Great idea John! There are a lot of great stories out there that should be
captured while they still live in someone's head.
The site eham.com has a section called Friends Remembered. While this may
not perfectly match what you had in mind, it was designed to let people
enter memories and comments about their SK friends. See it at
http://www.eham.net/friends/
Perhaps something similar could be created on contesting.com that wasn't so
focused on Silent Keys, but would allow us to capture our favorite stories
about people in the contesting world.
Randy, K5ZD
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cq-contest-bounces@contesting.com
> [mailto:cq-contest-bounces@contesting.com]On Behalf Of W0UN -- John
> Brosnahan
> Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 05:57 AM
> To: cq-contest@contesting.com
> Subject: [CQ-Contest] HISTORY
>
>
> Sorry folks--looks like the reflector ate my message and
> the embedded photo. Here is the text again without the
> photo. If you want to see the B&W photo I will mail a copy
> to you privately, upon request. Thanks--John
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dear Contesters--
>
> I had a short exchange with Steve, K4FJ, that started out about
> windmills and progressed into a little post-WWII contest history.
>
> It got me to thinking that while some of these pioneers in
> "Big Time Radio" are still alive, many are not. In fact many
> of their "Elmerites" are getting pretty long in the tooth now
> as well.
>
> So while there is still lots of first-hand information and
> some CLOSE second-hand information fairly fresh in our
> collective memories maybe we should start a web site
> history of these stations. It could be fun for a lot of us old
> timers as well as very instructive for some of the newer ops
> who missed out on this post-WWII explosion in technology
> and station design.
>
> One place to start would be with the Contest Hall of Fame list.
> But there are a lot of stations and operators who are very
> worthy of being "enshrined" in some sort of history book who
> have never been so honored.
>
> Of course there are the well known guys like W3GRF, W4KFC,
> K2GL, W9TO, etc. But there are a lot of guys from the west coast
> who are less well known and yet have made some serious
> contributions both to station design and operating. And some
> guys in the midwest who will never get any notice at all unless
> we really make an effort to concentrate on their contributions.
>
> What I am thinking about first are the Silent Keys out there
> and those who are no longer active due to old age and poorer
> health. (W7RM comes to mind here.) Or maybe just starting out
> with stations who were pushing the state of the art in the 1950s
> and then add the 1960s at some point.
>
> Seems that it would be nice to generate a history book and cover
> the guys that might be forgotten if we don't make some sort of
> serious group effort. Hopefully there are some good photos of the
> old-time stations that could be scanned and added to such a
> book. And I would hope to spread the load so that any one
> person only needs to write a few pages. With a little effort
> we could get the first 100 guys into a site like this and it
> would not be much of a burden on any one individual.
>
> Part of my interest is to provide some recognition to my own
> personal DX and contest Elmer--W0AR/W0AIW. Lee published
> the first 4 element quad in QST in the early 60s as well as
> the 4CX1000 der Loudenboomer amp that many used in the
> KC area. W0AIH recently sent me this old photo of W0AIW
> from the late 50s. N1GL and I did a MS in the CQWW CW
> from here in 1962. By then an S-Line had been added to the
> desk and one of the 75A4s had been retired. Lee founded
> Radio Industries and manufactured amplifiers and rotators
> under that name until he sold out to Hallicrafters and was a
> long-time Honor Roll member. And Lee is still pretty active
> with skeds with many friends (less anyone think he is a SK).
>
> Just seems like it would be nice to get a lot of the history of
> "Big Time Radio" collected into one place. And I would probably
> not limit it to JUST contesters, but to anyone who made a
> serious contribution to antennas, amplifiers, equipment, operating,
> etc. Other midwest stations like W0SYK come to mind. Bill Brown
> built some very nice amps for guys in the midwest. And W0NFA
> is not well known but he did some serious MMs in the early
> 1960s with antennas that would still be competitive to this day.
>
> I am NOT an HTML guy or a web master or anything that would
> be very helpful in actually pulling this off. Best I can do is to
> start the discussion and to cover a couple of guys that helped
> me to get started. But it seems like a way to honor any Elmer
> that helped make a real contribution to the advancement of the
> state of the art of competitive radio.
>
> So what do you think??
>
> 73--John W0UN
>
>
>
>
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