[CQ-Contest] Remembering Ed Bissell, W3AU (long)

[Fred Laun]

I am sure that the news that Ed Bissell, W3AU, ex-W3MSK, had died on May 10 
at the age of 83  made a lot of people in the Amateur Radio contesting 
world take a few minutes to stop and think.  Ed, CQ Contest Hall of Fame 
Member #10, touched the lives of quite a few  of today's active contesters, 
giving a number of them their first chance to enter the world of big-time 
multi-multi contesting.  This writer was one of them.

It has been my sad experience in recent years to see one after another of 
those on my personal list of heroes pass from the scene.  I feel that it is 
appropriate on such occasions to pause for a bit to record for posterity's 
sake remembrances of these folks so that something about them will be 
available on the Web long after they and those who knew them pass from the 
scene.
K7SV and KC1F have already begun this process, so let me add some of my 
fond memories of Ed to theirs.  Time has blurred some of my memories so I 
will not attempt to assign a time frame to them in all cases.  Any of the 
rest of you who have memories of Ed, please post them here.  No one person 
can do justice to the multi-faceted, colorful personality that was Ed Bissell.

I first met Ed not long after I moved to the Washington area from Wisconsin 
in 1963 as W9SZR to work for the Government.  I joined PVRC almost 
immediately, and since all I had with me was an SR-150 in my car with a 
home-brew HF mobile whip, and since I had done reasonably well in CW DX 
contests as SOHP from the station of W9EWC, at one time or another I was 
invited to join the multi-multi teams at both W3MSK and W4BVV, the two 
biggest multi-multi teams PVRC had at the time.  W4KXV (now N4RP) was 
another multi-multi available to PVRCers at that time.

Since I had joined the U. S. Foreign Service I operated at Ed's or at Tom's 
off and on for several years following, on brief stints back in Washington 
in between my overseas assignments at HI8XAL, HS3AL, HS5ABD, XV4AL and 
LU5HFI, until I bought my own place here in 1975 and proceeded to erect my 
own antenna farm.  Much of the inspiration for having my own antenna farm 
built came from Tom and Ed as well as Len Chertok, W3GRF.  Sadly, all three 
have now left us.

I recall that we would all arrive at Ed's on Friday afternoon in order to 
sit around his dinner table while his XYL Grace served a sumptuous meal 
before the contest began.  While we ate Ed would chair a planning session 
during which we reviewed what conditions would probably be like and how we 
would plan to cope with them.  In those days we didn't have anything to go 
on but WWV which would transmit a series of numbers in Morse which told us 
how good or bad things were predicted to be for the following several hours.

Then it was into the big shack to take up our assigned positions and get 
ready for 0000Z Saturday to arrive.  Ed had homebrew amplifiers for each 
band which were lined up along one wall, and a fair collection of Collins 
and Central Electronics exciters and Collins receivers, augmented by the 
rigs of many of the operators who would bring their own rigs along with 
them.  As I recall most of the time Bob Cox, K3EST, ran the operation, 
assigning the bands to the operators and forcing us to keep things moving 
as the contest went on.  When I first operated W3MSK Don McClennon, W3EIS, 
later W3IN and N4IN, had a lock on the 160 meter position;  I don't recall 
who had 80; Jack Colson, W3TMZ, ran 40 meters; K3EST and Jack Reichert, 
W3ZKH, now N4RV, jointly manned 20; "Big Charlie" Weir, W3FYS, later W6UA, 
ran 15 and, in phone contests, Don Search, W3AZD was the 10 meter man.  Ed 
himself would fill in only when a position would otherwise remain unmanned; 
he preferred either 160 or 10 meters;  he felt his job was to keep the 
hardware side of the operation running smoothly.  If an antenna or rotor 
problem cropped up, Ed would climb a tower to fix it no matter what the 
weather, or no matter what the time of day or night.  If there was an 
operator to two to spare, they would go out an help Ed from the ground.  If 
not, Grace would generally fill that assignment herself.  I can remember 
once going out in the dark to help move an 80 meter sloper around in an 
effort to get a CE1 who was not answering our calls, and the move was 
successful!  Others who filled in where needed as I did were Carl Kratzer, 
WA3HRV, now K3RV, who eventually became the main 40 meter 
operator;  "Little Charlie" Weir, W6HOH/W3NPZ, now W6UM; Bob Morris, W4MYA; 
and Gene Zimmerman, K1ANV, now W3ZZ.  I'm sure I have left a few out as I 
was not in the area very much during my early years in the foreign 
service.  On one occasion a fresh-faced 16-year-old whose call is now K3LR 
came down from the Pittsburgh area to see what big-time contesting was like 
at W3MSK.  Another op who spent some time sitting in Ed's operating chairs 
was the legendary Don Riebhoff, K7CBZ/K7ZZ, of XU1DX, HS3DR and CT4AT fame.

A new arrival to operate at W3MSK would be overwhelmed by the tall towers 
sticking up through the trees on Ed's heavily-wooded lot, which supported 
such monstrosities as a 5-el 40 meter Yagi, 7-el Yagis on 20 and 15, maybe 
10-el on 10 -- I don't recall -- as well as a 2-el Yagi on 80 and wires for 
160 and for receiving snaking through the trees in all directions.  Ed's 
QTH was very close to the Potomac River and the towers and antennas could 
easily be seen from the other side of the river at Mount Vernon, VA, which 
had been President George Washington's residence in days of yore.  Ed's QTH 
was so situated that when we beamed "over the Pole" into Asia we beamed 
right up the Potomac River which we felt gave us a big advantage over the 
competition in that direction, though we couldn't always beat the legendary 
W3CRA in pile-ups on Asians.

At the end of the contest Ed would usually come to my operating position 
with a potent highball to celebrate the successful completion of yet 
another contest, and "bottoms-up" it was.

The principal competition in those days for W3MSK was the big installation 
in Tuxedo Park, NY of Buzz Reeves, K2GL.  At that time, hard as it is to 
believe now, all of the W1's thought we had a big propagation advantage 
over them because they thought they were too close to the North 
Pole  during disturbed conditions.  As I recall the story, a group of W1's 
surreptitiously drove down to observe Ed's operation to try to figure out 
what his secrets of success were.  After being parked along the road next 
to Ed's lot for some time they were accosted by a county cop who told them: 
"You can't park here --- CIA!"

They needn't have been so secretive about their visit, for Ed's door was 
always open to ham visitors and no appointment was necessary.  I recall 
that at the height of the 1968 riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 
assassination, when much of downtown Washington was put to the torch, it 
fell to me to pick up Dick Klein, K9OPF, later K4GKD, an old pal from 
Wisconsin who was at that very moment arriving by train at Union Station in 
downtown Washington to go to work for the Government.  I was an apartment 
dweller in suburban Virginia at the time and the direct route from my place 
to the train station forced me to thread my way through smoky streets where 
cars had been abandoned by their owners who had been caught in the traffic 
jam created by the riots and were desperate to get out of town and to 
safety.  After picking Dick up the only place I could think of which might 
provide a safe haven for us without requiring me to drive back through the 
danger zone was Ed's, so Dick and I promptly headed there where Ed gave 
Dick a warm welcome to Washington and assured him that the city was not 
normally in such turmoil.

At one point there developed a nasty line noise and Ed, after some 
searching, located the offending pole.  Each time the noise popped up 
again, Ed would hand a big sledgehammer to an operator who was unoccupied 
at the moment and instruct him to drive down and hit the pole until, 
listening on the car's radio, the noise stopped.

In the effort to compete with K2GL, W4BVV and W3MSK decided it would be a 
good idea to join forces in pooling information and converted some old 
command sets to 147.00 MHz. where DX spots were passed from one station to 
the other.  This may very well have been the pioneer spotting net in the 
history of contesting.  To this day the frequency which most PVRC'ers in 
the Washington area use when driving to and from work is the repeater whose 
output frequency  is  147.00, K3WX, whose owner, Tony Faiola, is a 
long-time PVRC member.

Ed was one of a number of PVRC contesters who came to the Washington area 
to work for the U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL), and it was no coincidence 
that a lot of contest sites in those days were located just south of the 
District of Columbia in Maryland, not far from the Potomac River, an easy 
commute to the NRL HQ along the Potomac River in Southeast DC.  Before Ed 
moved to his eventual QTH in Accokeek, he had rolled up some big single-op 
scores from a hilltop in Forest Heights, MD.  My QTH, by the way, is in the 
same general area.

When NASA was formed to run the U.S. space program, the new agency raided 
NRL for a lot of its initial scientists and engineers, and Ed was one of 
them, as was his boss at the time, Karl Medrow, W3MCG, later W3FA, who was 
also a PVRC member and later erected a multi-multi of his own.  Ed 
eventually became NASA's liaison to the Indian space program, and made many 
a trip to the Indian spaceport at Trivandrum, where he developed lasting 
personal friendships with other Indian hams including VU2JN and VU2PKK.  In 
recent years, after retiring to Florida and assembling yet another super 
antenna farm with the assistance of Pete Raymond, N4KW, Ed had kept regular 
daily CW and SSB skeds with Jayram and Kutty and others out there, as well 
as weekly skeds with W6UM and other of his former ops.  He was in 
reasonably good health and regularly active up until about three months 
before his death.

Since Ed travelled so much to India at that time, he was the principal 
driving force in the effort to establish a reciprocal operating agreement 
with India following the passage of the Goldwater bill which made such 
agreements possible, and he was the first American licensed under the 
agreement, holding the call VU2MSK for many years.

So Ed, mentor to so many budding contesters, inventor of so many 
multi-multi procedures and techniques, we loved ya, man, and we'll miss 
ya.  If you ever learn how to communicate back here from the fifth 
dimension, give us a call.

In fond remembrance,

Fred Laun, K3ZO