HAM’S LIFE

The rapid developing electronics field has a very close association with ham radio and I refer to other technologies to illustrate that the expediential advance in technology covers much more then just electronics.  It may be a stretch in the mind of some to link this with ham radio but in my thinking there is a connection.  

Saturday night I heard the last part of a radio talk show that apparently had a guest earlier in the show.  The guest, it would seem as I followed the call in discussion, believed that modern electronic technology came as result of a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947.  Now I can not prove nor disprove if a UFO crashed in Roswell or if any technology was learned from that craft if it did crash but I do not believe we need UFO conspiracy theories to understand modern technology advancements.

The Industrial Revolution is considered to have started around 1760.  Up to that time things did not change much.  When people wanted to go somewhere by land they walked, rode a beast of burden, or rode in some kind of wagon or cart drawn by such animals.  If they wanted to go by water they had to row or be wind driven.   Harnessed steam power change that.

The world started changing.  The change, sense that time, has continued to change at an accelerated rate.  Swifter means of transportation and greater productivity of factories prompted the need for faster and more efficient communications.

The word telegraph comes from Greek and means distant writing.  Though a few telegraph devices using electricity were developed prior to Samuel Morse’s telegraph but they died while Mr. Morse’s telegraph took root and grew.  The telegraph started the age of electronic communications in 1837. 

Just 40 years after Mr. Morse showed the world how to put messages on wire and send them long distances in a flash Alexander Graham Bell showed the world how to put the human voice on wire and send it over long distances. 

While the world of electronic communication was growing during 1800’s and early 1900’s other fields of technology also grew.  Accelerated development was happening in all fields Firearms, Electric lights, Internal Combustion engines, photography, and the list could go on. 

Nikola Tesla demonstrated a wireless telegraph in St. Louis, MO in 1893 but Guglielmo (Italian for William) Marconi made it to the patent office first with an economical and effective system that communicated more then just a few meters away.  It was 60 years (1837 to 1897) from when the first effective wire telegraph was patented until the first effective wireless telegraph was patented and it was 40 years from when the telegraph was invented until the telephone was invented but it was only 2 years from when the wireless telegraph was demonstrated until the wireless telephone was demonstrated.  1899 A. Fredrick Collins successfully made a voice transmission.

In 1906 Lee De Forest placed a grid in the vacuum diode and made it a triode he called an Audion.  The Audion had a little gain but it was not until about 1912   triodes with sufficient gain make an oscillator was able to be produced.  The vacuum tube was further developed.  It had more grids added and it was reduced in size.  Using the vacuum tube allowed transmitters to operate with a continuous wave (CW) on a specified frequency rather then the parasitic signal spread over a band.  Receivers could then use active devices rather then the passive units of prior days.    The little glowing marvel made it so that almost every home in the United States had at least one radio receiver in it by 1930.

In 1939 RCA released the AC/DC radio using the All American Five vacuum tubes and radios started appearing in several rooms in the home.  They could fit in packages small enough to sit on a book shelf, kitchen counter, or bed side night stand.  Soon many companies started selling these efficient, attractive, small, inexpensive, and very dangerous radios.  Compact battery operated vacuum tube radios were also being produced.  Automobiles with radios started showing up just after 1930.

By 1947 Television antennas were sprouting on the roofs of houses all across the United States. 

In 1925 Julius Edgar Liliendfield filed the first patent for a transistor in Canada.  The new transistor was very similar in operation to a Field Effect Transistor.  Because Mr. Liliendfield did not publish any research and his patent did not cite any examples of the device being constructed Oskar Heil was able to patent a similar device in 1934.

Though Bell Laboratories was not able to patent a working bipolar transistor prior to December of 1947 they had been working on the concept of a solid state replacement for the vacuum tube for several years before 1947.

Now all of this was prior to the events that happened in Roswell in July of 1947.

Looking at the technological developments that took place from the beginning of the Industrial Revelation until 1947 and noticing the accelerating advances in that technology and comparing it to the rate of acceleration sense 1947 personally I would say we are just about on target where we should be without the need of some extra-terrestrials technology input.     

With the advent of email the @ sign has gained popularity. It is now as well recognized as the & sign.

The “American Morse”, also known as “Railroad Morse”, had a character for & which has been used by amateur radio operators most of whom did not know they were using an “American Morse” character. Because the modern amateur radio operator uses “International Morse” which has a different timing arrangement then “American Morse” the letters e and s are used to make up the & sign. So when es is sent it is recognized as “and” but it really is the & sign.

(The original character makeup for & was not es but a dit with a slightly less time then that used between letters followed by dididit.)

Because the @ is used in email addresses and there was no code character for @ email addresses were difficult to exchange via CW. This problem was addressed by the ITU-R.

On May 24, 1844 the first transmission of a message by telegraph to be publicly observed was sent so it was on this date 160 years later (2004) the Radio Communication Bureau of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-R) formally added the @ (which they called “commercial at” or “commat” for short) to its list of Morse characters. The new character is AC (Underscore means it is not two characters but all sent together as one) so it is sent as didadadidadit (• — — • — •).

The ITU-R is the same group that required amateur radio operators to demonstrate an ability to send and receive “International Morse” until they dropped that requirement on an international level in 2003. Think about it!

The @ sign is the first new character to be officially added to the Morse character set sense World War I. The information on what that character added during WWI was or its exact date of its addition seems to have been lost.

The problem now is to get the sign into common use so when sent other hams will be able to understand. We need to spread the word to others and use the character on the air.

History of the @ sign:

The origin of the @ sign has been lost to antiquity but it was known to be used by scribes to shorten the Latin word “ad” (at, to, or toward) as early as the 6th or 7th centuries.

The symbol can be found on 14th and 15th century clay pottery which were used to hold grain or wine and seems to have some connection to the measure or quantity it contained. Later it came to mean “at the price of”. Underwood added it to the 1885 typewriter keyboard.

The use of use of @ as part of the email address is credited to computer engineer Ray Tomlinson who in 1971 used it to separate the name of the intended recipient from their location with a character that would not appear in either name.

Saturday night HAARP concluded the transmissions for the phase of the operation I have been speaking about in this blog. 6.7925 MHz was noisy at my location Saturday night and I was unable to hear the reflected signals but the 7.4075 MHz much quieter and I was able to hear about 80% of all the returns.

Thank you to Alexey for finding my error (see comments on previous post). I can’t believe I did what I did. Maybe the fact that I had not been able to sleep more then 3 to 4 hours for the past several nights had some effect. What ever the reason was I knew something was wrong but I went over and over and still could not see it. I checked several sites for the distance between the earth and the moon and they all said the same thing but it just did not seem the distance was right. They said 385,000 KM to 405,000 KM which means the round trip is 770,000 KM to 810,000 KM. Alexey wrote all the zeros out so I saw where I was going wrong. 405,000 Kilo Meters is 405 Mega Meters thus 405,000,000 Meters. RF travels at 300,000,000 Meters a second. I should have calculated it as 810,000,000/300,000,000 or 810/300 which equals 2.7 thus it takes 2.7 seconds for the signal to reach the moon and return. That would seem consistent with what I heard.

One interesting thing I heard Saturday night on 6.7925 MHz (at least interesting to me) was a CW message being sent. A station could be heard establishing communications with another station just a few hundred hertz above the HAARP transmission. I was trying to hear the reflection so I did not pay any more attention to it then to the fact that it was there but while the one station was sending its message I diverted my attention to what was being sent and found it was a string of five letter groups. Having been a military radio operator in the 1960’s this was a familiar pattern. It was an encrypted message format used by the US military. The interesting part of this was to see that someone is still using CW to communicate messages of importance. CW is alive and well.

It was a very interesting and educational experience for me and I hope if HAARP conducts any future experiments of this nature, and I am sure they will, they will again invite the hams to participate. For this privilege I thank HAARP.

There have been many changes in ham radio procedure over the years. I am not talking about law, though that too has changed, I am talking about operating practices. Establishing initial contact after a station has called CQ is one of changes.

When I got my license in 1960 calling CQ on 2 meters was standard practice but today CQ is rarely heard on 2 meters.

My first license was a novice class and the requirements by the FCC were that all novice class operators were to use crystal controlled transmitters with no more then 75 watts final DC input power. Being crystal controlled meant operators could not move the frequency of the transmitter to zero beat with the signal being received. A station may call CQ on 7173 KHz and another station with a 7170 crystal might answer. If the calling station just listened on frequency used to call CQ the answering station would not be heard by the 7173 station. After calling CQ the transmitting station operator would tune the receiver above and below the crystal frequency to see an answer was being given on a near by frequency. Even general class operators using VFOs would tune to listen for crystal controlled stations.

Today operating crystal controlled transmitters almost eliminates answering a station not transmitting close to the crystal frequency. This has produced a change in the process of answering a CQ. The recommended way of answering a CQ in 1960 was to send the call sign of the station that gave the CQ three times and then send the call sign of the station answering the CQ three times.

Making a contact might sound something like this in 1960: First the CQ was given, “CQ CQ CQ DE WA6OHP WA6OHP WA6OHP” which was repeated 2 times followed by “K”. The station answering would send, “WA6OHP WA6OHP WA6OHP DE K6KRL K6KRL K6KRL K” (K6KRL was my mentor Jim who is now silent key – this call has not been reissued).

Today calling CQ has not changed but when answering the CQ it is recommended the answering station give the call sign of the station being called only once followed by the sending stations call given three times followed by K. So it now would sound like this, “WA6OHP DE K6KRL K6KRL K6KRL K”.

I do not know when, how, or why KN became standard practice for turning the QSO back to the other station but after contact is established the ARRL recommends using KN in place of K. KN means “only the station being called should answer” and it is a way of saying “we do not want anyone else joining into our QSO.” Round tables QSO’s can be a lot of fun. I would like to see the KN eliminated except where special circumstances would warrant its use. It serves no purpose except where the stations do not want another person joining in and when used to replace K it eliminates stations the ability to indicate they do not want break-in.

When using voice replies to CQ the procedure is, for the most part, the same. The DE is replaced with “this is” and K is replaced with “over”. The phonetic alphabet to identify the answering stations call sign.

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“KN” is a single character and should be over-scored but I do not know how to do that on this computer.

Ramsey Electronics has several inexpensive easy to assemble electronic kits. Some are specifically amateur radio related and others are not. The QAMP20 is a 20 meter 20 watt linear amplifier. Being linear it will run CW, SSB, or AM. It can be driven with ½ to 2 watts with a power requirement of 12 VDC at 4 Amps.

Ramsey’s estimated assembly time is 4 hours for beginner, 2 hours for intermediate, and 1.5 hours for advanced builders. I did not time myself but I would say that their timing estimate is fairly accurate.

The instruction booklet, as with all their kits I have assembled so far, is very well done and can be followed by anyone even with no electronic knowledge.

Alignment is very easy. Basically it is just a matter of setting the bias.

The work horses of the amplifier are two P16NF06 MOSFET transistors. They are run in Push-Pull format so as to reduce potential second harmonic output. It has a 3 stage pi network low pass filter output to further reduce the harmonic output. The input and output to the transistor are both through ferrite wideband transformers.

The exciter input uses a T-R relay circuit which is operated by a simple diode detector to sense when RF is applied and a two transistors amplifier circuit to drive the relay. If the power switch is not on the relay will not actuate and thus the exciter can be run “bare foot” but when the power is on it will switch on as soon as the exciter is keyed.

When testing the QAMP20 I found that ½ watts in gave 5 watts out and 1 watt in gave 10 watts output. An IFR service monitor’s power meter was used for the test. The efficiency is about 30 to 35% which is about where a class AB amplifier should run.

Over all, with the exception of the plastic box to house the unit, I would give this unit a very high rating considering the cost.

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This amplifier is for sale on eBay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=190189665379&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT&ih=009

The vacuum tubes were finally becoming available for amateur use in about 1920. These tubes were low powered and designed for receiver use. The first real power tubes, UV-202 and UV-203, suitable for transmitters were placed on the market in March 1921.

With the advent of the UV-202, UV-203, and the UV-204, which came out just a month or so later, amateurs could earnestly start changing over from Spark Gap transmitters to true CW transmitters. Even though the true CW transmitters were possible in the early 1920’s it was not until 1927 that the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR which at that time was part of ITU) decreed that spark gap transmitters would be phased out and this was to be completed by 1939.

Receiver normally used batteries for power in those days but it was impractical to try to run the transmitters on batteries and in 1921 suitable rectifiers tubes were not available so the transmitter tubes were fed with raw AC. The transmitters usually consisted on one tube acting as the oscillator and final all in one. They were normally not crystal controlled though W.G. Cady published his findings on quartz crystals and frequency stability in 1920. A common design was to use two tubes in a basic push pull fashion so while one tube plate was going positive and conducting the other was going negative.

These new transmitters had drift, chirps, clicks, and pure AC hum. What a sound that must have been!

The solution to the problem was the electrolytic rectifier. These were apparently commercially available but most hams made their own. All it required was pint jar, an aluminum bar, a lead bar and a solution of sodium tetraborate, more commonly known as Borax, or baking soda in water. The top portion of the jar was usually coated with paraffin to prevent a deposit buildup on the side of the container. The aluminum electrode form a layer of corrosion and thus becomes the cathode while the lead, it has been found that almost any metal except aluminum will work, is the anode. Usually several jars were placed in series to rectify the high voltage needed for the transmitters.

Those transition days from spark gap to vacuum tube transmitters must have been some really fun days in amateur radio.

The Coast Guard Cutter McLane had two transmitters on board for CW operations. The transmitter for 500 KHz was a TDE a big black box, max DC input power 125 watts, frequency range 300 KHz to 18 MHz, and had a VFO. We also had an AN/FRT23 for HF operation but it was crystal controlled. So the only transmitter that would allow ham radio operations was the TDE but I had been given direct orders from the XO not to use any of the ship’s transmitters for amateur radio purposes.

About 9 months after reporting aboard the McLane I was married and then about a year after that my oldest daughter was born. My wife was at that time WN5NEP and her doctor was W5MSQ.

The local ham radio club had a SSB net every Sunday afternoon on 80 Meters. One Sunday while I was on duty (that means staying aboard to protect the cutter while it is in port) I wanted to check into the net but using the TDE on CW was my only option. Even though I was on CW the net welcomed me in and after the net was over Doc (W5MSQ) and I shifted down to the CW portion of the band and had a lengthy QSO.

During our QSO the OD (officer of the day), a boatswain’s mate who knew nothing about radios, stopped by the radio room when he saw there was some activity. He asked me what I was doing.

I knew I was had. Violation of a direct order from the XO was sure to bring serious consequences. I may have gotten by with it if I told him I was testing out the transmitter but that would be a lie.

I looked up at him and simply said, “I am talking to my wife’s doctor.”

At that he started laughing so hard he could hardly contain himself. He walked off the bridge laughing and repeating, “I am talking to my wife’s doctor.”

He didn’t believe me, he didn’t tell anyone, and I didn’t get into trouble. That was the first and last time I used the ship’s transmitter for amateur radio use.

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See information on the McLane at http://www.silversides.org/mclane.html

A statement was made on the history channel that the vacuum tube had to be invented before the radio could be invented. The logic behind the statement was that oscillators could not be made before amplifiers and it is true that oscillators could not be built before amplifiers but radio communications predates the use of these little glowing marvels as amplifiers by over 20 years. A spark gap and a coherer detector started it all off. Later the Peroxid of Lead detector came into being followed by many others including the Electrolytic Detector, the Barretter Carborundum Detector, the Silicon Detector, the Perikon Detector, and the Galena Detector, the last three could be lumped together and called a crystal detector. All of these preceded the use of the vacuum tube.

Though they precede the use of the tube they do not precede the vacuum tube itself. The summer of 1895 is considered the beginning of radio communications when Guglielmo Marconi was able to transmit and receive a signal over a distance of 1.5 kilometers (approx. 1 mile). The vacuum tube history began in 1883 when Thomas Edison, while trying to improve the incandescent light, discovered when he placed a small metal plate in the glass envelope of the light and attached the metal plate to a positive charge while the negative charge was on the filament electric current would flow across the vacuum inside the envelope. This came to be known as the Edison Effect but Edison did nothing more with it. He did not believe it to be of any value.

In 1904 Sir John Fleming found he could use the Edison Effect to detect radio signals. So over the 9 years between Marconi’s invention and Fleming’s discovery the vacuum had no connection to radio. It was not until 1915 when Lee DeForest placed a grid inside the diode between the filament and the plate that amplification was possible. With the invention of the Audion, the first name for the vacuum tube, true CW became possible. The Audion later became known as the Fleming Valve which it is still called in many countries but in the United States of America it is called a vacuum tube.

Not only did it provide the necessary essential to make oscillators and detectors but amplifiers and mixers which allowed the superhetrodyne radio.

It was these little glowing marvels that bridged the road between the wide band, short range, loud smelly spark, with insensitive passive detectors and the present solid state DX in a box radios.

In 1960 Single Side Band (SSB) signals could be heard on the ham bands but standard Amplitude Modulation (AM) was still the most popular mode of voice transmission. There were arguments as to the value of SSB over AM (SSB is a modified standard AM signal). Quality of the sound was one major objection to SSB while cost and complexity of equipment for transmission and reception was another. But change was, and still is, inevitable thus SSB quickly grew to the point where it became the normal and AM (sometimes called Ancient Modulation) became the rare mode of communications.

SSB was first introduced by John Renshaw Carson when he applied for paten on 1 December 1915. The first recorded used of SSB was by the telephone companies starting in the 1930’s as a means of multiplexing (using a single carrier or in this case single pair of wires to carry multiple information channels simultaneously) telephone lines. Using a pilot frequency a carrier was established for each channel and the Upper Side Band was used to transmit the communications in one direction while the Lower Side Band was used to transmit the information in the other direction.

After WWII amateur radio operators began to experiment with SSB on the air.

Up to 1950 the United States Air Force bombers carried a radio operator to maintain communications. This meant an extra person, thus that much less payload could be carried and extra fuel was needed. It also required the operator to receive a message and passing that information on to the pilot or other crew member for whom it was intended. The reverse was also true; the radio operator took the message and passed it on to its intended recipient’s operator. With the advent of the B52 jet bomber communication speed needed to increase to accommodate the increased speed of the aircraft’s movement. The middle man, the radio operator, became the target for elimination.

Two Generals in the United States Air Force, General Curtis E. LeMay W6EZV and Lt. General Francis H. Griswold K0DWC, addressed this problem by placing SSB amateur radio stations in two B52 bombers. By this they were able to prove the improved quality of long-range voice communications. High quality long distance voice communications allowed the crew to communicate directly without a radioman.

In 1966 any amateur radio station transmitting a false distress signal could be sentenced to up to 10 years in jail. A fine could also be imposed. While the jail time has been reduced Federal prison time is still a possibility.

It was April first 1966 in the afternoon when a quiet watch at the Coast Guard Radio Station New Orleans (NMG) was interrupted by a message on the teletype; a super tanker on fire was sinking in the Gulf of Mexico. We had not heard any distress signal on either 500 KHz, the maritime distress and calling CW frequency, or on 2182, maritime distress and calling frequency voice frequency. The reason we had not heard the signal was because the distress call was made on an amateur radio frequencies.

Immediate rebroadcast of the distress was sent on 500 KHz and 2182 KHz as directed by the Eighth District Coast Guard field office. Ships and aircraft were dispatched from the West Coast of Florida as well as from Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. The reason so many units were dispatched was because the exact location of the ship was not known. The co-ordinances given by the ships operator placed it near Florida but the Navy radio direction finder stations placed it near New Orleans.

I was the only ham radio operator on board the station that day so a relief operator was sent to relieve me so I could proceed to the ham radio station to assist. The station sending the distress signal was using CW but was in the phone portion of the band so I, along with others assisting, used SSB.

I was informed of the co-ordinance problem so I asked him to hold his key down for a few seconds so we could get a good DF signal.

The operator said he was trapped in the radio room by the fire. The status of other crew members was unknown.

Why he was using an amateur radio frequency and not normal ship board distress frequencies was a question we all had but we were not going to use valuable communications time to ask. The answer to that question we could sort out later.

The operator sending the distress said he believed he could swim under the fire and escape. With all the good lucks and such I again informed him that we were having some DF problems so I asked him to lock his key before he left.

The long steady tone continued for just short time and then went silent. We all assumed the water had reached the transmitter and killed it. As for the fate of the operator we would have to wait.

The signal was not shut off by water but by an FCC officer who was within blocks of the station when I asked him to lock the key. That signal was sufficient to lead the officer to the house of a 17 year old ham still seated at his station where he had executed his little prank. The boy was promptly arrested.

It was some months latter I was in the FCC field office to take a commercial radio license test when I had the opportunity to speak to the field engineer in charge. I asked him about the case. He told me the operator was found guilty and the FCC was asking for maximum sentencing.

He told the court that it was just an April fool’s joke but the cost of dispatching assistance was not funny.

A little side note: The ship which was reported to be on fire was a real Super Tanker with only one radio operator on board. There were specified times for the radio watches on ships with only one operator so the rebroadcast of the distress signal was sent again at a time when of the ships with radiomen would have an operator on watch. The radio operator, having come on watch on watch, heard the distress rebroadcast and reported it to the captain of the ship who drafted a message to the Coast Guard stating that, “this ship is neither on fire nor otherwise in distress and does not plan to be in the near future.”