[TowerTalk] RE K7GCO's comments, and some misc. ramblings

[K0FF]

I totally agree with K7GCO that the obsession that hams have with coaxial
cable vs. open feeders has set us back tremendously. With due respect to
Collins et.al., coax was great for the Army ops in WWII and served to make
radio a controlled science rather than the ART that it was prior to the war.
The SWR bridge is the next thing that hams obsess over. A 1:1 reading means
a good antenna system, right? haha
And my final observation about setting back the hobby : vacuum tubes.
We started out solid state = the galena crystal. Tubes came along and we
stopped thinking about junctions until Schokly invented the transistor at
Bell labs in the late 40's. We lost another decade before they became
commonplace, due to the ubiquitousness of tubes.

As long as  I'm airing my grips about setbacks, let me say a few words about
Printed Circuits. They are great for commercial gear of course, but they are
single-handedly responsible for killing off the building of ham radio gear
in America. If we could get away from the fetish of HAVING o use them, we
could get back to building gain. You could use wire-wrap, terminal strips,
or point-to point wiring. This would bring some of the ART back to the "ART
of Radio". I have a Zenith TransOceanic, all solid state, built in 1957.
This radio is a beauty, and uses all direct wiring. They even went so far as
to put each transistor in a little socket, just as if they were building a
tube rig..it's really pretty to look at, and works very well.

K0FF


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