Happy 40th Gene.
Man, your memory is better than mine! I do remember those things now
that you mention it, but they were buried down in a forgotten memory
location.
While I was down there digging around, I also came across some records
of the 11 meter ham band. It dissappeared in 1958.
I think one of the things I miss the most is the warm glow of the cherry
red plates of big transmitting tubes, and the cold blue glow of the big
mercury vapor rectifiers, and the pink glow from the little gas
regulator tubes. In a dimmed room, they were spectacular.
Jerry, K4SAV
ersmar at comcast.net wrote:
>Gents:
>
> I just looked at the calendar and remembered that it was forty (!)
>years ago today that I passed my Novice Morse code test! My Elmer, Harry
>Schaefer (callsign forgotten by me, sorry) of Coaldale, PA had just given me
>my test at 5 WPM send and receive. He then showed me his station -
>Hallicrafters receiver sitting on a large wooden desk in his attic and Globe
>King 500 Watt floor rack-mounted AM and CW transmitter feeding a tuner and a
>dipole just outside his window (in the days before RF exposure rules!)
>
> He tuned across a couple of QRQ stations in the low end of 80M. Of
>course, I couldn't copy them and asked what they were saying. Harry cocked
>his head for a while, listening intently AND COPYING IN HIS HEAD (My hero!)
>He said one Ham in Massachusetts asked another Ham in New York state when
>the power came back on in New York. The NY Ham said his town hadn't been
>affected by the power failure. The next morning I read in the paper about
>the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965. (
>http://blackout.gmu.edu/events/tl1965.html .)
>
> Since then we Hams, and the rest of American society, have witnessed
>momentous changes in electrotechnology. In commercial radio broadcasting,
>FM supplanted AM as the delivery method preferred by more in the listening
>audience. The Carterphone decision of the FCC in 1968 opened the way for
>interconnected devices such as phone-patches (remember when they were
>illegal?) and, ultimately, alternative carriers such as MCI, to connect to
>AT&T's telephone network. We no longer hear, "The following program is
>brought to you in living color on NBC." Fiber-optic cables are now as
>ubiquitous as copper wires. Television sets went from using external
>converters for tuning UHF channels to mandatory built-in tuners that covered
>up to channel 83 to tuners that covered only up to channel 69 (the missing
>14 channels had been assigned to something called "cellular telephone"
>service.) And my kids are texting each other on their own wireless
>telephone devices. (Remember when Ham autopatching was all the rage on
>VHF-FM?) And computers in the home? Only on The Jetsons.
>
> Thanks for letting me wax nostalgic a bit today (not that you had much
>of a choice, I suppose.) I'm sure we all have similar stories, but for me
>it's been an extremely enjoyable trip down this path of Ham Radio.
>
> Now if I could just work KL7 on Topband!
>
>73 de
>Gene Smar AD3F
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>
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>
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