Ok, the key word for this month is ELECTIONS and I am sure you are as excited as I am!

Cold weather, too much to eat, and too many places to be have taken their toll on my ham radio activity.  It is now time to get back to the more important task of sitting on our laurels, playing radio guys and gals.

Don’t forget the club meeting next Tuesday. It will be fun!

CUL, Jim, WA6OTP

A new year and a new start! Resolve to make it to the club meetings and get involved in your club! Also, get back to the books and upgrade. More VE sessions are scheduled for this year. Another GREAT potluck and gift exchange last month! It was fun and good food for all! Sorry if you missed it. I heard some members didn’t come because they were afraid of catching the flu. I guess they are staying at home and never going out in public this winter. Do you s’pose?

Come out and vote next Tuesday and don’t forget to pay your 2004 dues.

If you have anything to submit for publication in the Gnus, see the contact information below the masthead.

73, Mike, N7GEI

This month’s SOARC meeting will include the election of officers and board members for next year. We also have lined up another presentation by one of our members and lots of odds and ends, as usual. See you there.

73, Bill, WX7U

Western Belles is a women’s ham radio chat group that meets at 7:30 PM on the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of every month on the 147.300 repeater. Please check in!

The ladies get together regularly for lunch and all female hams are invited to attend.

Our next luncheon will be at 11:30 on Saturday, February 7th, at the Black Forest Family Restaurant, 820 NE E St., on the west side of the Grants Pass Shopping Center.

The SOARC VE test sessions this year will be held on March 26th, July 30th, and November 26th. The exams are conducted at 1830 on the last Friday of the month in the Senior Center cafeteria (our regular meeting place). Volunteer examiners should be there at 1800.

The exam costs $12.00 and is available to all, first come, first served, with no reservation necessary.

73, Bill Tyner, WX7U

VE Liaison

There was so much great food at the December potluck that several of our members wanted the recipes for some of the dishes. The call was made for cooks to contribute their fixins, but, unfortunately, only two responded. See below.

Chunky Pecan Pie Bars

Crust:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar

Filling:

• 3 large eggs
• 3/4 cup corn syrup
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tbsp. butter, melted
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 3/4 cups (11.5 oz. pkg.) semi-sweet chocolate chunks
• 1 1/2 cups coarsely-chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease 13 x 9-inch baking pan.

Crust:  Beat flour, butter, and brown sugar in small mixer bowl until crumbly.  Press into pan.  Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until slightly browned.

Filling:  Beat eggs, corn syrup, granulated sugar, butter, and vanilla in medium bowl with wire whisk.  Stir in chunks and nuts.  Pour evenly over baked crust.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until set.  Cool completely in pan on wire rack.  Cut into bars.  Makes about 36 bars.

Enjoy! Jim Woods, W7PUP

Broccoli Casserole

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs. frozen chopped broccoli
• 8 oz. Velveeta Cheese, cut into chunks
• 1 cup milk
• about ¾ sleeve of Ritz Crackers, crumbled
• 2 sticks melted butter

Heat frozen broccoli in large sauce pan with about 1 cup of water just enough to thaw it out. Drain broccoli and place in large casserole dish. Place cheese chunks all over broccoli. Pour in milk. Sprinkle crackers all over. Drizzle melted butter all over. Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

Boney appetite! Mike Wright, N7GEI

PLEASE BE SURE TO PRESS EQUAL AFTER EVERY STEP!

IGNORE THE AREA CODE & USE ONLY YOUR 7 DIGIT  NUMBER:

1. KEY IN THE FIRST 3 DIGITS OF YOUR PHONE NUMBER INTO THE CALCULATOR.
2. MULTIPLY BY 80
3. PLUS 1
4. MULTIPLY BY 250
5. PLUS THE LAST FOUR DIGITS OF YOUR PHONE NUMBER
6. AGAIN, PLUS THE LAST FOUR DIGITS OF YOUR PHONE NUMBER
7. MINUS 250
8. DIVIDE BY 2 AT LAST

WHAT IS YOUR ANSWER?

By Jan Moller, K6FM

In the 1930’s, the Swedish amateur radio society, SSA, was only a few hundred strong and had their newsletter as a page in a monthly magazine, ”Populär Radio”. I read it as a school boy and was immediately fascinated.

Imagine having your own radio station at home and talking to the world.

It was not until 1937 that I managed to take the test, which was simply to send and receive Morse Code at 10 WPM; no technical questions. The license itself was an impressive document, a royal resolution that the student, Jan K Möller, was permitted to operate ”a private radio station”.

A cover letter assigned the call SM5XH and the bands 80,40,20,10, and 5 meters, plus an admonition not to disturb broadcast reception. No rules!

Using a copper soldering iron heated on a kitchen stove gas burner, I built a two-tube regenerative receiver and an ECO-PA transmitter with 89-6L6G tubes that put out maybe 40 watts. We lived on the top floor of a seven -story apartment building and I managed to put up a wire antenna on the metal roof, supported by two 15-foot galvanized ¾ inch water pipes as masts. The antenna was a single wire-fed Hertz that resonated in the 20 and 40 bands. Not the most ideal DXing setup, but I succeeded in working all continents but Australia on CW before the war started.

1939 saw me in the ROTC of the Royal Signal Corps. One of the field radios was a French-made 800-watt station that ran off a gasoline generator and could be tuned to the 40 m band. I recevied permission to use it one evening, if I furnished the gas, and worked all Europe with that massive power. Great fun! The motor generator provided 1000 Hz AC and the power supply was apparently not well-filtered because I got T7 reports from everybody! The next day WWII broke out.

My best assignment during the war was perhaps running a combined military and marine radio station in Boden, a fortress town near the Arctic Circle. The civilian call was SAI and we monitored the international marine distress frequency at 500 kHz. Twice a day we had to put out a ”CQ CQ de SAI SAI” followed by a ”QRU” unless we had traffic for somebody. The rig was an old 5 kW transmitter with majestic tubes, feeding a basket dipole between two 300-foot towers. Our receivers were Swedish-made Hammarlund Super Pros, one version of which covered the 500 kHz channel. There were also a few insignificant 2 kW jobs for the military traffic.

After the war and college graduation, I went to work for the Swedish branch of ITT, a manufacturer of communication radios near Stockholm. Six other hams were on the staff, including the chief engineer, SM5RF. When we finally got our licenses back in March of 1946, he produced a prewar 7 MHz crystal and managed to fire up an experimental police radio in the lab on the 10 m band that very day. Being the only SM station on the air for a week, we had some excellent QSOs with the USA from that lab.

SM5RF also arranged the purchase of a bunch of surplus BC-342 receivers from Lafayette Radio in Chicago for us at ITT. That was the first professional receiver I owned. It did not cover the 10 m band, so we built a few outboard converters to solve the problem. Working at a radio plant had its benefits; later I put together a 500-watt AM transmitter with an 813 final from odds and ends that came my way.

One problem was my apartment building in an old section of Stockholm which was still on 220 V DC mains. Hard to believe in the year 1947. Fortunately, an auto repair shop in the basement had arranged somehow to have 220 V AC installed. My friendly landlord let me have that connected to the apartment with a line in the elevator shaft (at my expense, of course) which made the running of a ham station easier. I put up a twinlead folded dipole for 40 m across the back yard and a W8JK beam for 20/10 m on the roof and was at last happily DXing.

The USA being the leading country in the world in electronics, I emigrated to the States in 1950. It was, in a way, a hardship as Barry Goldwater had not yet persuaded the FCC to allow foreign nationals to have ham tickets. Playing with electric model trains was a poor substitute. Anyway, raising a family and much travel in my work kept me from ham radio until the 60’s. But when I had a chance for an interesting job in Sweden in 1965 (and to show off our kids to the relatives) I stacked up on ham gear. Two Heathkits, the SB-400 tx and the matching SB-200 PA, a used Collins 75S3 rx and a T33Jr yagi antenna kit went into the household goods container.

Getting on the air in Sweden with this was fun (thanks to my previous license I got a nice call, SM5ZZ) but also full of surprises since I had not been on the air since 1950. The 15 m band was a pleasant novelty and so was SSB phone but I had not realized the, for me, new practice to call or reply to a station on his frequency.

The Collins rx could not be syncronized with the Heathkits, so it took a bit of extra dial-twiddling to set up a QSO. Still, I managed to work over 100 countries during the 3 year stay over there. Back in the States, the Swedes having taken over all my ham gear, I had learned my lesson and got my first transceiver, a Heathkit SB-101. Our location in northern NJ was good; I strung up a dipole for 20 m and raised FB8XX on Kerguelen Island barefoot for my second QSO as WB8LLG. That started DX chasing in earnest. I was lucky to find a 45-foot tower for $50 and put a three-band quad on top and really went to work with that efficient antenna. The freezing rains in NJ ruined it frequently, but fiberglass booms are easy to repair. (To be continued)

By the time my job petered-out and we moved to California in 1976, I had over a 100 countries confirmed (it is harder with a US call) and also aquired a 5BWAS. That was a fun effort; the hardest part was to work neighbor states on 10 and 15 m because of the skip.

We ended up in Simi Valley near LA and the search for tower and antenna began again. A fellow at work had a Telrex 20m monobander cheap and the local radio club found me a 52-foot crank-up tower. That was a good pair, most of the good DX was then found on 20 m and the hunt began, happily with my new call K6FM. By then I had discovered that many of the DX stations worked split, to be more efficient, so the old SB-301 was replaced with a Kenwood TS-850S with an outboard second VFO. I also had a new SB-220 PA to make the competition with the California superstations easier.

The high winds in Simi Valley caused an unusual accident in 1984. A pulley shaft sheared off in the tower, which sank down and caused the stays to go slack which promptly made the wind bend the tower over our house. The Telrex boom punched a hole in the roof that cost $200 to repair!

Fortunately, insurance helped me get a new tower, and the beam could be repaired, but I was off the air for a while. I still have that tower today; it has cost me a fortune to move to Flagstaff, AZ, when I worked there, and then over to Grants Pass, OR, when I retired for good. Flagstaff was interesting, the house lot was so crowded with trees that I hade to replace the 20 m beam with a smaller Explorer 14, but it was a good DX location, except for 80 m work. The area was so dry that it was necessary to lay out a large ground net for a counterpoise to get any antenna efficiency at all on that band. The 48- inch average snowfall in wintertime helped, but not much.

Finally, in 1989, we moved to Grants Pass and settled down as retirees. My DX country count was now up to over 200 and I had plenty of time to operate. With the new WARC bands, I needed a transceiver that covered them too and settled for the TenTec Omni V with it’s dual VFO’s and a very quiet rx. This was a fully transistorized rig that required no tuning, so it saved much time when bandhopping.

This was a great time to chase DX. A sunspot maximum was approaching (1991) and personal computers came into general usage, providing new sources of instant DX information. Previously, I had subscribed to a weekly DX newsletter but Internet bulletin boards such as DX Summit and DX Central made station and frequency data available the moment they appeared on the air, making them easier to find. In addition, several free DX newsletters are published over Internet weekly and propagation software can be downloaded that helps you to determine when and on what band it is feasible to reach a certain country. It became a new ballgame.

The results showed in the records. By 1992 I had passed 300 and seven years later 329. It was much harder to find new ones now but the ultimate goal, to work all DXCC countries, was at least a possibility. As the year 2001 approached, only two countries remained, North Korea, where ham radio was prohibited, and Bouvet Island, a Norwegian possession in the south Atlantic near Antarctica without population. But we were lucky; a Norwegian scientific expedition to Bouvet included an American Navy doctor, N4BQW, who put a station on the air under terrible stormy weather conditions and kept it going till April 2001.

Christmas 2001 gave the worlds DXers a great present; a UN worker, 4L4FN, in North Korea got a provisional permit to operate a ham station there. The pileups on him were terrific but he was a skilled operator and worked many thousands of hams before, for political reasons, he was shut down later the following fall. And I got my last country!!

Today, I still have my old Explorer 14 on the 60 ft tower, augmented by a Butternut HF6 vertical for all HF bands, a 10 MHz horisontal loop and a halfwave sloper for 18 MHz. An FT-1000MP Mark V Field transceiver with dual receivers was added to make split operations easier.