savage, a nationally syndicated always-angry conservative talk show host. Although here, some parental censorship occasionally comes into play depending on the topic of the night. The simple yet intriguing idea of talking to someone at a distance without benefit of wires does not reach Zachary because wireless radios, televisions and cell phones are given technologies in his generation. In fact, not only are they a given, they are for the most part, out-of-date technologies. Zachary did surprise me the other day when he said he wanted an FRS radio for Christmas but his reason seemed to have little to do with the bug or the Magic. His after-school program staff members use them so it appeared to be more of a status thing. Santa Claus will most assuredly provide the requested item but he does so knowing that there is a good possibly that the bug or the Magic will not spark. Does this bother me? Hmmm. I would say the answer is No.

My Dad's time and my time were far simpler times when there might have only one or two television stations in town, where tuning the big black Bakelite knobs before the soft orange-glowing analog dials of a tube-driven shortwave receiver would immediately transport you across continents and into distant ports of call, where cable TV was something that the good folks in rural Pennsylvania used to get over some annoying hills so they could watch some TV stations out of Philadelphia. But then again. There were no video games. No file sharing. No Windows XP. No nothing. Except the radios. So in a way we were actually quite lucky. Not too much else to distract us. But I will wait and see. Who knows? Maybe the first time Zach actually pays attention to a station beaming in from Moscow or Berlin or Istanbul, maybe that's when the bug may bite. Maybe the bug may bite when his best pal shows up on the front porch one bright summer day with a couple of 80211 laptops with a master plan to communicate from their respective bedrooms with WebCams plugged in and they will say in conspiratorial tones:
"We see each other on these laptops tonight!" -30-

A RAF! Like a RAT: All the same! The History of the Ouija Board!

Halloween always was and always will be my favorite holiday. When I hit fifteen years of age, I hit the brakes at one of my first teenage roadblocks that strongly suggested my costumed days would be over soon when the local neighborhood lush at the far end of the street stood at his doorway and peered at me through glazed and watery bloodshot eyes and uttered:"Aren't you a little old for trick or treat?" I guessed this meant no candy and I was right, but despite his drunken stupor, he did manage to score a bullseye critical to my presumed maturing process and that was: I was now too old for Halloween.

BUT! I do get to relive my childhood Halloween through MNOAOS Zachary, who at thirteen still digs the Trick or Treat scene. So, while Zach fabricates some kind of homebrew costume and grabs his big plastic Jack O'Lantern, I secure my official 1960's vintage MADE IN JAPAN metal and glass Halloween lantern and we both take it to the streets each Halloween just as the sun drops below the horizon, which even in a small city like Albany, happens very very fast.

Another avenue for returning to Halloweens come and gone is through my weekly Random Access Thought(or Random Access File) segment heard exclusively over This Week in Amateur Radio. In the late chilly autumn evenings during October 2005, I decided to produce a feature documenting the history of the Ouija Board. This was one of my first heavily researched RATs, making extensive use of the Internet for facts, figures and historical perspective. This is also where I learned that not all information may be so correct or accurate in presentation.

I harvested something like ten different webpage sites and found that facts such as years varied by as much as plus or minus two or three years, although elements such as names and locations were fairly consistent. Too, many of the ambiances and background sound effects like tolling bells, scary cemeteries and groaning monsters were sourced as free Internet downloads. This was in the time before the N2FNH Sound Effects Library had grown to its current mythic proportions. Someday I should publish this library for sale to sound effects fanboys! These effects tracks still reside somewhere deep within the hallowed hallways of the big vault.

The history of Ouija Board Random Access Thought also set the stage for the radio and podcast debut of Marilyn Munro(nee' Krasnov). In this performance, I offer the historical content while Marilyn intones gravely and in reverse echo the consequences of using such tools of the devil.

So download this week's This Week in Amateur Radio Ham Service and the TWIARi Broadcast version, or even better connect to http://www.twiar.org/n2fnh/RATParts
Look for file number RAF051021_R1.cab, right click and "Save Target As" to your hardddrive. Use your WinZIP or IZArc to extract the select RAF audio WAV file inside!

Patches!

Dr. Seuss Explains Computers!

Who was Doctor Seuss? Those of us who grew up in the 1950's and 1960's will recall this author of popular children's books. Such titles as: THE CAT IN THE HAT, HORTON HEARS A WHO AND GREEN EGGS AND HAM quickly come to mind and while it is more than doubtful that the following short item was penned by Doctor Seuss, it certainly captures his style and flavour.

DR. SEUSS EXPLAINS COMPUTERS

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report. If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, And the doubleclicking icon puts your window in the trash, And your data is corrupted ...cause the index doesn't hash, Then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash! If the label on your cable on the table at your house Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse, Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang Because as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang! When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk, And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk, Then you have to flash your memory, and you'll want to RAM your ROM. Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom.

Letters! We Get Letters!

Here, in no particular order, are a few recent e-mail requests for an Official This Week in Amateur Radio QSL Card. The more traditional pathway of writing a reception report and mailing it to: This Week in Amateur Radio Post Office Box 30, Sand Lake, New York 12153 has given way in recent years to an e-mail request sent to n2fnh@capital.net. So, whether you receive the program over your local VHF or UHF repeater, copy the show over WBCQ or download the latest weekly Internet Podcast, you can get your own TWIAR QSL Card by taking pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. either way works!

------

Hello,

I heard that this is the email to request the TWIAR QSL Cards from for
the radio broadcast. If this is incorrect, please disreguard.

My information is:

Robert Keller KC8FNF
9909 Trail Bottom Rd. NW
Dundee Ohio 44624
(330)852-0174

I listen to the podcast via download from iTunes, most recently issue #808.

If you need any further information, please ask.

Thank You and 73,
Robert KC8FNF
------

Greetings. I heard your latest brodcast om wbcq and enjoyed the program. I would like a qsl please. KB8OCG. 3760 Myrtle Rd. Lakeport MI 48059. Tnx73
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
------

Bill, I read your random access thought on the 158.400 stuff. There is another website you may want to check out. And yes, it's still out there. 73's Joe - KB2SRD

http://www.popularwireless.com/forum/ubbthreads.phpubb=showflat&Number=71536&page=1&fpart=1

This Week in UFOs! A Once and Momentarily Current Special Feature of TWIAR!

Well! Be sure to tune in this weekend for the Random Access thought, heard worldwide and exclusively over This Week in Amateur Radio. This episode and also a second future edition soon to go into production, is a long time coming. In the far distant, primordial mists of TWIAR, eons before the Random Access Thought, centuries prior to the Ancient Amateur Archives and certainly way before Leo Laporte's Tech News, there was a short lived feature which apparently played over the course of two or three programs entitled This Week in UFOs as hosted by Don Ecker KE6RVO, a columnist for UFO Magazine. George has been talking, virtually proselytizing, about this feature for years but recently, like the Holy Grail, he stumbled across two cassette tapes while doing some housecleaning in his radio shack. He turned the tapes over to me for remastering and post effects enhancement.

This RAT is prefaced by Mister Munro, Marilyn's husband, with an introduction and historical prospective voiced by George W2XBS.

Download this week's This Week in Amateur Radio Ham Service and the TWIARi Broadcast version, - OR - even better, connect to: http://www.twiar.org/N2FNH/RATParts
Search for file number RAT081014_ECK1.cab, right click and "Save Target As" to your hardddrive. Use your WinZIP or IZArc to extract the juicy RAT audio WAV file concealed inside!

From the RAT Files Circa 2003: The Hobby of a Lifetime!

The following was originally composed as radio copy for a feature entitled THE RANDOM ACCESS FILE for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO for airing on October 25, 2003. For more information on this audio news service, please click on http://www.twiar.org/

I remember this little kid. Cute kid. About nine years old. I remember this little kid sitting in the front room at his house at 644 Morris Street which was actually a huge rambling apartmentthird floor up in the Pine Hills section of Albany. Crouched by the big bay window, tightly gripping a heavy chrome microphone with the big quarter-inch plug jacked into a Roberts upright reel-to reel tape recorder, he sat there belting out a play-by-play commentary over the fly-in, the fly by and the fly away of the glorious Goodyear Blimp , a silver helium-filled, lighter than air baggy cigar gliding gracefully high in the starlit skies over the city on a crisp and chilly Friday October evening with its glittering red, yellow, green and blue pinpoints of light that spelled out the word GOODYEAR in giant sparkling letters across its massive broadside.

Then I remember remember this other little kid. He's about a year older. About ten. He's feverishly tape-recording the warbling, the chortling and the singing noises of the Three Amigos coming out of a big beige-colored RCA Color TV three-inch speaker from a NBC show called "The Wonderful World of Disney". He's doing this with the same grey wrinkly-metal clad tape machine with it's light-glinting plastic seven-inch diameter Scotch Brand magnetic tape reels coasting around and around at an amazing seven-and-one-half inches per second. All the funny music, the silly voices and the bang-clang sound effects preserved on a thin quarter-inch slice of acetate plastic and magnetic stuff that the 3M Company called type 111, all of which is basically just coherent rust.

Of course, all this this happened some forty years ago and all this courtesy of Dad, who faithfully made the commute upstate every Friday night after work because he lived in the Bronx and who sometimes lugged the twenty-five pound Roberts with him just so some little kid could practice blimp announcing or generate an endless succession of mouth-fart noises or sometimes even secretly spied on Mom and Dad's kitchen conversation using the heavy chrome mike with the big quarter-inch plug jacked into the Roberts all weekend-long.

And then there was this other little kid who finally got his own portable Airline tape recorder from Montgomery Ward with the tiny three-inch reels. The big fist-sized microphone was concealed on the front face of the machine which unhinged along with a long thick coily cord, which then could be parked in front of the TV in order to snag the cool Hanna-Barbera sounds from Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Top Cat plus neato noises from Hollywood flicks like "Forbidden Planet", "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Robinson Crusoe On Mars". All these little kids soon grew up to be me who's talking to you right now.

The Roberts machine would eventually return to me and stay with me and finally die with me many years later but not before a succession of other tape recorders came along, like the monster WEBCOR that I borrowed from Kurt Hackel down the block. It never got returned because he and his family moved away and he said he didn't want it anymore. Then there was the Mercury five- inch reel-to-reel portable and another Wards Airline seven-inch reel job, both of which I played and plowed into the ground until no reels would turn anymore.

But during the associated tenures of all these machines, many more hours would be spent recording silly sounds off the TV or the sometimes seemingly bizarre noises right outside my bedroom window. The Goodyear Blimp would make many more migrations to our city over the course of a half-score of years and on many occasions, the mike would be thrust out the window to document the low "brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" of the blimp engines. Scary space noises also came in over the crunchy static on a shortwave radio, a big one down at Terry O'brien's house. Terry and his brother Mike had this huge ominous pinewood-finish shortwave radio console with the eerie green tuning eye circa 1940 in their attic bedroom and the WEBCOR was dragged over to archive the weird burbling teletypes, the oodly-doodly howling facsimiles, the impending BEEP..BEEP..BEEP of CHU , the monotonous drone of the WWV and other boinking, beeping and blipping baudot blasts that boodled and oodled their way beyond the heavy cloth speaker and into the microphone.

The many hours spent tape recording soon gave way to many more hours spent hunched over a splicing jig, mounted on my little desk which was hand painted a horrible stark blue color by my well-meaning Mom who felt that wood-aging and antiquing was her personal calling. These hours would be spent carefully slicing and carefully splicing and carefully matching the forty-five degree sliced ends of the tape together with some very sticky milky-white splicing tape, all of which you could get at the Lafayette Electronics store or the Radio Shack. Splicing the tape meant you could connect a bunch of sounds together or maybe shorten or maybe lengthen a song, which seemed a really cool thing to do.

And so this became my hobby. At least it was my indoor hobby. I wasn't a total nerd though. I did actually go outside and do the skateboard and sprain my ankle, many times. And I did go and bat the ball and break the window, many times. And other kid stuff like that too. I did also get into the fine art of throwing stainless-steel razor-edged boomerangs with intent to kill. But here, I digress.

The concept of sound effects as a hobby was further cast in stone when I chanced to see a 50's vintage George Reeves Superman re-run on the tube where some kid running around with a tape machine collecting sounds actually helps Superman catch some big bad thugs by using the recorded sounds of the Man of Steel flying and landing to drive them crazy. I figured if it was good enough for Superman, then it was surely good enough for me. Now of course to our well meaning but terminally-misdirected though-most times kindly Certified Social Workers of our latter day, such an activity would be tagged to as "therapy". Because I was a kid doing all this, the CSWs would pencil it in as "play therapy".

Basket weaving is therapy. Potholders is therapy. Making a lamp out of some chunks of wood is eighth-grade shop class. Drawing pictures of Boogie men is not only play therapy but is also disturbing. Manipulating sounds at your very whim is magic. More than a hobby. Beyond an adventure. Magic! Those hours and hours of taping sounds and splicing sounds did become a minor obsession and this is actually how I got into broadcast radio. At the time, my primary goal was to gain access to sound recording equipment and that I did for about twenty years at various radio stations here in New York and Connecticut.

Access initially came in the form of big glowing rosy red tube-amplified AMPEX 350s and then the solid-state 440s, Scully 280s and Studer REVOX A77s. To be sure, I loved doing radio. But I loved playing with the sounds even more. A universe of monster ten-inch reel-to-reel tape machines, lead-weight sixteen-inch diameter turntables and audio consoles with audio gain knobs, known to the insiders as "pots". These pots were as big as a stevedore's meaty hands, all of which would maintain into the early 1990s when without much fanfare, an IBM 386 with Windows 3.1 and an on-screen virtual production studio-in-a-box called CARD-D materialized. This unseen epiphany unfolded at WROW here in Albany and now things could be done in way not seen before. Play a sound backwards? Click on a tab which said REVERSE. No more physically flipping the tape reels on a full-track tape recorder just to get the same effect. Play a sound at half speed? Click on a tab which said SAMPLING RATE. Change the rate from 44.1 KHz sampling to 22.025 KHz sampling which amazingly equals an analog recording run at half-speed. No more seven-and-a-half or fifteen inches per second mechanical speed switch.

But this was only the beginning. Things began to accelerate and began to become far more accessible beyond the professional broadcast or recording studio. Soon, the expensive IBM clone, the obnoxious proprietary software and hardware, indeed the studio itself was no longer restricted to the pages of Broadcasting Magazine but now sat on the shelves at COMPUSA. Another interesting bit of Karma phased in around the same time. A Canadian company called SOUND IDEAS managed to get its corporate fists wrapped around some remarkable and very well-known sound effects libraries. Here was something I had wished for for many decades and now for a few dollars, well, a lot of dollars, all the sounds I used to tape from the TV, all the sounds from Hanna-Barbera, all the sounds from Warner Brothers, all the sounds from Jay Ward were mine for the purchase. Sadly, the original tapes I had recorded those many years ago are gone. Some were lost through moves from place to another but most of them did not survive the decades well. They simply became unplayable through advanced age despite attempts to carefully preserve them. In their stead though, several small brightly-colored boxes with pictures of cartoons on them and each box loaded with many silver digital disks encoded with the very same things I had lost so long ago. They were back. And what's more, while I still have a functioning Studer Revox A77 sitting on the floor in my bedroom, I have do also nine different computers sitting in the living room loaded with various flavours of COOLEDIT and GOLDWAVE available to me at my very mouse tip. And so that which became my hobby is still my hobby.

In the evening hours when it's just me and Suzie (my one foot wife), I sit before a beige-colored computer monitor with the COOLEDIT displayed upon the glowing screen. There is no tape now. No splicing jig. But there is the mouse which works much better and certainly much safer than the razor blade. And sitting on track 30 of the disk which I just this moment slid into the CD player is a two-minute audio clip of the Goodyear Blimp recorded in 1961 by Audio Fidelity Records as it was nosing it's way up the Hudson River, heading due North and on course for little old Albany, New York. And did you know this COOLEDIT has a multitrack feature?? So there's one track for the blimp, And one track for Bill. And I've also got this long, thin plastic Radio Shack microphone right here with the tiny one-eighth inch plug jacked into the computer. Hmmm, what should I say next? -30-

Brands!

We Just Got a Letter! We Just Got a Letter! And So Forth!

Here, in no particular order, are a few recent e-mail requests for an Official This Week in Amateur Radio QSL Card. The more traditional pathway of writing a reception report and mailing it to: This Week in Amateur Radio Post Office Box 30, Sand Lake, New York 12153 has given way in recent years to an e-mail request sent to n2fnh@capital.net. So, whether you receive the program over your local VHF or UHF repeater, copy the show over WBCQ or download the latest weekly Internet Podcast, you can get your own TWIAR QSL Card by taking pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. either way works!

--- --- ---
OK I admit it. Between QSOs I visited your blog.
73, Harry
W9HGO -SKCC #4647

I have been an active SWL'er since 1960. Passed my General written 10/20/04 and passed my code exam and extra written on 1/23/05. No transmitter at the moment but have a JRC525 on the receive side. My previous radios were a Yaesu FRG 7000 and a Hallicrafters SX-110. I am usually on 10 15 40 or 80 listening for CW to copy or our local repeater here in Chicago, IL (147.15). I like the idea of QRP and looking for an old inexpensive boat anchor to go along with the JRC. Also interested in glow bugs and want to build up an old 1 tube transmitter at some point in the future. At the moment, July 2008, looking for my first HF rig. Finally got my first HF rig a beautiful Icom 765. On August 28th I made my first QSO. I am doing mostly CW and waiting for my digital interface so I can do some psk31 and RTTY. You will find me mainly on 40M. But check out the SKCC sked page http://www.obriensweb.com/sked/ and come and find me. I can do about 5-7 WPM so be patient.

--- --- ---

Hello George,While strolling through the ham radio sites I recently found TWIAR. IT'S FUN!Some of your most important topics are hardly a topic on this side ofthe pond. Distances are much shorter here - you can easily go from oneend of Germany to the other within a single day and there are some82.000.000 people living in this crammed space.Every 60 miles or so you have a town of at least 100.000, quite a few ofthem 1.000 years old and some even 2.000 years. So we had enough time tobuild an infrastructure to last. The last desaster where amateur radioplayed an important role in was the Hamburg flooding in 1962. Besides:As far as I can judge many things are much more buerocratic over here.How does it come that TWIAR has not been mentioned at Wikipedia? Thatis, until today - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Week_In_Amateur_Radio_International.

Let's hope that none of the moderators will delete it. Perhaps you can find a ham or two to polish the article. But you know the Wikipediapolicy: Don't do it yourself...vy 73,AlexanderDL4NO

Now is the Time for Amateur Radio's Best Bargains! W2XOY Serves Up Another Amateur Radio Tale!

This edition of the Random Access Thought continues the thread I started last week with Bill Continelli as guest host. Prior to the story of "W2XOY's Secret Elmer". Bill had dropped by and recorded a feature entitled:"Now is the Time for Amateur Radio's Best Bargains". We did this back in late February, 2005 with production wrapping up on March the 2nd.

The basic premise of the story is that Bill, planning ham radio purchases in 1974, is visited by himself from thirty one years in the future. Bill's elder self launches a discussion in typical certified public accountant's terms just how buying amateur gear in 2005 will actually be cheaper than it was in 1974. Needless to say, this Random Access Thought was extensively post produced with the added feature of some classic motion picture soundtrack music. Mr. Continelli serves up some fairly intense and quite passionate acting while paying homage to "Gone with the Wind".

By the way, if you listen carefully, you may hear jingling bells in the background. Ed the cat, a fifteen pound street feline with the personality of Scooby Doo and the smarts of a doorbell races feverishly from room to room while the microphonium was hot. Ed is one of those creatures who occasionally discovers his tail and chases it!

This installment, like "W2XOY's Secret Elmer" made use of a production scheme best described as Single Track Overlay. While I currently produce the Random Access Thought in multitrack, back then I used the primary voice track as a template. Primary effects and background ambiances were then overlaid or matted under the voice. Under some circumstances, this style of post production could actually be faster and more efficient.

My thanks to George W2XBS for requesting this episode and reminding me that I still had this classic gem concealed deep within the Random Access vaults! Please download this week's This Week in Amateur Radio Ham Service and the TWIARi Broadcast version, or even better connect to: http://www.twiar.org/N2FNH/RATParts Look for file number RAT081008_BARG_BCQ_R1.cab or RAT08008_BARG_HAM_R1, right click and "Save Target As" to your hardddrive. Use your WinZIP or IZArc to extract the select RAF audio WAV file inside!

From the RAT Files Circa 2003: The Amazing RadioShack HTX-420!

The following was originally composed as radio copy for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO for airing Saturday September 27, 2003 as a feature entitled: THE RANDOM ACCESS FILE. Please click on http://www.twiar.org/ for additional information on this premier amateur radio audio news service.

I had a Sunday brunch with a remarkable Motley Crew of ham radio operators. Among the quorum in session were George Bowen W2XBS, our Technical Guru here at This Week In Amateur Radio and Bill Continelli W2XOY,our Maven Emeritus of the Amateur Radio Archives. We had convened at a nearby Denny's Restaurant in Defreestville, a little half-mile strip of nowhere, planted right in the middle of anywhere, jammed in smack dab somewhere in where ever, upstate New York. Bill was in his best evangelistic form extolling the virtues of his brandspanking new Radio Shack HTX-420 dual band handheld transceiver which he sternly advised was on closeout for a mere $129.00 US. Bill quietly murmured in conspiratorial tones that the very last unit in the area could be located at the Hoosick Street Radio Shack in Troy.

The 420 was a cute little blister, reminiscent of the Kenwood TH-D7A in terms of appearance and keyboard layout. The HTX-420 transmits from 144 to 148 MegaCycles and from 438 to 450 out of the box and offers extended receive from 136 to 174 and from 420 through 512, plus the aircraft bandfrom 108 to 137.

The little HTX might not have been of further interest except that Bill further intoned that this radio could be easily modified to transceive far beyond its respective band edge limits. How easy? This is how easy. On page 42 of the owner's manual, under the heading: CHANGING THE TRANSMIT FREQUENCY RANGE The following statement: "To extend the range, turn off the transceiver. then while holding (the SCAN button) plus (the 9 button), press POWER". With this so-called MOD, the two meter transmit now expands from 142 to 149.88. This is typical Civil Air Patrol and MARS capability and so no big deal. It was the extended transmit from 420 through 470 that caught my attention so let's flag that thought for just a moment.

This is a quite a sea change from previous Radio Shack policies regarding their amateur radio walkie-talkies especially since when they first debuted their HTX-202. That radio was loudly hailed as a two meter-only rig, no extended transmit, no expanded receive. Apparently, this ham-only approach has been slowly tail spinning away from stated doctrine. This keyboard approach is also light-years away from the days when open heart surgery had to be performed on some HTs. I still have my Kenwood TH77A which had to be physically disemboweled. Some highly significant mega-chip had to be unsoldered and physically lifted off the primary board just to further unsolder two microscopic surface mount components hidden beneath. Professionals were needed and secured for the project. This was far beyond my own capabilities. But the job got done. Similar devices such as the Standard C528A did not require the scary circuit board hospitalization but did offer keyboard MODs. However, the prospective owner was required to enter several pages of many PRESS FUNCTION and many PUSH NUMBER in an effort to unfetter and to unshackle. A major-league headache!

My now archaic Alinco F-1 handheld, which in untimely manner became the F-1 MINUS 2 when my son, four years old at the time of the incident, smart-bombed a well-targeted shoe onto the surface of the innocent radio and promptly amputated the bright white little number 2 keypad button which quickly bounced away and got lost forever somewhere in the flibbity-jibbity. And my other assorted Alincos...well, they did make life a bit easier by providing the obvious SNIP HERE bright yellow wire or the obvious CLIP-HERE bright white resistor but even so, the protective covers to the transceivers needed to be undone and their soft and secret internals violated.

But not so with the HTX-420. At the conclusion of our Sunday brunch with the Motley Crew, I decided to take a leisurely tour upstreet to Troy and sauntered into the emporium and put forth my request and the requisite cash-flow. Five minutes later, I had the booty in tow. I was tempted to change tracks and go with a pair of Motorola T-5950 Family Radio Service radios sitting on the shelf, but I held firm which brings us back to my flagged thought. This little HTX by its own design parameters embraces both the Family Radio Service and also the General Mobile Radio Service and this little HTX byits own design parameters transceives very well in both the 462 and 467 MegaCycle ranges. Armed with this sensitive little brick of technology, I was now privy to an amazing microscopic world just outside my ham shack window and just right down the street.

But the signals...................................
They are so small..............................
And the signals..................................
They are so much higher in frequency..............
That you can just barely hear them...................
Outside your window...........................................
........................much less right down the street.
And the radios that are being used....................
They are so small.................................................
That they..............................................................
Like the cellphone................................................
And the pager.......................................................
.................could easily be dropped into a toilet.

So on my own city block where I live, lots of little kids have lots of these little 500-milliwatt FRS radios that you can grab for nine bucks at the WalMart. An endless chaotic stream of beeping noises can be heard in the late after-school hours, playing endlessly between dinner-time, homework-time and bed-time. Legal issues aside, I decided to attempt first contact with the pre-teen street population using the the amazing HTX-420 on high power and much like the CB of yesteryear, lines like "Hey, what's your 20???" were still very much part of the working vernacular.

I immediately met resistance when I asked them what they were doing on MY channel. Perhaps I was a bit forward with this unsubstantiated claim.

"Who are you?" They demanded.
"I am the King!" I asserted.
"You are not the King!" They challenged.
"How can you say that?" I stated in self-defense.
"Because the King lives in Egypt!" They argued.
"But I am from Egypt!" I lied.
"No you are not!" They theorized with obvious knowledge and truth.
"How can you tell?" I wondered aloud.
"Because you are here in Albany on my street!" They assured me.
"I am the Queen!" Said another, far more adult, far more feminine and far closer to my age.
"You are?" I stammered.
"Yes, I am a nurse too..." She purred.
But I was not sure if this was an act of seduction or an offer of mental health therapy, so I put the 420 down and continued to listen to the on-going drone of the beeps, the boops and the blips while the Queen called for the King several times more but to no avail. I did learn a few hours later that the Queen had a late-night working spouse who might not appreciate HIS Queen getting it on with the King.

And later that same evening just a few minutes east of midnight: "The King is here!" I announced to the pre-squelched static rush and to no one in particular.

"Hey man...!" An anonymous young male voice countered.
"Yes?" I responded with guarded concern.
"Hey man, where are the girls?" He cooed with a edgy, wicked smile.
"I don't know." I waffled, caught off guard.
There was no more chit-chat to follow. My answer clearly was incorrect and it appeared to the young fellow may have sharked his way on to another channel in search of the "girls". Quite a departure from the kiddie-talk six hours earlier.
But better than cable TV just the same.

Now far be it from me to suggest that you or anyone employ non-FCC type-accepted RF equipment in the service of the 21st century CB lest some well-meaning but most-likely over-intentioned FRS or GMRS user freak out and spew government regulation dogma out through your speaker grill but I did have some fun. By the way, I did go back and picked up those Motorola 5950s at the same Radio Shack a few weeks later so now when the moment strikes me, I can jockey back and forth between the radios in an effort to keep mycantankerous audience at bay. Should you try this yourself? Only you...can answer that question! -30-

Marks!

W2XOY'S Secret Elmer! The Subject? Yes!

This week's edition of the Random Access Thought takes on an air of high tech mystery and political intrigue as Bill Continelli W2XOY relates the story of "W2XOY's Secret Elmer". By today's broadcast standards, this is a truly vintage recording, first produced in December of 2005. It has become fairly standard that if Bill has a topic he desires to cover that falls beyond the realm of his popular Ancient Amateur Archives, he will, in effect, franchise time via the Random Access Thought as a guest host. While Bill's Ancient Amateur Archives are presented "dry", that is without any audio enhancement, hosting a RAT freely allows these stories to be fully developed with sounds and environmental backdrops that expand the theoy of "theater of the mind". This production was fun to do. I kept going back and adding more and more effects to fully document Bill's tale!

Mr. Continelli has performed in a number of other Random Access features, including "CQ MARS! CQ MARS!" and "The Story of Reggie". In addition, Bill has offered a number of custom recorded vocal effects which are now part of the ever-growing N2FNH Sound Effects Library.

This installment, like of many of my early Random Access programs relied on a method of production which might be described as Single Track Overlay. While I currently produce features which are developed though multi-track, in those days, I would use the primary voice track as a template. Primary effects and background ambiances were copied and directly overlaid or matted on to the voice track. Under certain circumstances, this style of post production could actually be faster and more efficient, but I moved to multiple track production when George W2XBS requested stereo versions of RAT, QSL and BLOG promos for TWIARi. Under a multi-track format, elements such as music can be selectly added for This Week in Amateur Radio International but be removed for the HAM Radio Full Service version. I still use Single Track Overlay in the development of certain sound effects combinations where I want two or more effects to be merged but not heard as separate elements. So download this week's This Week in Amateur Radio Ham Service and the TWIARi Broadcast version, or even better connect to: http://www.twiar.org/N2FNH/RATParts Look for file number RAT080930_BOND_BCQ_R1.cab OR RAT080930_BOND_HAM_R1.cab, right click and "Save Target As" to your hardddrive. Use your WinZIP or IZArc to extract the select RAF audio WAV file inside!

From the RAT Files Circa 2003: The Victorian Internet!

The following was originally composed as radio copy for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO. Please click on http://www.twiar.org/ for additional information.

Maybe you heard the old saw: "What goes around, comes around".
Maybe you heard the old saw: "History repeats itself".
Maybe you heard the old saw: "Same soup. Different bowl".
Maybe you heard the old saw: "It's the same old dead horse in the bathtub".
No.
You never heard this one.
Only I heard this one.
From my seventh grade socialite math teacher, Miss Joyner.
Never mind.
So a question now:
What technology has become most significant in our daily lives in the last
decade?
There is more than one answer.
But you could easily argue....
That the Internet.............
Matches.......................
The Internet is a new thing...
Is it not....................?
Not necessarily..............!
Well, there was the ARPANET.
A cold war Caesar salad of some GOVs, some MILs and some EDUs.
Triviologists recall the ALOHANET.
A Darwinian precursor to our own packet radio network.
Very esoteric, though.
Our Internet is actually the second coming.
What came around today already has come around a few centuries before.
There was another Internet and the first operational network devices went on
line 200-plus years ago in France at 11:00AM on the 2nd of March, 1791.
But these network devices were not computers.
Not as we know computers to be.
Not digital.
Analog.
They were five foot tall pivoting wooden panels.
Painted black on one side.
White on the other.
Peripherals came in the form of clocks and telescopes.
The operating system was a hand-written codebook.

The first two transceivers were spaced about ten miles apart and two guys, Claude and Rene Chappe reckoned they would call their new communications contraption the TACHYGRAPH, taken from the Greek meaning "fast writer" but quickly the name was modified to another which translated as "fast writer" and the new word was TELEGRAPH! This was the debut of some significant history that would repeat itself 200- plus years later with some better equipment.

Hi, this is Bill Baran - N2FNH - with a history lesson, a book review and a homework assignment from the Packet Radio Junkbox, a monthly feature heard exclusively over This Week In Amateur Radio. Last month, I was loitering in George Bowen's kitchen. George W2XBS is our Techn-Wiz here at This Week. George had dragged out some old Q-Streets that were dumpsterbound for me to peruse and I caught sight of a letter to the editor discussing a recent review done on a volume entitled: "The Victorian Internet", authored by Tom Standage. Catchy title.

A fan of SF magazines such as Analog and Issac Asimov's, it struck me that this might be a title you might see in those august and somewhat mentally enlightening pulps so I sallied forth to the local bibliotech and secured a copy and summarily digested it. "The Victorian Internet" is the story of the telegraph. The Chappe brother's black and white panels gave way to a more sophisticated optical telegraph, a small house with a large swinging arm tower assembly overhead that, depending on how and where the arm was positioned, could be translated into letters and numbers.

"By the mid-1830's, lines of telegraph towers stretched across much of western Europe, forming a sort of mechanical Internet of whirling arms and blinking shutters and passing news and official messages from one place to another". The author goes on to say: "The continental network eventually reached from Paris...to Amsterdam...to Venice with other networks in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Russia and Britain bringing the total number of telegraph towers in Europe to almost a thousand".

This continental network was actually a large network of several optical telegraph networks and by extension this is the basic definition of an internet. The first suggestion of a telegraph system making use of electromagnetism to send messages was put forth by an anonymous author identified by the initials C.M. in an article appearing in Scots Magazine dated February 17th, 1753, The title of the article was: "An expeditious Method of Conveying Intelligence". From there, "The Victorian Internet" launches into a three decade-long fast track documenting the emergence of the electromagnetic telegraph, how undersea cables came to be designed and built, how the career of the telegrapher, the men and the women behind the key fed into the maturity of the telegraph here in the United States and overseas, the merging of these systems into an inter-networked global communications web.

But who knew that something as mundane as the quiet humming and clicking of a newlyinvented ticker tape machine would be the harbinger of hands-free operation and the death knell of a choice career in working the key, a doorway into things like fully duplexed, and then completely multiplexed automated transmissions.

And then the ultimate decline and replacement of the electromagnetic telegraph by the equally electromagnetic but much more consumer-accessible "number please" telephone. And of course, along the way, all the names associated with this prehistoric Internet like Francis Ronalds, William Cooke, Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison.

And this is where I will leave the tale to hang because I do not want to ruin the story for you by telling the whole schmear. So run to the library right after This Week in Amateur Radio and borrow this book. And to further entice, you will learn how the worldwide electrical telegraph network gave rise to some rather creative business enterprises, the DOT COMs of the 1800s. Likewise, romance and crime, the bastion of 21st century television and hacking and cracking, the bane of 21st century Internet were also part of the territory of the electromagnetic telegraph network.

After reading "The Victorian Internet", it occurred to me that if the Internet were nothing more than a network of networks, then there are actually all sorts of networks and internets out there. But I'm not talking about Microsoft or MAC or TCPIP or AX25. Nothing so digital. Nothing so electronic as that. What came to mind was Analog networks. Physical networks. Mechanical networks.

Prior to the development of the first optical telegraphs, the news moved as fast as word of mouth, horses, carriages and seafaring vessels could carry it. But there were a few primitive though fully operational communications schemes in place in some seemingly uncivilized localities. Every kid growing up in the 1950's USA knew from watching Davey Crockett on TV that those nasty Injuns were sending smoke signals from one mountain to the other.Tarzan movies taught us kids that those pesky African natives beat on drums or big fallen tree trucks or sometimes even whistled really loud between mountain valleys. Analog long distance point-to-point communications. Using an agreed upon transmission protocol.

If these nasty injuns and pesky natives were so savage and uncivilized, how come those clever Europeans and us feisty Americans didn't have e-mail like that. We can bring this analog network communications theory a little closer to home, maybe even in your own home,especially you live now or grew up in a big city apartment. If your apartment had steam radiator pipes or air vents or even better, a dumb waiter, than Mrs. Blum could shout to Mrs. Cohen and relay all the latest neighborhood happenings and general purpose gossip. The telephone? Why? Shouting down the air vent or the dumb waiter is more organic. More granular. More whole earth.

Mrs. Blum's voice is channeled through several hundred feet of ducting that by its very unintentional design provides considerable amplification albeit with some inharmonic distortion to the receiving party, namely Mrs. Cohen. Internet Phone today is the air vent of yesterday. Pounding a broomstick on the ceiling or banging on the steam pipes to express anger or displeasure is yet another approach to point-to-point communications and not unlike ICQ, AOL or MSN instant messaging except the emoticon is the message and the message is the emoticon. Such a message need not be abrasive or angry, The pop singers Tony Orlando and Dawn offered up a somewhat more positive scenario in a song by suggesting to a girl fiend on the next flight up that she "knock three times on the ceiling if you want me. Twice on the pipes if the answer is no".
Again, we see an inter-connected ceiling and pipe network and a previously agreed-to protocol. Pretty advanced thinking for the 1970's!

And, how about those tubes? I learned in "The Victorian Internet" that pneumatic tube systems were developed during the rise of the electrical telegraph as a means to help increase the volume and distribution of the hand-written message from office to office and building to building. In fact, in localities like New York City and Paris, these tube networks were so vast they covered much of their respective cities. You still see these pneumatic tubes in use at many banks where you may have the choice of the teller's window or access to the teller via pneumatic tube. A kind of A-mail or perhaps a very simple form of A-commerce. That's "A" for what now?

So finally, your homework: To the library! The title: The Victorian Internet The author: Tom Standage. The publisher: Walker and Company of New York City. Don't ask what the Dewey decimal number is. I don't know. Or You could (ick!) Embrace the paid model. As of this writing, the paperback was still available from the publisher. It's not terribly gelt-intensive. About 12 US. - 30 -

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