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.     

No! NASA is not looking for hams willing to operate from the planet Mars.  The MARS referred here is the Military Auxiliary Radio System formally known as the Military Affiliate Radio System. 

The program behind MARS started back in November 1925 under the leadership of Captain Thomas C. Rives of the United States Army Signal Corps.  Captain Rives organized a group of amateur radio operators with the intent of utilizing their talents to train soldiers how to use the new technology of radio communications.  He would also use the organization, which was then called Auxiliary Amateur Radio System (AARS), to assist in research and development of radio equipment to be used by the US Army.  AARS members could also provide an instant pool of already trained radio operators for military operations if needed.

That pool of ready trained operators proved very useful when the United States of America was suddenly thrust into war on December 7, 1941.  Many of its members of AARS became military radio operators.  AARS operations along with all amateur radio operations were suspended during the war.  In 1946 AARS was reactivated.

November 1948 AARS changed its name to Military Amateur Radio System (MARS) and was split into two separate groups, the Army MARS, and the newly formed United States Air Force MARS.  (The USAF became a separate branch of the US military on September 18, 1947.  Formally it was known as the Army Air Corp.)

MARS kept its acronym but changed its name to Military Affiliate Radio System on September 2, 1952. The Navy-Marine Corps MARS program was established on August 17, 1962.

The MARS program became well known for its handling of messages and phone patches for military personnel serving overseas.  Modern email and cell phones has almost eliminated the need for MARS to handle personal messages for those serving in the military. 

December 23, 2009 MARS again changed its name while keeping it well known acronym.  The new name for MARS is the Military Auxiliary Radio System.  The Department of Defense give the following definition of a military auxiliary: “an organized body of volunteers prepared to supplement the uniformed services or any designated civilian authorities by provision of specialized autonomous services when called upon or when situations warrant.”  The Civil Air Patrol and the Coast Guard Auxiliary are two examples of Military Auxiliaries. 

With the name change came a modification of its primary mission.  MARS now will provide auxiliary emergency communications for US Military and other federal agencies such as FEMA and Homeland Security.  MARS may now assist state, local, and select private and public agencies with emergency communications. The new focus of the MARS’ mission is homeland security. 

I delete about 100 comments for each one I accept because most of the comments are just to advertise their site and has nothing to do with ham radio.  If you read through the comments you will see that many of the comments I have accepted are probably for the purpose of drawing people to a site unrelated to ham radio but at least the comment had some substance.  There are also a lot of good comments.

Today as I was monitoring the comments I found one by Mike G which really attracted my attention.  The comment can be found on my post “THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAM RADIO AND CB” (http://hamslife.com/?p=24).  Mike’s comment or actually questions were: “Were HAM radios used by the French resistance during WWII? Have they been successfully used in modern times, in countries where tyrannical gov’ts have taken over? How can a HAM radio be utilized successfully today if the USA were to collapse?”

The subject Mike brings up deserves, in my estimation, a lot more then just a simple response in the comment section.  Actually the area of ham radio and government subversion could fill a book but I won’t be writing a book here. 

During WWII there were commercially built ham radios on the market but nothing like the great number of units available today.  Many of the ham radios were home brew.  While I am sure many of these radios were converted to underground use by the French and other resistance groups and operated by licensed ham radio operators it needs to be understood that a radio station is only a ham radio when it is operated by a legally licensed amateur radio operator on an amateur radio frequency using amateur radio call signs.  If a licensed amateur radio operator uses his ham station under an encrypted call sign (call sign to reveal station identity to the station being called while concealing the station identity from others) to pass subversive information it technically is not a ham radio station at that time.  It may sound like I am splitting hairs but that is a hair that I believe needs to be split.

Radio transmitters and receivers which were constructed for amateur radio use have been used by many for good and bad.  Resistance groups such as the French Resistance have used them to combat tyranny and rebel armies have used them to provide communications.  Drug and other smugglers have used them to pass information.  Ham radios and ham operators have provided the world with instantly available operators and equipment to meet specific communications needs outside the normal amateur operations. 

The potential use of ham radio in event of a government collapse whether USA or another is certainly a difficult question to answer.  There was a television program series that illustrated this at least to some extent.  The program was “Jericho” and it can now be found on U Tube.  Jericho gave the title of that week’s program in Morse code. 

If the government collapse is do to an overthrow where nuclear weapons are used, such as in Jericho, most modern ham radios will become worthless.  Nuclear explosions produce huge EMF (Electro Magnetic Force) fields which will destroy all solid state devices.  Only those hams with vacuum tube equipment would still have working radios in event of a high level nuclear explosion.  Finding power to run these radios might prove to be interesting because most power plants use solid state devices in their monitoring equipment and the loss of these devices would cause a shutdown. 

I do believe that EMF is a serious threat to our world today. Thus we need to organize a group of ham radio operators with vacuum tube radios and means of providing power (generators must not have solid state devices necessary for operation) for those radios.  Transportation and communications are so dependant of the use of solid state equipment that in event of such an attack we would have our life line cut off and the organization I just described could be the saving force.  

It is a scary thought when you realize our very existence has become dependant on a very fragile silicone thread. With the right equipment  and organization we, ham radio operators, could become the safety line to catch our society incase someone should cut that thread with a nuclear weapon.

While doing some work on my computer my good old R-390 receiver was running tuned to 40 meter CW which was fairly quiet. Suddenly there was a pile up. I am not sure who or what the station being called was but it did show that the band was not really dead. While everyone was giving their call hopping to be the next one called I heard those three little letters LID sent by a 599 signal. I had to laugh when I heard it because the real “LID” just announced to the whole world that he himself was one.

First things first, some readers may not know what is meant by the term “LID.” The term is older then radio; it dates back to the early days of telegraph. With CW we have a nice tone to copy but the telegrapher only had a clicking sound to copy. The armature would go from up to down making a click then back up making another click. The length of time between the down click and the up click determined if it was a dot or a dash that was being sent.

As the number of operators grew they would operate side by side and while the older operators could copy their sounder the newer operators found it difficult to distinguish between clicks of their sounder and the clicks of the sounders next to them. The problem was solved by placing a tobacco can lid between the armature and the coils of the sounder. By bending the lid it would sound different to the other sounders near by because they too would bend their lids to give a distinctive sound. The older operators would laugh at them and say they should be able pick out their own sounder and not have to use a lid. Thus the older operators would call newer operators lid operators as a derogative term.

As the telegraphers became radio operators they carried the term with them as a reference to any bad operator. I really don’t know when, where, or why but the comma sent by itself (da da di di da dat), usually at a slower then normal operating speed, became the accepted abbreviated expression for LID. As a CW operator in the United States Coast Guard I heard that comma frequently sent over 500 KHz, the distress and calling frequency for ship shore CW.

Someone might make a call during silent period (15 minutes before and 15 minutes after each and every hour lasting for 3 minutes). This would almost always prompt a comma being sent by one or more self appointed airwaves critic who by the mere act of sending that comma broke proper radio periodical. The first 2 minutes and 45 seconds of a silent period are for distress signals only and the last 15 seconds may be used for emergency or safety messages. This action would almost always prompt a reply of “U” (di di dat) either from the original offender or from another self appointed critic.

The operators on 500 KHz were professional radio operators yet, in my opinion, when they sent the infamous comma they were acting very unprofessional. This is not a practice we need to follow on the Amateur bands. People make mistakes lets learn to get over it and go on because some day, some where we are going to make a mistake too, maybe even more then one.

Today it is hard to understand what it was like in the early days of ham radio. Even over the 47 years I have been a ham there have been so many changes that when I tell how it was when I started some of the newer hams sit wide eyed just as I did when hams from the days of spark gap told of their experiences.

The spark transmitter was very noisy when it was being used. There was the smell from the ozone produced by the arc. The arc created a very annoying light display when the transmitter was being keyed. For these reasons the radio transmitter was not a welcome resident in the average home so it became housed in a small out building in the backyard many times much like another small structure also found in the backyard which didn’t smell very well either. The term ham shack was attached to those small buildings and the term has stuck even though the station might be located in a corner of the living room.

Almost a year ago I wrote an article on one of my other blogs which prompted a comment with a question. The question follows: “one question i have is
are the following principals basically the same - how do they differ? Heterodyne Regenerative and Super Regenerative.

That article was posted on this blog site on 02/01/2008 titled “The Regenerative Receiver.” I want to try to answer that question here because I must have left something ambiguous in that article.

The word “heterodyne” is derived from two Greek words; “hetro” which means different and “dyne” meaning power. By combining the two words we see that it latterly means a different power. A heterodyne is a signal which is produced by mixing two or more signals in a non linear device or to say it another way heterodyning is the process of mixing two or more signal frequencies to produce a different frequency signal. When two frequencies are mixed they actually produce two new frequencies. So if a 7.100 MHz signal was mixed with another signal having a frequency of 6.645 MHz it would produce an output of 455 KHz and another of 13.745 (the sum and the difference of the two frequencies). In that case, considering 455 KHz is a very common IF frequency, the 455 KHz signal would probably be the one desired and the 13.745 MHz signal would be filtered out.

The technique of heterodyning was developed by a Canadian inventor and engineer named Reginald Fessenden.

After the process of heterodyning was developed and understood the superhetrodyne receiver could be developed. Prior to the superhetrodyne receiver and after amplification was possible receivers had a series of RF amplifiers ahead of the detector. Each of these amplifiers had to be retuned when the receiver frequency was changed. The superhetrodyne receiver eliminated the need to have a series of RF amplifiers that had to be tuned separately. Normally there is one RF amplifier ahead of the mixer though there can be more and sometimes the mixer is the first stage. The input to the mixer is tuned and the frequency of the local oscillator which produces the signal to be mixed with the incoming frequency can be variable (in some cases the local oscillator is crystal controlled) so the output frequency always remains the same. Each RF amplifier, which is actually called Intermediate Frequency (IF) amplifier, can be tuned to the same frequency no matter what the input frequency is. Using an IF frequency allows the construction of more selective circuits. Fixed frequency filters can be easily added to the IF giving greater selectivity then possible with LC circuits.

Ease of tuning, improved gain, and increased selectivity are three advantages of the Superhetrodyne receiver. An other advantage was provided by the fixed If frequency being fed into the detector is it allows the signal of the IF to be mixed with the signal produced by the beat frequency oscillator (BFO) which makes receiving CW and SSB much easier (the BFO heterodynes the IF frequency down to audio frequencies).

Regeneration is a process where by some of the output signal of an amplifier is sent back, in phase, to the input. When the output of an amplifier is sent back to the input it is called feedback. When a sufficient amount of the output signal is sent back to the input in phase the amplifier will sustain its own signal producing process called oscillation. Feed back can be regenerative (positive feedback or in phase feedback) and degenerative (negative feedback or out of phase feedback).

As the article I mentioned above describes, the regenerative receiver used a small amount of positive feedback to improve the receivers amplification and its selectivity so one tube acting as the RF amplifier and detector worked very efficiently. When the feedback was increased to the point where it started to oscillate a signal was being produced which would mix with the incoming signal to produce a tone so a CW signal could be read.

A super-regenerative receiver is a regenerative receiver which uses a quenching frequency to prevent oscillation.

So I guess the answer to the question I was asked is heterodyne and regeneration are two different processes and regenerative and super-regenerative differ in that the latter uses a quenching frequency.

Most people who are not ham radio operators are completely suppressed when you tell them that there are amateur radio television stations. Most people do not know how much the amateur radio community has added to the advancement of the art of radio.

On July 2, 1928 the FCC authorized C. F. Jenkins W3XK in Wheaton, Maryland to broadcast the first television signals. For the first eighteen months these were only silhouette images from motion picture films but it was a start.

W2XB started broadcasting the first regular schedule television transmissions on July 21, 1931. W6XAO in Los Angeles went on the air on December 1931 transmitting images every day except Sundays and holidays. W6XAO continued the broadcasting for several years.

While commercial broadcasters saw the potential in broadcasting radio programs on the AM bands it was not until after World War II that commercial television really began to catch on.

By the mid 1950’s almost every home in the United States of America had a TV antenna on its roof. Cheep unshielded TV sets with 21 Meg IF strips were the norm. TVI plagued the amateur radio operators even when the signals from our transmitters were clean. A 21 MHz IF strip 4 MHz wide (19 to 22 MHz) is going to pick up every strong 15 meter signal in the area. Citizen Band operators began to add high power amplifiers which were illegal and frequently included an abundance of spurious radiation which created an abundance of TVI which was blamed on the hams. Every little blip on TV was blamed on Hams and the Amateur radio operator who put up an antenna in his back yard had to be ready to receive some unkind words from the neighbors.

Satellite TV, cable TV, and better filtering in modern TV’s has reduced the problem some, though it still exists. There are still people who hate hams because they think hams interfere with their TV reception. The irony of the whole thing is that if it had not been for ham radio operators who were willing to spend their time and money developing Television no one knows how long it would have been before there would have been any television programs for people to watch.

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.

As a radio operator in the United States Coast Guard it became my lot to serve on the USCGC McLane out of Brownsville, Texas. The McLane was 125 feet long and 25 feet wide and operated on HF frequencies from 2 MHz to 32 MHz with 180 watts of CW power. While serving on the McLane we went as far south as the Yucatan Peninsula. During the time when we were underway we needed to maintain communications with the Coast Guard Radio New Orleans NMG which at times was close to 1500 miles away. This was very successfully done with one antenna called an H antenna.

The H consisted of a single wire running from a 10 foot support pole on the starboard stern corner running up to a few feet from the starboard side of the yard arm across by the mast to the other side of the yard arm and down to a 10 foot support pole on the stern port corner of the ship. There were two wires with insulators running from the yard arm to support the wire on each side to support the antenna away from the yard arm and mast. The wire was tapped with another wire at the .36 of the total length of the antenna point which was near the starboard support wire from the mast. That wire was the feed line and it was run to an insolated feed through which came inside the radio room. The HF transmitter was attached to the insolated feed through.

Carefully studying the antenna I realized if the wires were removed from the two stern supports and stretched out straight it would form an off center fed Windom antenna. The off center fed Windom can be feed with 600 ohm ladder line, 300 ohm twin lead, or just a single random length wire as was the antenna on the McLane. The antenna on the McLane was not quite ½ wave long for our lowest frequency of 2686 KHz (called KC then) but it still worked quite well at that frequency. The transmatch or antenna tuner was apparently able to compensate for the difference.

The Windom was a common antenna in the 1930’s but it is not selective against spurious radiation. With the advance of Television sets which lead to TVI problems the Windom fell into disuse by the middle 1950’s. While underway the McLane had no problem with TVI so the antenna worked very well. (If 50 ohm coax is used at the transmitter output to a low pass filter then coax is run between the filter and the transmatch TVI problems are no worse with the Windom then with a center fed dipole.)

The antenna requires a very good RF ground. This will not only improve the operation of the antenna system but it will also help prevent stray RF inside the shack while transmitting. One reason the antenna may have worked so well on the McLane was the ocean is the ultimate ground.

The antenna is a half wave dipole, that is half wave at the lowest frequency used, fed at the 300 ? point (.34 of total length on one side and .66 of the total length from the other end.) with a single conductor or twin lead.

A Windom antenna is said to work on the fundamental frequency and the even harmonics so the 1.8 MHz antenna would work on 3.6 MHz, 7.2 MHz, 10.8 MHz, 14.4 MHz, 18 MHz, 21.6 MHz, 25.2 MHz, and 28.8 MHz. This would make it on or close to the 160, 80, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12 and 10 meter bands. On this type of antenna the antenna tuner acts as a real antenna tuner, unlike that of a coax fed antenna, and can make up for the difference. The frequencies used by the McLane were not as close to the even harmonics of the lowest frequency used as the ham band frequencies are to 160 Meter.

Most modern HF transmitters have linear amplifiers for use with SSB. Linear amplifiers have a very low spurious output so if a low pass filter is used between the antenna tuner and the transmitter output there should be very little problem. Also most TV’s are now used on cable or dish which are not as susceptible to TVI as they were in the earlier day’s television sets which were attached to antennas on the roof of the house.

Many hams feel constrained when it comes to putting up antenna because of limited room but as described above a very effective antenna was used by the United States Coast Guard on the very limited space of a 125’ ship. If you can put two poles on the roof of your house which are parallel to the back fence and run a single 260 feet long wire starting at your back yard fence up to one pole then over to the other pole and then down to the back fence again you should be able to put up an antenna which could be used on any desired frequency from 1.8 MHz to 30MHz.

The albatross is a large seabird which ranges widely over the Southern Ocean and in the North Pacific. They are among the largest of the world’s flying birds and when in flight they are as graceful as any bird can be but their take off and landings are a sight to behold. To get off into the wild blue yonder they run down the beach and flap their wings but because of nose dives resulting in feet over beak it frequently takes several attempts to succeed. Landings can also result in similar summersault type of maneuver. Thus they earned the name “gooney bird.”

The military transport plane C-47 which was the same as the civilian DC-3 also acquired the name “gooney bird.” The DC-3 was a very fine aircraft and many are still flying today so I do not know why they were call “gooney birds” but it was a name attached and used by those serving in the military at that time.

The yellow gooney bird was neither a bird nor an airplane. It was not able to fly at all under its own power. The yellow gooney bird was a ham radio transceiver produced by the Gonset Company in Burbank, CA. Gonset produced some of the Communicator II in yellow cabinets exclusively for the United States Civil Defense program. The Gonset Communicator II, like the albatross and the C-47, became known as a “gooney bird.” They were a very good AM 2 and 6 meter transceiver which was able to be operated on 6 and 12 VDC as well as 120 VAC. The transmitter portion was crystal controlled but the receiver was tunable across the whole band.

Though I speak of the radio’s operation in past tense there are many, as the one in the photo, still operating. Mine, as you can see, is not yellow but it is exactly like the yellow version with the only differences being it is gray and it does not have the red triangle with the letters CD inside.

Last year there was a television program called “Jericho.” . In an early program there was a gray Gonset Communicator II with the actors trying to figure out why it did not work. The answer was obvious to all who know this radio. Unlike most radios with the antenna port on the back this unit has its antenna connector on the top and the unit in “Jericho” there was no antenna plugged into it. So it is no wonder it did not work. A 19 inch whip on a PL-259 works very well on these units.

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Note: If you do not know code and you watched Jericho the code sent at the beginning of each program was real. It told the name of that evenings program title.