[CQ-Contest] CW on Tonight Show

[Jim Cain]

Ref. The Tonight Show, Friday, May 13, 2005:

How Cool! Congrats to Ken (K6CTW) and Chip (K7JA). You two really did all of us proud.

We knew it was a no-contest, even though Ken was handicapped by having to copy on a speaker with "phone QRM" from the audience. Sounded like about 40 words per minute, to me, good copy here on the telly.

You guys must have been petrified being on national television. I would have been shaking like a leaf either sending CW or writing the message. Much worse than taking a 20 wpm CW exam before an FCC examiner!

Great outfits, too -- loved the garters and green eyeshades. (Leno got in a nice dig at the 20-somethings who showed up to text message in jeans and t-shirts).

It's nice to belong to a secret society of those who know that it wasn't Morse code you were using, but rather International Morse, or "the radiotelegraph code."

It looked to me like you had two tiny transceivers set up with rubber antennas on them. Yaesu, I'll bet. What band were you on?

Chip -- You got to say five words and three of them were "in ham radio." Thanks -- if you hadn't squeezed in those three words viewers would have had absolutely no clue that ham radio was involved. And, nice hamming it up at the end, too, blowing on your hot CW fingers. 

Too bad the ARRL did not see fit to publicize this on their web site. Guess it didn't fit their agenda.

I learned about this event, in advance, on this very reflector (thanks Ward and Tree) and forwarded it to a bunch of friends. I hope everybody else did the same.

Jim Cain, K1TN