THEY'RE HERE! THE NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK!

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Here's a partial list of brand new callsigns e-mailed to me this Thursday. These are the new callsigns for MNOAOS Zachary and his friend-who-is-a-girl Jessica. April Chunski is a friend of ours and a member of the Schenectady Museum Amateur Radio Association.

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KC2VWW Chinski April
KC2VWX Bowen Jessica
KC2VWY Baran Zachary

TWO NEW HAMS!

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That guy on the left...and that gal on the right are two new amateur radio operators. Both took their Technician Class License exam at the Masonic Lodge in East Greenbush, New York on Sunday morning October 4th. The two day class and examination was sponsored by EGARA, the East Greenbush Amateur Radio Association. Who are these kids? Stay tuned! Details to follow!

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!

Who ARE those people? Part 2 - Mother Radio and the Krasnovs!

Mother Radio first appeared on This Week in Amateur Radio in Random Access promos in 2005. She was one of the very first voice characters to interact with Zachary, aside from myself.

Mother Radio is every body's Brooklyn-born Jewish mother, even if you're not Jewish. In the course of the past few seasons, Mother Radio's voice has dropped considerably in pitch. She has become tougher. More crusty. In fact, Mother Radio is downright cranky.

The Mother Radio character is loosely based on my own maternal Grandmother, who was born and bred in the Bronx in the late 1800's. She had that curious prim and proper Depression Era social quality about her but she had her quirks. When I was a little kid making all kinds of little kid noises and little kid distractions, she would always advise that I should not "wake the baby
downstairs". This terse statement Mother Radio subsequently inherited and has belted out many times. Another stinging imperative: "Now do as you're told!" was a line lifted the cheesy B-flick "The Crawling Eye", fully in keeping with her character!

Despite her crabby nature, Mother Radio is still prim and proper enough not to utter any sort of street language. Thus, if she believes that you are full of baloney, she may decry that it's all "a boatload of floobus". To the best of my knowledge, there is no such word in the English language as floobus. But it sounded good so she owns it.

In January of 2008, personal details about Mother Radio became public knowledge over This Week in Amateur Radio. Mother Radio's actual name is Beverly Krasnov. It appears that she lives in Brooklyn (variously known as Big City) with her husband Boleslav Krasnov. Mr. Krasnov is employed at Canarsie Wireless as a technician of forty-five years seniority.
Both Beverly and Mr. Krasnov have hosted a number of recent Random Access Thoughts and Files. Beverly has covered the story of Marconi and the mystery television station KLEE while Boleslav has discussed StratoVision and Technology Curiosities and Complaints.

I selected the name Beverly for Mother Radio because to me, she was always a Beverly. Mr. Krasnov's first name Boleslav was my Father's first name, although everyone called him Bill. The last name Krasnov, I appropriated from a fellow ham radio friend, Bob Krasnoff KF4UVA, who currently lives with his wife Leah in Boynton Beach. It is my personal idiosyncrasy to oft times label various friends' wives by an alias other than their real names. So for Leah, I would on occasion refer to her as Beverly or Marilyn whenever we got together.

Speaking of Marilyn, Marilyn, the loopy British chick, is the Krasnovs' lovely daughter. Why she possesses a British dialect is not clear since she is Brooklyn-born. In contrast, Mother Radio has that crunchy three-pack-a-day growl while Boleslav speaks with a distinctively animated Brooklynese overtone. Marilyn is happily married to Mr. Munroe, a true Brit. But she hangs around the home nest with her parents a good deal of the time. Marilyn's favorite pastime is watching paint dry. She paints a room and then watches the paint dry. The Krasnovs have experienced continuous interior decoration since Marilyn was a teen. She expanded this obsessive compulsive behavior to her own pad busily painting walls while Mr. Munroe listens to non-directional aircraft radio beacons in his private study.

Meanwhile, Cigman Krasnov is Marilyn's fail-to-launch forty-five year old sibling. In addition, Cigman is indeed a chronic three-pack-a-day smoker and not necessarily the brightest bulb in the pack. He digs hot cars, fabulous babes and sleeps till noon. Given the present day cost of cigarettes and their attendant health issues, it is a puzzlement that Cigman goes so far against the social grain.

Zach hangs out the Krasnovs quite often, which is curious since he lives here in upstate New York. How he gets around is not clear.

Rumor has it that Commander Jainpain, yet another of my obtuse characters, may be in some way related to the Krasnovs. But...that's another story.

More later.