Hams?

[lgb&dtuba]

And every bit as expensive.

[Rick Denney]

As for the moon bounce antenna: These are rarely an "antenna", but arrays of antennas backed up with some hefty power; often pushing well over a million watts ERP (some more than 2 million watts ERP). I peruse the ham merchandise catalogs regularly and have never seen an antenna identified specifically for moon bounce. I would be curious to know (and a little sceptical) if there is, in fact, anyone doing regular moon bounce on a single beam antenna unless that single antenna were a fairly sizable parabolic dish.

The rules have changed over the years for CB. I knew that 5/8-wave verticals were, of course, allowed, but thought they have gain they are not beams (and thus my terminology was wrong). I'm sure all such were allowed at least when the 11-meter band was a ham band, but I do recall reading that the antennas had been sharply limited as a result of that band being moved to the Citizen's Radio Service.

And, yes, power in those days was always rated as "input" power--input to the finals. No longer, though.

I know of at least two EME arrays being offered for sale in this area, and one of them calls it his moonbounce array. With WSJT, EME antennas can shrink (and have), but you're right that a typical array has eight or ten 20-odd-element yagis in the array, all on monstrous az-alt rotators. Lessee, each one of those antennas has about 28 dB gain, and doubling the antenna number adds about 3 dB if I'm remembering correctly. So, 36-40 dB gain is probably possible. With big hardline and 1500 watts, that could make millions of watts of effective radiated power. Don't stand in front of the antenna. Like I said, that's on the cutting edge of what amateurs might be into.

Rick "who watched a veteran EME operator make meteor-scatter contacts using WSJT last year" Denney

[SplatterTone]

but I do recall reading that the antennas had been sharply limited as a result of that band being moved to the Citizen's Radio Service.

11-meter as a ham band goes quite a ways back. The change-over was Sept. 11, 1958 to be exact.

I sold this stuff when I worked at Radio Shack in the 1970's. The antennas -- including a three-element beam -- were clearly sold as Citizens Band equipment. Note that this was not Bubba's Truck Stop, but a nationwide, very visible retailer. A link to the current FCC regs is below. I see no limitation on antenna type. The only change to what I previously posted was that power limitation has been changed from 5-watt input (which I always thought was a little goofy) to 4-watt output carrier, 12-watt PEP.
http://www.reactintl.org/rules-cb.htm

I was an avid participant in CB and was quite familiar with the official rules as well as the popular customs. I even had an official FCC license call sign (KAUK4626) -- which, according to above list of rules is apparently still good. I am old enough and participated in it far enough back that I know what it was like when it was indeed a very civil and enjoyable hobby (if we leave out channels 6 and 19). Every area of town had one or two channels where that area of town hung out. There were channel get-togethers, cook-outs, and softball games. People were reasonably observant of good behavior without being stiff and formal. It was very similar to 2 meter simplex, very informal, multi-participant BS sessions ... back when 2 meter had those.

As an editorial comment, I will note that ham radio experienced its major growth some period of time after CB went through its enormous popular growth. Most of the new hams were previous CB operators. The popularity of CB collapsed because of the incompatibility the elements of a lot people using it, almost all AM transmissions, and a sunspot peak which left the entire band unusable for most of the day. This left no "farm league" to graduate to amateur radio.

ARRL and the politics-that-be tried to compensate by greatly simplifying the license requirements. But, if my local area is representative of the state of ham radio in general, then those simplifying measures haven't worked. What I think might have helped is if the ARRL had worked to come up with a good replacement for CB -- perhaps something like FRS but without the severe equipement limitations. I suspect the good riddance and don't come back attitude towards CB left no pool of people to graduate to amateur radio.

[SplatterTone]

When did the change from 23 channels to 40+ occur?

I don't recall the exact year. As you noted, it was around 1977 give or take a year or two. This, by the way, lead to the demise of Lafeyette which was a pretty big electronics retailer "sort of" in the vein of Radio Shack (but different). Lafeyette had grossly overstocked on 23 channel radios to ride high on the popularity of CB, then got stuck with a whopping big stock it could not sell when 40 channels was approved. Kind of like an auto dealer with a lot full of Chevy Suburbans right about now. Radio Shack wisely started selling out its stock of 23 channels radios at the very first hint of 40 channels on the horizon. There was a period of time when we had very little to sell. We just tantalized the customers with the promise that 40 channels would in fact be a reality.

There was pseudo-gentlemen's agreement (not universally followed -- as is the case with some informal practices on ham bands) that channels 38-40 (if i recall correctly) would be for people using single sideband transmissions.

[SplatterTone]

HA!! I knowed I detected the distinct aroma of CB that was wafted into the thread. So, is that a picture of the actual radio?

[SplatterTone]

gear from the middle and late 1940s and some from the 1960s.

The 40s stuff, if it is in good, restorable shape is probably worth some cash, quite a bit probably. You don't see much still alive from that far back. The oldest receiver I have, an RME45, is from around 1945. It's not that great of a radio. A lot of drift. Big, heavy bastard.

rme45_2.jpg

Receivers from that time could be ham or general shortwave. If any of it says Collins on it, it's probably worth a chunk. Some of the better Hammarlund and National stuff will bring in a bit of cash. But those guys had some so-so, unremarkable stuff too. Hallicrafters had a little bit of pretty good stuff ... as well its share of unremarkable stuff. Most old receivers and transmitters from that time had unstable frequency control and drifted (changed frequency) quite a bit. Only the best of the best had good frequency stability.

Do you know if any of that stuff is transmitters? An old one I have that somebody needs to take and restore is a Globe King 400. Here's a picture of a 500 which is essentially the same size. Although there are probably some 80-meter AM operators that would love to have something like this, I doubt that in its unrestored state, it is worth much, if anything. Much bigger, heavier bastard. The three chassis in the rack are, from bottom: The power supply; the AM modulator; the Amplifier.

globe_king.jpg

[lgb&dtuba]

Now that's a boat anchor

[Rick Denney]

but I do recall reading that the antennas had been sharply limited as a result of that band being moved to the Citizen's Radio Service.

11-meter as a ham band goes quite a ways back. The change-over was Sept. 11, 1958 to be exact.

I sold this stuff when I worked at Radio Shack in the 1970's. The antennas -- including a three-element beam -- were clearly sold as Citizens Band equipment. Note that this was not Bubba's Truck Stop, but a nationwide, very visible retailer. A link to the current FCC regs is below. I see no limitation on antenna type. The only change to what I previously posted was that power limitation has been changed from 5-watt input (which I always thought was a little goofy) to 4-watt output carrier, 12-watt PEP.
http://www.reactintl.org/rules-cb.htm

12 watts peak envelop power is probably a little less than 4 watts RMS for single sideband with suppressed carrier (which, because the carrier is suppressed, has a zero output carrier). The old power rules for ham radio also specific peak input power in those days (and those days weren't that long ago). My early 80's vintage Kenwood TS-430 HF radio specified 200 watts "peak input power", which is about the same thing as a 100 watts output with some modulation processing on the voice. I usually read about 80 watts on that rig on my true averaging output power meter, and my voice usually drives a higher average than most folks.

You're right that there is no restriction on beam antennas. I even went to the actual Part 95 so I could read the appendices. Gotta be careful about listening to authoritative hams when it comes to the rules for CB--it's not an ubiased crowd.

http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_ ... 7cfr95.pdf

I was an avid participant in CB and was quite familiar with the official rules as well as the popular customs. I even had an official FCC license call sign (KAUK4626) -- which, according to above list of rules is apparently still good. I am old enough and participated in it far enough back that I know what it was like when it was indeed a very civil and enjoyable hobby (if we leave out channels 6 and 19). Every area of town had one or two channels where that area of town hung out. There were channel get-togethers, cook-outs, and softball games. People were reasonably observant of good behavior without being stiff and formal. It was very similar to 2 meter simplex, very informal, multi-participant BS sessions ... back when 2 meter had those.

I remember those days as well (and, yes, I think the move from 23 channels to 40 channels happened around 1976). I also participated in CB before it became overrun by truckers and seeming anarchists. In fact, I had an FCC license to operate on 26.620 MHz, just below the CB band, for the Civil Air Patrol, so my radio discipline has some military aspects to it.

As an editorial comment, I will note that ham radio experienced its major growth some period of time after CB went through its enormous popular growth. Most of the new hams were previous CB operators. The popularity of CB collapsed because of the incompatibility the elements of a lot people using it, almost all AM transmissions, and a sunspot peak which left the entire band unusable for most of the day. This left no "farm league" to graduate to amateur radio.

I don't recall the propagation issue. Cycle 21 peaked in about 1981 or so, after I'd moved on from CB in about 1977. Cycle 20 peaked in about 1970, before the boom. For skywave propagation, however, sunspots are a good thing. The maximum usable frequency will be highest at the peak, which will allow propagation on higher and quieter frequencies. Right now, at the bottom of the very beginning of Cycle 24, the 10-meter band is all but worthless, supporting skip propagation only during rare openings, but people will be making DX contacts on 10 meters in about five years.

ARRL and the politics-that-be tried to compensate by greatly simplifying the license requirements. But, if my local area is representative of the state of ham radio in general, then those simplifying measures haven't worked. What I think might have helped is if the ARRL had worked to come up with a good replacement for CB -- perhaps something like FRS but without the severe equipement limitations. I suspect the good riddance and don't come back attitude towards CB left no pool of people to graduate to amateur radio.

We still have over 600,000 licenses hams, though it is true they are not getting any younger. But the real problem seems to me unrelated to CB, despite that it is every ham's favorite insult. The real problem is that people once admired and sought jobs in electronics, and a person without two degrees (or even one) could legitimately be trained to perform electronics repair and even design and build radios. A 14-year-old of 50 years ago would be enamored with radio as the pinnacle of moder technology, and his parents would encourage it as a means of learning a respected and well-paying trade.

Nowadays, the kids with the intellect to pursue a technical career go vastly further than what they would generally learn in amateur radio, and few radio amateurs (unless they are also RF professionals) can learn enough to be relevant as technologists. Amateur radio is the last holdout in the lost art of HF propagation, but professional and military communications have generally gone to higher frequencies, digital modes, and software-driven devices. The gap between what an amateur can do and what professionals do has grown beyond what most folks can bridge, so the motivation for amateur radio has shifted from a relevant step in a worthwhile technological career to a nostalgic repository of lost technologies. The exceptions to this who I know (and I know many) are electronics professionals in their day jobs. I don't see many bank tellers or plumbers on the forefront, for example, of designing DSP algorithms for software-defined radios.

Thus, I don't see CB as a farm club, even back in its glory days. CB was a low-cost and multi-party alternative to the telephone, and a way for men to chat without too much interference from their wives. If you listen to 2 meters, or 75 meters, you'll hear those same guys, now 40 years older, still talking. Two meters is dying because it's no longer much use as an alternative to the telephone (everyone already has that capability in their pockets or clipped to their belts), and only in a few places can you have simplex operation without very complex antennas. Thus, the repeaters become these partly walled-off domains for local rag-chewers. I can drive coast to coast and never hear a soul on 146.520, which is the national simplex calling frequency.

For me, the interest is in establishing the capability without the intervening rented infrastructure. That's as challenging now as it ever was, and no computer can completely replace that RF device and antenna for talking to someone in another part of the world without renting an internet connection or phone line. I was chatting with a work colleague about it, and he asked me why I would consider playing with amateur radio when I have a cell phone in my pocket. I asked him why he rode a bicycle to work when he has a car in the driveway. He said the bike was great exercise. I said, "exactly." Amateur radio is great exercise for the brain on a very technical subject. CB never was, at least not to that extent, and neither is two-meter FM, unless you are the guy building the repeater.

Rick "who'll see your rant and raise you 2.7 rants" Denney

[Rick Denney]

One unit is very clearly marked Hammarlund. I do not know what it does. It has a large (6x6") lighted VU meter or tuning dial in the center on the top half. There are a few things marked Collins as well.

Hammarlund was a well-known brand of receiver in the boat-anchor era. Collins was respected even more. (Collins radios were made in Richardson, Texas, and the Collins factory still exists, though it's not Collins any more and they no longer make amateur stuff.)

Please do not try to plug them in to see if they work if they have been stored for a long time. The capacitors in those old radios need voltage to maintain an oxide layer that acts as part of the dielectric. The old capacitors were wound with wax paper, which has probably dried out, so any breakdown in the electrolytic capacitor will cause arcing, which ruins the capacitor altogether. The guys who know their stuff will take these guys up from zero volts to 110 volts using a Variac, and they may gradually raise the voltage over a day or two in hopes of reforming the capacitors. Also, vacuum tubes might be gassy and a slow warmup will allow their getters to gather up some of the undesired molecules that have leaked in. It takes some expertise to revive gear of this vintage.

Rick "noting that plenty of electrolytic capacitors even from old solid-state electronics are probably now dead" Denney

[Rick Denney]

This, by the way, lead to the demise of Lafeyette which was a pretty big electronics retailer "sort of" in the vein of Radio Shack (but different). Lafeyette had grossly overstocked on 23 channel radios to ride high on the popularity of CB, then got stuck with a whopping big stock it could not sell when 40 channels was approved.

I had a Lafayette 23-channel CB radio with synthesized local oscillators back in the day, in addition to a Regency 12-channel crystal-controlled CB radio. I'm trying to remember who made those Lafayettes--oh, yeah, it was Trio (aka Kenwood), and they were pretty good quality. Kenwood still makes good-quality ham gear. Recently, I found a book titled "Amateur Radio General License Study Guide" in a box of old stuff, bought for me by my father in about 1971, from the Lafayette Associated Radio Store in Houston. Looking through that book reveals just how much has really changed.



Rick "noting that all CB, ham, and commercial 12-channel Regency radios look alike" Denney

[SplatterTone]

I don't recall the propagation issue. Cycle 21 peaked in about 1981 or so, after I'd moved on from CB in about 1977. Cycle 20 peaked in about 1970, before the boom. For skywave propagation, however, sunspots are a good thing.

I do recall the issue. Sunspots are a very bad thing when there are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of AM transmissions, the carriers of which combine to form a massive chorus of heterodynes, the result being a constant S10-plus roar. A-L-L D-A-Y L-O-N-G. People gave up. The area-of-town groups and relationships evaporated.

But the real problem seems to me unrelated to CB, despite that it is every ham's favorite insult. The real problem is that people once admired and sought jobs in electronics ... Nowadays, the kids with the intellect to pursue a technical career go vastly further than what they would generally learn in amateur radio,

Your are attributing to much glamor to this. Ham radio is and always was a bastion of gadget lovers. Oh sure, there are the few egghead technorati in there, but they are a small minority. Consider the collection of which Wade speaks. Do you think that pile of radios was collected by an insatiable desire for technology? Heck no. It's gadgets. Always was gadgets. Cool stuff to play with. "The only difference between men and boys is the size and price of their toys." CB offered a very simple way to start dabbling in radio toys as opposed some other kind of toys. Having gotten my ham license in 1988 during the big growth period for ham radio, and having attended the club meetings while noting that the vast majority of new hams I met were previous CB operators, my empirical observation is that CB is where the interest in radio gadgeteering started for most because all you had to do was walk into a store and buy a cheap radio and antenna and start yakking.

I will acknowledge that the computer and video game world offer up some very attractive toys. But I have to wonder if that is entertainment rather than gadgeteering.

Amateur radio is the last holdout in the lost art of HF propagation,

What art? I never had anything more sophisticated that a 40-meter inverted vee and a tuner. You tune around listening for a CQ, or you send your own CQ. Either the waves are bouncing your way, or they aren't. Maybe I'm just hard to impress. I have Sardine Sender, 80-meter 3/4 watt cw transmitter I made from one of the handbooks (don't remember which one). Yeah, I made a couple of contacts with it. No art there. The band happened to be quiet enough, and somebody had a good enough receiver to pick up the signal.

Two meters is dying because it's no longer much use as an alternative to the telephone (everyone already has that capability in their pockets or clipped to their belts),

... or few new people are coming in.

and only in a few places can you have simplex operation without very complex antennas.

Any decent vertical on a pole above the roof will easily get you a 30 mile radius to anyone else with a decent vertical on a pole above their roof. I used to pick up fox hunt HT's from 8 miles away (at least) while standing on the ground while holding and waving around a 3-element Cushcraft beam.

For me, the interest is in establishing the capability without the intervening rented infrastructure. That's as challenging now as it ever was,

For you maybe. For most it's the playing around with radios. Back in the 20 wpm Extra Class days, only a small percentage of hams went that far. The majority did the 13 wpm to satisfy the carrot and stick requirement to get on HF phone, after which, they gladly packed up the morse key. Phooey on the challenge. 13 wpm wasn't all that tough; 20 wpm was a challenge (more accurately: a bitch). I did Novice, Tech and 13 wpm in my first testing session. General and Advanced the next month. Then it was eight months of a lot of practice, every day, to get to 20 wpm. I did the challenge along with the gadget stuff. But very few others did or wanted to. That's why the challenge was eliminated. Don't take my word for it, take that of the ARRL: People aren't looking for a challenge, so make it easy to get a license.

Gadgets. Playing with cool toys. Start with CB, then, if you're still interested, move up. Except CB is essentially dead.

[lgb&dtuba]

For you maybe. For most it's the playing around with radios. Back in the 20 wpm Extra Class days, only a small percentage of hams went that far. The majority did the 13 wpm to satisfy the carrot and stick requirement to get on HF phone, after which, they gladly packed up the morse key. Phooey on the challenge. 13 wpm wasn't all that tough; 20 wpm was a challenge (more accurately: a bitch). I did Novice, Tech and 13 wpm in my first testing session. General and Advanced the next month. Then it was eight months of a lot of practice, every day, to get to 20 wpm. I did the challenge along with the gadget stuff. But very few others did or wanted to. That's why the challenge was eliminated. Don't take my word for it, take that of the ARRL: People aren't looking for a challenge, so make it easy to get a license.

Gadgets. Playing with cool toys. Start with CB, then, if you're still interested, move up. Except CB is essentially dead.

I think age has something to do with it, in the sense that if you are old enough the options available to you when you were young were quite different.

When I was in high school (in the early 60's) there were no home computers, let alone computer games. If you were a techno-geek, then electronics was where it was at. The space program was in full swing and it hadn't been that long since the first satellite had been launched. Becoming an electronics tech or engineer was the glamor career. At the same time money wasn't all that available for a high school kid. If you were lucky around here you could get an after school job bagging groceries. Or work tobacco in the summer. (I bagged.)

That little bit of money went into buying my first electronics kit - a Knight Kit 3 transistor cb walkie talkie. Cost me all of $9.99 as I recall. That's about $100 in today's money. That got me and a buddy on the air. Why cb? First, it was what we could afford. Second, in those days the amateur tests were conducted by the FCC in regional offices. I would have had to go to Norfolk, Va. to test for Novice. No way was my Dad going to drive me 150 miles away for something a frivolous as a ham license. The walkie talkies had 100 milliwatt transmitters and we didn't need to even get real cb licenses for them. So that and tearing down junked radios donated to me from the local tv-radio repair shop to build up a supply of parts for projects constituted the hobby for me. Remember radio/tv repair shops? If you lived in a small town, that was where the town's uber geek worked. And teenaged geeks hung out.

As for cb itself, in those days cb'ers actually had licenses, used their calls and pretty much followed the same on air procedures as hams. Lower power was about the only real difference. (OK, cb was only one band. Hams had more.) So it could really be a stepping stone.

CB fed my young techno-geek urges and sufficed until I went into the Navy and got myself trained for real in electronics. When I got out of the Navy in 1969 I worked for a while repairing business band two way radios (anyone remember Aerotron?). Electronics was already evolving beyond the old repair guy paradigm and so I got interested in and went back to school to become a computer programmer. A decision that has proved much more lucrative than if I had tried to stay in electronics repair. While I was in electronics I found that the last thing I wanted to do when I got off work was more electronics.

It was 1988 when I became interested in ham radio again, discovered that you no longer had to go to Norfolk to test, and got licensed. My path through ham radio pretty much mirrors Splat's except I spread it out over a couple of years and I was in the majority who never went past 13wpm and Advanced until the code requirement went away. The day I passed the 13 wpm test was pretty much the last time I touched a key. For me it's always been about the gadgets.

The point buried in there is that CB really was a stepping stone to ham radio once upon a time. I'm not so sure it is now. It doesn't take much to jump straight into a technician license today and modern 2m mobiles don't cost significantly more than a decent cb used to. As far as what you hear on cb today, well let's just say that we can only hope that it's not a stepping stone into ham radio.

73 de N4SVZ

[tubatooter1940]

I have a VHF radio in my sailboat. I was so grateful when they repealed the license law for VHF. Now I am free to babble away like the C.B.'ers used to but for one thing. Almost no one is listening except the Coast Guard and a few marinas.
Sailors these days use cell phones when near the coast. So do I.
I keep a phone directory aboard my boat. Handy!

[Rick Denney]

Your are attributing to much glamor to this.

Probably. That's the thing about nostalgia.

But Jim's description fits my own history pretty well, though I'm a bit younger and for me CB was descending into its own hell too quickly for my interest in it to last very long.

I had other interests that drew me away from the radio stuff. Yes, I enjoyed (and enjoy) the gadgets, though the underlying knowledge required to do something with them interests me just as much as the toy aspect. It's certainly more than just chatting with people--I get plenty of that without radio.

I have a work colleague with whom I have traveled extensively. He is a ham, and he kept me up-to-date on his contesting activities. That appealed to me, and the memories of hanging around one of my oldest and closest friends, who is a broadcast radio engineer, had given me some enjoyable memories of phasing AM station antenna arrays and the like. You could say that I've always had a ham streak, but never really the time to pursue it. Frankly, it was the removal of the code requirement that finally pushed me over the edge. Yes, that has resulted in lots of Extra-class operators, but I can't see any real harm from that. The old guys resent that their hard efforts are undermined, and they think the young'uns don't respect them, if you believe what you read on QRZ. I do get tired of the "walked 20 miles in the snow, uphill both ways" stories. And some of us who are new are not unaware of many of the traditions, we just never got the license for whatever reason. I've certainly had to bite my tongue to keep from challenging the comments of sold of the more experienced hams, who apparently forgot some important truths about how RF works. For example, lots of people who passed code tests still confuse low reactance in an antenna system with high radiation resistance.

There is an art to HF propagation, and it's more than just seeing if someone is out there on the lobe of gain that a given dipole might have. I was able to hear Scarborough Reef during the dxpedition last year, but could not make contact. Whatever I knew then wasn't enough, either in terms of station design or operating strategy. I know guys who have beams at 70 feet and also at 40 feet, so that the lower beams can bring in contacts from a shorter skip owing to their higher take-off angle, or take advantage of different ionosphere layer propagations at different times of the day. If that's not subtle, then I don't know what is.

Rick "learning Morse at 20 wpm, but sporadically" Denney

[eupher61]

20wpm, eh? Impressive...

I just bought an AARL CD set "Your Introduction to Morse Code", which uses the Farnsworth technique (letters at 15wpm, spaced to 5 wpm). Apparently the VECs have agreed to use 13-15 wpm character speeds, spaced to 5 wpm, for the 5 word test.

I like it!! I've tried several times through the years, trying to teach myself code. I once had an oscillator, built it from a kit, but I had no system for learning anything. Just going A B C D etc sure didn't work.

$14.95 for this 2 disc set...well worth it!

[SplatterTone]

trying to teach myself code.

Conversing on the air with code is *THE* fastest way to build speed. The tedious part is getting enough speed so that you can do a little bit of conversing in the first place. Working up to 20 wpm, most people, including me, hit a big barrier at about 17 wpm. It took months of nightly CW work and copying the ARRL code practice sessions to get past it.

"Back in the day" a program called Super Morse was what just about everyone used. It had multiple practice routines. If I'm not confusing the program with something else, the routine that worked best for me was where it sent a random character, then you typed the character as quickly as you could. The program would go to another character, or give you a bad beep and do the character again. After the session, the program would give you your wpm score. I wrote a simple little BASIC program for Commodore 64/Vic 20 that would do just this one thing.

This works well up to a point. You can't build speed this way because you get one character at a time to which you respond one character at a time. For real world receiving speed, your brain is processing a queue of characters, and what you are writing is behind what you are hearing. Those people who have a good short term memory can do it all in their head.

Super Morse could also take a text file and send it in code. Back then, people didn't have Internet connections to their house, but now, I think you can download the ARRL practice text for the week if they still do that.

For the 5 wpm test, it is slow enough that you can write down the dots and dashes, then go back and fill in the characters when the sending ends.

[SplatterTone]

If that's not subtle, then I don't know what is.

That's money.

If you absolutely must do DX, the DX-ers I knew did very well with just a tri-band beam at a modest height of around 30 to 35 feet, and a wire or vertical antenna of their liking. I did a little bit of DX, but I never cared for the slam-bam, here's your signal report, goodbye, DX stuff. I much prefer those 30 minute to 1 hour (or more) CW exchanges. So I spent most of my time on 40 meters CW. With a tuner, my simple 40-meter inverted vee at about 25 to 30 feet worked well on any band from 80 meters on up. It was essentially useless on 160 meters.

A tidbit of info: The popularity of the PDL2 quad on CB was due in large part to its angle of radiation that made it especially well suited for working skip. Yes, that's one official rule that just about nobody gave much attention, and nobody enforced. Not something that me and my plain ground plane ever had to worry about.

All this talk has me thinking that maybe I should try to find where I put that multi-band vertical I never used and hook up the 751A (with extra narrow crystal filters, of course).

[Rick Denney]

20wpm, eh? Impressive...

I just bought an AARL CD set "Your Introduction to Morse Code", which uses the Farnsworth technique (letters at 15wpm, spaced to 5 wpm). Apparently the VECs have agreed to use 13-15 wpm character speeds, spaced to 5 wpm, for the 5 word test.

I like it!! I've tried several times through the years, trying to teach myself code. I once had an oscillator, built it from a kit, but I had no system for learning anything. Just going A B C D etc sure didn't work.

$14.95 for this 2 disc set...well worth it!

Don't do it. If you learn at a Farnsworth spacing of 5WPM, you'll have time to review the table in your mind between each character. I've been told that is a deadly trap to be avoided if at all possible.

I would suggest an alternative to those CD's, based on the strong recommendations of the FISTS trainers in my club: Download the G4FON training software. It uses the Koch method, does not require memorizing the patterns first, and will allow you to learn at your ultimate speed. It starts with two characters and builds from there, rather than starting slow and then trying to increase speed. That's the approach I'm using--but nothing will work well without more effort on my part. I do know half a dozen characters very well, however.

Rick "noting that the Koch method is very similar to learning music" Denney

[The Big Ben]

This thread has gotten pretty long!

I have my ham ticket- KB7AIL as a General.

I'm a little disappointed with the way the ham game has gone in the last ten or so years. Cellphones seem to have killed repeaters (with good reason-Private communication and low cost vs. public communication at free cost makes it an easy choice to make your business private *and* you can easily call any one you want.) And the HF down cycle has kind of killed HF for right now.

Seems to me that much of the allure of ham radio is the creating of 'potential to make communication" rather than the communication itself. It's hard to get others to talk about much more than their station set up and the weather then they want to move on.

I agree with what others have said here: Hams are the OGs of geekdom. "Original Geeksters".