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-