Retiring The C49DRSACR!

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Back in 2004, I decided to expand the range of the Random Access Thought (File) venue for This Week In Amateur Radio by adding in-the-field interviews at local hamfests, amateur club meetings and with individual characters worthy of Random Access note. At the time, I considered the purchase of some kind of a digital audio recorder and so did some typical Internet research. What I found was that while there were several half way decent machines on the market, there were two principal issues. These devices, with the exception of some inexpensive mp3 recorders, were still physically large, boxy AND they were very expensive.
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Due largely to self-inflicted laziness, I drifted over the mighty Hudson River to the local RadioShack in East Greenbush and found a solution, For a cheap $49.00 plus tax and tip, I was able to secure a RadioShack CTR-121 CAT.NO.14-128 portable audio cassette recorder, custom manufactured in China by people working in fire trap sweat shops for three cents an hour.
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This cassette recorder, otherwise known as the C49DRSACR, was actually a fairly decent investment. The first in-the-field assignment was to record events at the Schenectady Museum Amateur Radio Association's Field Day. Using the built-in microphone, I was quite surprised at the good voice quality but the first of two and a half irritants soon came into sonic focus. This machine has a tape counter which can used to roughly ascertain where something might be located on the cassette. The counter makes use of some unseen mechanism linked to the capstan that moves the tape. However the counter would make a faint tick-tick-tick which acoustically translated directly onto the tape into a much more noticeable THWACK THWACK THWACK.
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The solution to this problem was to use an equally cheap external RadioShack computer microphone CAT.NO.33-3025A, which took us away from the unwanted imposing tick-tick-tick, but the tick-tick-tick continued to manifest itself by imposing a wow-wow-wow on the tape normally not be heard unless a sound such as a bell or tone were picked up, which made recording such sounds problematic.
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The second concern was common to many such portable cassette machines. To assist in better capturing more distant voices or sound, there is a built-in automatic gain control or AGC. But the AGC is set similar to the AGC in a single sideband radio receiver with a fast attack and slow decay. Thus, if someone spoke close to the microphone, the subject would playback loud with background audio pushed way down. When the near-field speaker stopped speaking, the background audio would rush up to almost full gain. Experiments using digital noise reduction, hiss reduction or forcing levels was usually not really too terribly satisfactory.
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But I lived with it anyway until a few weeks ago when, after a typical Saturday Chinese Lunch, we all walked next door to the Guitar Center. The short story is that I purchased an Olympus LS-10 Linear PCM Recorder. The long story of this remarkable device will be forthcoming once I have more to say about it. In the meantime, I have no intention of disposing of the C49DRSACR.While it is becoming almost impossible to locate new stock audio cassette product, I do have a small collection of those here in the N2FNH Magnetic Tape Library and some kind of hardware is needed to play those. But should the C49DRSACR unceremoniously crap out, I might have to go to yard sales to buy somebody else's junk to replace it.

It's To Laugh! (zwee-wee-wee-wee) It's To Laugh!

I made mention over on Facebook that I had been experimenting with laugh tracks and that just for the fun of it, I would be adding some of those sort of enhancements to future Random Access Thoughts, Files and the myriad promotional announcements(such as PODCARD/QSL/TWITTER announcements) generated for playback on TWAUDIO and This Week in Amateur Radio.The subject is not only one of the eclectic aspects of audio post production, but certainly one of the most interesting. So herewith, a compact list of bookmarks on the history and current state of the laugh track.

http://www.tvparty.com/laugh.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh_track

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2218/why-do-sitcoms-have-laugh-tracks

http://www.andheresthekicker.com/ex_ben_glenn.php

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/26/arts/charles-douglass-93-inventor-of-laugh-track-for-tv-dies.html

http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=24803

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2009/10/four-old-gadgets-we-love-and-four-we-hate/

A Message In A Bottle! Fanmail From Some Flounder?

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!

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heard about the pod card WBCQ 21.56 UTC i would like to get one of these cards you were 5-9 in stamford CT.
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Hi
I started listening to TWIAR via iTunes and love it!
Could you send me a PodCard? (not sure if it is physical or electronic, do I need to send a SASE somewhere?).
Thank you very much,
n7dil (aka Martin Dill)
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Please send me a This Week In Amateur Radio POD Card. I recently discovered your pod casts and have really enjoyed listening to them.
73s
KD0JPE
John Kennedy
Longmont, CO

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD! Something Subliminal! At Least One Listener Heard This!

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Last week, My Number One And Only Son Zach and I attended a "Bring Your HT Night!", a special how-to-get-on-the-air presentation for new hams sponsored by the East Greenbrush Amateur Radio Association. It was through this group that Zach took his technician class amateur radio examination and subsequently became KC2VWY.
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While at the meeting, another new ham, and one whose name I am sorry to say I did not catch, approached me and thanked me for years of late night radio entertainment that I had provided over a local broadcast outlet. This new amateur radio operator was now a retired State University of New York policeman and was referring to a program that I had done in the 1980's variously entitled "The All Night Scene" and "East Of Midnight" which aired via WROW here in Albany. For about six years, I got away with a lot of my own creative programming because station management simply did not regard late night radio in the same way they coveted their morning and afternoon drive time broadcast real estate.
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In a way, The All Night Scene was a precursor to the much shorter Random Access Thought program that is currently heard by way of TWAUDIO and This Week In Amateur Radio so many of the sound effects, music cues, voice clips and quirky writing and program development styles were transferred directly.
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Working in radio oft times means doing more than one assigned shift and many extra duties and one of those was occasionally board-opping New York Yankee Baseball games. I am not a sports fan as such but I did enjoy running the games because in those days Phil Rizutto was one of the game announcers who always made for enjoyable and certainly unpredictable listening. My air shift was something like 10 to 6AM, so the summer months guaranteed quite a few games. Each night as I would tool in to work, I would occasionally hear something subliminal on the air that only a fellow WROW staff member might detect if they were listening.
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Because baseball games are played outside and most stadiums are not enclosed, the threat of rain and thunderstorms is a factor which may induce a delay or result in cancellation. So in the studio, we had a special broadcast tape cartridge or "cart" with a seventy second recording of ambient low level crowd noise that had been lifted from the Yankee feed prior to a game. On this same recording, there was also some distant organ music playing and this aspect is important.
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This cart could be used if a rain delay came up and the play-by-play was interrupted and everyone stopped talking, which was not unusual. Likewise, if for any reason, there was a loss of audio from the Yankee feed, at least the board-op would have another minute to decide whether to go back to regular programming.
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On the drive into work each night, I would often hear that distant organ music playing in the background. Announcer Joe Condon was mixing the rain delay effects with the real time crowd noise, largely for his own amusement. So of course, I continued doing the same into my air shift but I decided to take this theory several steps further. Over the course of a few weeks, I began to integrate other effects, such as the low turbofan whine of an approaching commercial airliner, the rattletrap sounds of elevated trains and classic castle thunder, which would begin to rumble in if the discussion of rain delays came up. For a split second, the sound of a high power Winchester rifle came to mind. But this was a family show. For me, the New York Yankees Baseball broadcast became an experiment in real time audio production.
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Great care was taken to keep these sweetening elements including the rain delay recording at extremely low levels, usually on the order of minus 30 to 50dB. Over the air, these added elements would flawlessly wander in and out, wrapping around the real time audio. And to be sure, certain sounds would be dropped if the home team were playing in a competitor's arena. Unless I had personal knowledge of the proximity of an airport or an above ground rail system, these effects would be sidelined.
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I kept up this shtick for several months until one evening music director Jim Gagliardi frantically called me at home to advise that Bill Patrick, our esteemed program director, had just received a serious complaint from a listener. The caller accused WROW of programming subliminal program content into the Yankee broadcasts. He spent a lot of time traveling as part of his job and was also a big Yankee fan. Because he listened A LOT, the caller became aware of the enhancements but most specifically the organ music. The listener was smart enough to do an A -B comparison between WROW in Albany and WABC in New York City and could hear the difference. This fella couldn't figure out what the music meant but he knew it had to be something sinister. Bill Patrick found himself bewildered and annoyed, then asked around but no one was talking.
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Jimmy scrambled and scooped up all the incriminating recordings and hid them deep within the bowels of his office which was not hard to do since Jim was a big time desk clutter guy. There was no free space to found so no incriminating evidence could be found. Fortunately Bill regarded the complainer as a nerd, a word which he liked a lot. But since this was the early 1980's, "nerd" was synonymous with "jerk".
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For the rest of the season, the New York Yankees played without benefit of sweetening and so was quite dull by comparison. The various transportation and weather effects were permanently laid to rest but I had made copies of the rain delay tape with the organ music and so on occasion...on occasion, it would be possible to hear something subliminal in Adirondack Red Wings Hockey broadcasts heard nightly over WROW AM 590.

WHO IS THIS GUY? WHAT IS THIS GUY?

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SO! After maybe a year or so of deploying various software enhanced digital images of the ominous HAL 9000 to grace the face of this blog and also my accounts at Twitter and Twaudio, I decided to change my avatar from HAL to "Bubbles", a truly esoteric cartoon character that possibly one in a million may actually recall seeing somewhere on a bright and shiny kitchen counter in the mid 1950's.
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If you were living, breathing and sentient around back then, you may have seen Bubbles on a brilliant green can of Bab-O Cleanser. I can, only at the very vaguest, remember watching this cute Madison Avenue creation in a Bab-O commercial over a black and white television screen zipping around an animated cartoon kitchen cleaning things up. I couldn't even tell you if this was a he or a she or whether it even spoke or sang but I do know that by 1958 Bubbles was no longer on the container.
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Bab-O Cleanser was once an extremely well known and popular household scouring powder made mostly of sand and manufactured by B.T. Babbitt, Inc. The company had it's executive offices in Manhattan but actually had a production plant based here locally down near the Port of Albany. In fact, one of the main buildings had a pair of silos painted to look like a giant can of Bab-O and a huge container of Glim, a liquid detergent, which at one time you could see driving across the Dunne Memorial Bridge into Albany from the City of Rensselaer. This derelict structure somehow remains standing to this day, airbase to wings of pigeons, crows and ravens, home base to the homeless and still with a rusted and corroded "for sale" sign still flapping in the bone-chilling winter night air.
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In addition to Glim, B.T. Babbitt manufactured Cameo Copper and Aluminum powders and sold a spray starch, an all-purpose ammonia cleaner and soap pads under the Bab-O label. The company also made Quickee waterless hand soaps and at one point, owned the Charles Antell cosmetics line and the Curley Company. Based in Camden, New Jersey. the Curley Company produced a fleet of private label household cleaning products. There was also an institutional division that used the company's copyrighted labels as monikers for their industrial strength product analogs.
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Bab-O had it's heyday in the 1930's and 1940's but by the 50's began to face serious competition from Colgate Palmolive Peet with Ajax The Foaming Cleanser and Proctor and Gamble with their equally bright green cans of Comet. But by then, B.T. Babbitt was suffering to the point where any stockholders who held stock with Babbitt had assets in name that could yield no dividends. Finally, by the mid 1960's, the deal was done and the company's registered trademarks were summarily sold to other players. I do recall that Bab-O Cleanser and Bab-O 4-In-1 Spray Starch were sold to the Purex Corporation, which subsequently fell prey to some other company gobbling conglomerate who's name I do not know.
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I recently came across a good visual of Bubbles and decided put him to use as a profile photo on Facebook and then extended the image here at the Random Access Thought Blog, the Random Access File shadow blog, Twitter and Twaudio. SO! One could call it a blast from the past...so far in the past...I was still on the floor in my Doctor Dentons playing with my little wooden Fisher Price Puffy 444! But that of course is another story.
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WANT? ASK! GET! GOOD!

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!

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requesting a podcard
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TWIAR, Thank you for your wonderful program. It is by far my favorite show on Shortwave. I have been listening regularly for several years on WBCQ on 7.415. This week's program was heard ending at 2200 with a very nice signal 59+. I would enjoy receiving a QSL card. Michael Maher (NJ2X) 121 Taylor Ave. Hillsborough, NJ 08844 Michael NJ2X
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Been listening to the podcast. AJ4FJ -Greg
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Hi,
I heard the Random Access Thought on TWIAR podcast and it was great!
Please send a PodCard.
73, Eric Taylor KB1PJN

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night!!!

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It was a dark and stormy night! Well...actually...the night sky was clear and star-lit but it was icy cold in the single digits, Fahrenheit-wise, with blustery winds wailing incessantly through the cracks. And, it was time to retire for the evening. My standard procedure is to tap in one of any number of select frequencies into the bedside Sony 2010 to catch a few minutes of "Coast to Coast AM with George Noory". After listening in to George's real world and "Coast world" headlines, I then enter some other frequency as a dial tone channel. Typical choices include China Radio International at 6020 KHz or 6040 KHz. By this time of night, those signals are wavery and weak, and the languages spoken are not in English. Sometimes I plug in 391 KHz (lower sideband) where DDP, a non-directional aeronautical navigation beacon beeps its way north from San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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But also on occasion, I'll dial in random frequencies above 1600 KHz where many signals can be heard from Canada and also the West Indies. So this past Wednesday night, I keyed in 1670 KHz as my dial tone and could hear a fading, fluttery signal with a haunting choral musical selection playing. But the voices heard were those of children's and not adults. When the song concluded, a very young girl speaking in French provided commentary and then another children's group vocal aired and I dozed off.
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Several times during the night, I awoke. More chorus. All children. More talk, all children. Now here was something completely different! When compared to the principal provider of kids programming over stateside AM and FM radio dials, Radio Disney, this station seemed truly alien, or at least from another time. But unlike the over-compressed, over-hyped and over commercialized Miley Cyrus and Vanessa Hudgens audio chozzerai that Disney pumps out, these children sound so innocent and so child-like that it was a pleasure to listen.
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One issue in listening to this facility was that there did not seem to be any sort of identification. But then again, it was in French, a language I no speak. SO! Over to Google and a jump to Wikipedia and I got the following stub.

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CJEU is a Canadian radio station licensed to broadcast a French language children's radio format at AM 1670 in Gatineau, Quebec. The license is held by Fondation Radio-Enfant, a non-profit educational agency. Fondation Radio-Enfant was originally granted a short-term license, with the call sign CIRC, on 96.5 FM for the duration of the Rendez-vous de la Francophonie 2002 and in 2003, Fondation Radio-Enfant was also granted to operate at 1250 kHz on the AM dial, however, due to possible technical issues, the station never went on the air. The 96.5 frequency in Gatineau was later reassigned to CFTX-FM and Fondation Radio-Enfant was granted a permanent AM license in early 2007 to operate at 1670 kHz. CJEU was reported to be operating on December 10, 2009, playing music mainly in French and sung by children.
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And this addendum from http://www.dxing.info/news

CJEU operates 24/7 at a power of 1 kilowatt both day and night. The radio not only aims its programs at children and youth, but the programs are also made by children to some extent. The station is located at Atelier Radio Enfant Inc, Studio de la Maison de la culture, 855 boul de la Gappe pièce 310, Gatineau, Quebec J8T 8H9, Canada. CJEU can also be contacted by email
mailto:info@radioenfant.ca or by phone at +1-819-243-6226.

My Son, The Maker of Playing Cards!

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Ever since my Number One And Only Son Zach got his MacBook over a year ago, he spends a lot of time creating things. Whereas I produce specialty audio programs for podcasts and also collect and create sound effects, Zach has generated some interesting computer animation, has produced his own practice audio features and makes his laptop make remarkable Spirograph (if you remember Spirograph, then you are one of the Elders!) images. SO! His latest endeavor is making his own anime and manga based playing cards. But this is not new for the Z Man. He also mastered a pack of ECards which I mail out to our This Week in Amateur Radio listeners. Why not stop by Zach's blog base at http://thezachblog1.blogspot.com/ for more examples of his latest creative efforts!

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