Topband: CY9C

[Jim Brown]

On 9/7/2024 3:55 AM, Hans Hjelmström wrote:
> Same here .Just lost most of the fun with the new stuff FT 8 and in my opinion,even worse
> RIB and remote operating like N5J and others.

I view AA7JV's Radio In a Box as the greatest and most innovative 
engineering achievement in ham radio in my 69 years as a ham. It 
increases the likelihood of a team getting permission to activate 
islands that are a wildlife refuse, greatly reduces the difficulty of 
setting up decent stations on islands with difficult topgraphy, and 
greatly reduces the cost of expeditions by eliminating the need to set 
up an encampment of two dozen hams on an island or in an entity, to 
transport them there, and to maintain their human needs there for two 
weeks.

Those of us without heads in the sand may have noticed that ham radio 
has been graying out for decades, as many of us old-timers are dying 
out, AND WE ARE NOT BEING REPLACED in like numbers. An important 
innovation of the N5J operation was to involve both OT ops and new hams 
as remote operators.

The ONLY impact of these innovations on those of us at home has been 
that reduction of cost and difficulty of putting all those radios on the 
island, and to get them permission to be there. It has ZERO impact on 
our end of the QSO. There are radios and antennas on both end of the 
QSO, and a human operator is in control on both ends. The difference is 
that the human operators didn't all need to travel to the island -- only 
the much smaller team that set up and maintained the gear, which some of 
them built!

AA7JV introduced another important innovation at the Visalia DX 
Convention in 2019 that is quite important to we Topband OTs. Observing 
that in his many DX trips, propagation allowed nearly all of the most 
difficult QSOs on one or two nights of a 2-3 week trip, George developed 
a sophisticated combining network that allowed the two best weak signal 
modes, CW and FT8, to operate simultaneously into the same TX antenna, 
and to use the same weak signal RX antennas, allowing them to be active 
all night every night! The magnitude of this achievement technically is 
to realize that the two modes are working within 20 kHz of each other, 
and listening within 10 kHz, and the CW station is running high power!

George Wallner, AA7JV, is one of my heroes!

73, Jim K9YC