A Christmas Story by Bob Wexelbaum, W2ILP |
The 2004 holiday season is gone. I would have liked to have placed this
article in the December issue. Since
this is my first chance to submit an article, while being an editor, I thought
that I would start late by two months.
My article follows: -
Next to “The Wizard of Oz”, one of the most popular
movies that appear on TV during holidays is “A Christmas Story”, which was
written and is narrated by Gene Sheppard.
Gene (now a silent key) was a real ham…Not just a ham actor…but a real
licensed radio amateur operator. Gene
was also a soft selling commercial radio announcer. He could sell ice cream to an Eskimo and somehow gently impart a
genuine enthusiasm that could melt dry ice.
He told about his childhood when he spoke at a Hudson Division ARRL
Convention banquet some time in the 80s.
That is where I learned the rest of his “Christmas Story”, which was
never shown on TV. Maybe some lid had
edited it out.
If you paid attention to the TV movie, between the
commercials, you might remember that it was a family story and the hero of the
story was a kid with eyeglasses called Ralphy.
In his keynote speech, Gene confided that Ralphy was really Gene. You might also remember that Ralphy wanted a
Red Rider bee-bee gun for Christmas and was constantly warned that if he ever
got one he would shoot his eye out.
You might also remember that Ralphy listened to the Little Orphan Annie
show on commercial radio. This was in
the days before TV. Ralphy had sent in
the required jar labels from his Ovaltine in order to get the official Orphan
Annie secret decoder. When the decoder
came Ralphy copied a secret encoded message that was broadcast on the Orphan
Annie program, and eagerly rushed to the bathroom and locked himself in so that
nobody else could see the secret message he was about to decode. The carefully decoded message read: - “BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE”…. Aw..Just a
commercial. Like the rifle quest,
here then started another obsessive quest.
This is where Gene added an addendum, converting Ralph’s frustrations to
those of his childhood. You see, this
commercial disappointment led the kid to want to be a ham. A ham could decode Morse code from anywhere
on Earth and it was actually illegal for hams to send commercials. If you are a ham you can send Morse code
signals that nobody but other hams can be able to read. Even teachers, who give you C minus on your
essays, could not copy CW at 13 words per minute. This part of the story was not in the TV movie; maybe because it
would have been harder for the general public to understand that a kid could
want to be a ham bad enough to spend months practicing the Morse code and
studying rules and theories in order to get a license. Ralphy practiced code with his friend
Shultzy. They both became hams. You
might remember that Ralphy had learned some expletive words from his dad. His dad was prone to utter such language
while changing a tire or adjusting his ancient coal furnace. Accidentally Ralphy let one of those no-no
words escape his lips and he was punished for it. Tortured by having to suck on a bar of soap; when asked where he
had heard such language, Ralphy lied that Shultzy had said it on the ten meter
phone band, while getting an RF burn from a home brewed antenna tuner. This was serious because Ralphy’s
accusation, if true, could make Shultzy a federal offender and subject to a
fine or to losing his ham ticket. Realizing the possible penalties, the parents
of both of the young hams agreed that the matter should best not be
remembered. Ralphy had built the
famous Meissner Model EX Signal Shifter VFO from a kit. This harmonic generator was affectionately
known as the Meissner Signal Drifter. This unit was the first stage of many ham
transmitters of the time. It was the
least expensive way to avoid buying hundreds of quartz crystals to wander over
the ham bands. Ralphy’s receiver was a
three tube regenerative with plug in coils for the ham bands. His home brewed station was not very
pretty. He had used a Swiss army knife
and a hatchet to make holes for tube sockets because he could not afford
Greenlee punches. He envied the big
shot DXers, whose stations boasted expensive Collins equipment, including dual
diversity receivers, kilowatt RF amplifiers and six element rotating beams on
90 foot towers. He decided to trick one
of the big guys, just for the fun of seeing if he could. He built a transmitter, which was driven by
the Drifter VFO and ran about 100 watts.
He got a used Variac and slowly raised and lowered his final power to
simulate QSB, as he bootlegged the call of a DX station. He was careful to pick a call from the
nation that had the world’s lowest literacy, thereby being assured that such a
station would appear to be as rare as hen’s teeth. Anyway he got this big shot ham to reply to his bogus CQ on the
edge of the 20 meter CW band. He then
slowly drifted with his signal drifter until he was approaching…and
approaching…and approaching …and out of the band. Lost in the excitement of what seemed a new country contact, the
big shot ham followed, without any verifying beat from his frequency
calibrator. While the big shot was transmitting
from below the US ham band limit, Ralphy called the local OO and reported on
his crime. Now Gene did not go into a
lot of details about this part of his story but it was accompanied by Gene’s
oral simulation of the actual on the air messages that were transmitted. The audio tones of the drifting CW signals,
simulated by gradually changing pitch, drove the banquet audience into laughing
so loud that it became more difficult to copy the CW than if the ambient
laughter was Gaussian noise. I don’t know if it was funnier for non hams who
could not actually copy Gene’s oral CW or the hams who were trying to get the
drift of it.
Yep…I had also received a Meissner Signal Shifter
kit for Christmas when I was a kid (even before I was licensed). I guess Santa never read Part 97. I got it from a mail order to the original
Radio Shack of Boston, Mass. Although
it originally sold as a kit for about a hundred dollars, it was marked down to
only $65.00, because as a TVI prone generator, it was being discontinued. Thus the December holiday season reminds me
of Gene’s Christmas Story and thinking about Gene reminds me of what ham radio
meant to him. Holidays bring us
memories of past holidays. For me,
December also brings memories of ham radio.
Ham radio means different things to different people. For Gene it meant doing something that was
challenging, without shooting his eye out.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTERNERT LINK OF THE MONTH - IT’S ABOUT TIME
As the editor of “CQ de”, I have decided to start a
new feature: - ‘The Internet Link of the Month’. Yes - I have more than a years worth of Internet links that are
of interest to the radio amateurs who are also PC users. I am however open to suggestions from our
club members. Have you found a link to
ham software that you have used yourself?
Can you share the address and information with us? This month I will present a link called
Dimension 4. It’s about time. I’ll tell you where to get software that
will automatically correct the time on your computer clock using the best
possible time source available. All of
the software I will describe here is free and has been tested, at least by me,
and my firewall, as being safe and virus free.
Almost any time that you download new software you
have to agree to the maker’s disclaimer.
If the software causes trouble you can’t sue the maker of the
software. If you want to use my
suggested software and it bombs in your machine, please don’t blame Bill Gates
or me. Maybe you can blame Norton or
McAfee. Conflicts can occur if two
different software programs happen to use the same command for doing something
different and they get put into the same header. New machines can use longer commands, but in spite of that, given
enough time, it is possible to reuse a command that was used for something else
and develop a sub routine around it that is in conflict with the
defaulted. That would be a software
problem.
When I was a
kid we had a big AM radio console that was made by the old Victor Company. It was a TRF, with a lot of type 27 triode
radio tubes. One night it suddenly stopped working. This happened exactly at a time when Fibber McGee was opening his
closet and the usual loud sound effects of crashing hardware were being
modulated. Not being technically
inclined, my mother didn’t think of the possibility of a burnt open vacuum tube
filament. She said it was all Fibber’s
fault for opening his overloaded closet.
Anyway she did get it right…. that it was a hardware problem. People didn’t sue people then like they do
today. I don’t think that Fibber or
Molly ever made radio listeners sign a disclaimer.
The address of the site to download Dimension 4 was
originally given to me by Tom Provost AG2A, who is a member of GARC. Tom needs to accurately synchronize his
time with other stations for his meteor scatter work. I had loaded the software into my old PC, which ran Windows 98,
and any time I wanted to adjust my time (as it appeared in the lower right hand
corner of my display) and I was on the Internet, I could click on the Dimension
4 web address (which had been added to my favorites list), and a window would
come up telling me that my PC’s time had been adjusted; and by how much. The correction offset was usually only a
fraction of a second, since I made a correction at least once per month. The crystal clock in most PCs runs at a rate
that is as good as that of most quartz wristwatches, even when not
corrected. Periodically correcting the
clock made it a lot more accurate.
There is an old riddle that asks, “What is more
accurate: a clock that has stopped or a clock that is running a minute
late?” The answer is that the clock
that has stopped is more accurate because it is going to be exactly correct
twice per day, while the clock that is running behind by any increment, but at
the correct rate, is never accurate.
Thus we learn that to make a clock accurate you can’t let it lead or lag
behind the true time for even a short time, and thus you must keep correcting
it as often as possible.
I recently bought a new PC which runs Windows
XP. Not wanting to transfer all on my
hard drive from the old PC, I manually typed in the web address and clicked for
a new download of the Dimension 4 software.
Things have changed. Now there
is a newer version of Dimension 4.
Updating the clock is now automatic.
It happens without even being asked, as soon as you log on to the
Internet. The freeware is still there
but now there is a request for a $10.00 donation. After corresponding with the webmaster, I found that non-profit
hams can use Dimension 4 for free, and the donation is optional. I also asked permission to publish the
address in this newsletter and it was granted by an e-mail from
[email protected]. So without any more
delay of time here it is: -
http://www/thinkman.com/dimension4/
Next month I hope to be telling you about a very new digital voice mode called Ham Dream, which uses software now known as WinDRM. The software is still in the state of being developed. Up to now, all of the new digital modes required typing on a keyboard (just like RTTY). Some hams, who are happy working with a CW key or microphone, do not enjoy trying to type at a reasonable speed when in a QSO. I’m a two finger typist myself. I do OK typing e-mail and editing, but I feel pressured when I have to reply to a multi digital ham at a pace that is as steady as the going baud rate requires. Ham Dream may be the answer for the hams who like to use a mike and/or camera and want the advantages of real digitally modulated communication. Ham Dream can also be used to send video. We have seen how well a PC sound card can filter pulses from noise and convert them to analog audio or SSTV pictures. WinDRM is still in the testing stage. I’m starting to experiment along with the others, using the same interface connection as I use for RTTY, PSK-31, MFSK and Hellschreiber. In order to provide for more I/O some hams are trying to use two sound cards in the same PC. Obviously a world wide protocol convention must be developed for this mode and as of now it is still in the works and its methods are being debated on a reflector. Like the digital printing modes, it is being developed by foreign software experts and hams and is being translated and revised by US hams. More about how to try to at least receive digitized voice and video in next month’s Internet Link.
Don’t fall into a time warp. Stay synchronized.
The January meeting of the GARC was sparsely
attended. The sparker (I mean speaker)
George, W2RKM had cancelled, as had many others. Shortly before the meeting the snowfall looked like it might
deliver more than the few inches that it did, and so many decided not to take
the travel risk. Your editor wasn’t there either.
Thanks to BFU and Jack WA2PYK the coffee and donuts made it and six
attendees enjoyed the good fellowship and eyeball chatting that usually
accompanies our meetings. The
following reports are thus taken from the minutes of the GARC board meeting
which had been assembled by Pete, N2PYUV.
TREASURERS
REPORT
REPEATER REPORT
Ed had given a written report to Pat as
follows: Gordon was not present.
Balance Last Month: $3286.24 Repeaters
seem to be working OK.
Income: 400.00
Disbursements: 0.00
Present Balance: $3691.24
VE REPORT –
Bob, W2ILP
NET REPORT – Zack, WB2PUE
There were six VEs and two applicants. The nets have been
excellent. The
Both applicants failed the 5 wpm CW test. Sunday morning 40 Meter net had
a
good
turnout, but Florida stations
could
not be heard on LI.
WAG ACTIVITY –
Bob, W2FPF
No activity.
GARC NETS:
40 Meters:
7.289 MHz at 7:30 AM EST Sundays.
20 Meters:
14.275 MHz at 12 Noon EST Wednesdays.
2 Meters (via
repeaters): 146.745 MHz at 8:30 PM EST Thursdays.
145.330 MHz at 9:00 PM EST Thursdays.
Mondays (ARES/RACES)
MEETINGS
General
Meetings of the GARC are held on the third Wednesday of each month, starting at
5:30 PM. The meetings are usually held
at the Underwriters Lab, 1285 Walt Whitman Road, Melville, NY. Driving
directions and maps can be obtained from http://www.mapquest.com Board meetings are held eight days before
the General Meeting and GARC members are invited to attend, but please call Pat
Masterson, KE2LJ, at 516-346-7125 to confirm place and time of meeting.
GARC WEB SITE
The
web site of the GARC can be found at http://www.qsl.net/wa2lqo/ The webmaster is Pat Masterson KE2LJ. Pictures of GARC activities, archives of
newsletters, roster of members, and other information about the GARC may be
found there.
PUZZLE
Below is a cryptogram. It is a quotation by a famous author (Not an
ad for Ovaltine).
The
solution will appear in next month’s newsletter. If I get no negative feedback, there will
be
another cryptogram in the next issue. Your editor.
KFH RTBEDFBTC
KFHV BIRT IL
DZ D LYFHAC VTSFUBDPT DE ,
OHE D
ILLHVT KFH
EYIE , OTKFBC EYT FONDFHL
ZISEL EYIE KFH
IVT I
OISYTAFV, I LFADSDEFV,
I ZVTTRILFB, IBC
IB ILEYRIEDS, D
GBFX BFEYDBU
XYIETNTV IOFHE KFH.
--LDV
IVEYHV SFBIB CFKAT --
Hmmm…Typing
cryptograms using Word is not easy. It
is a constant battle with the spell checker.
A REMINDER
To
those who have not already paid their 2005 GARC dues: Dues may be mailed to our
treasurer, Ed Gallender, Grumman Amateur Radio
Club, P.O. Box 0644, Bethpage, NY
11714-0644
GARC VE
EXAMS We are continuing to proctor exams
for all classes of ham licenses on the second Tuesday of each month, starting
at 5:00 PM. The present exams are: Element 1: 5
WPM CW, Element 2: Technician, Element 3: General and Element 4:
Amateur Extra Class. The fee for 2005 is $14 for all exams taken in one
sitting. Applicants for upgrading should bring
a photocopy of their present license and their FRN number. New, first time, applicants should be
aware that their Social Security number will be required on their
application form. All applicants should bring drivers license or other
picture ID. The exams are given at the Underwriters Lab in Melville, unless otherwise noted. This is the same building where GARC
meetings are presently held. For any further information e-mail: -
[email protected]
or phone: - (631) 499-2214 Study material
information is available at the http://www.arrl.org or the http://www.w5yi.org
web site. All VECs use the same Q & A
pools. Since the beginning of the VE program
the GARC has provided opportunities to take ham exams monthly, during all
twelve months of every year. Bob Wexelbaum, W2ILP and the Grumman VE team. |
CQ de WA2LQO February 2005 VOL. 78, NO.
2 EDITOR Bob Wexelbaum W2ILP (631) 499-2214 CONTRIBUTING WRITERS PAT MASTERSON, KE2LJ PETE RAPELJE, N2PYV And all the members of GARC (we hope!) CQ de WA2LQO is published monthly by
the Grumman Amateur Radio Club for its members and friends. Send articles
and amateur equipment advertisements to: KE2LJ ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS If you want to
submit articles or amateur equipment ads via e-mail do the following: 1. For
submission direct to editor call him at above number to set up a transfer. 2. For e-mail
transfer: Internet Address I, W2ILP, am your new editor. I have lots of stuff to put into this
newsletter. I could write several
years worth of articles if you let me.
I need your feedback before I go too far. When I was a kid adults would say, “Children should
be seen but not heard”. I wanted
to be a radio amateur so that I could be heard and not seen. Now I am an OM and I am not much to
look at but somehow I still want to be heard. Getting to be editor of this newsletter is a way to
be heard, if the readers are curious enough to want to read what I write
or comment about. I know it puts
me in power…but I am not any more in power than a net controller. A net control can control nothing if
there is no net and an editor without readers and contributors is also
good for nothing. I’m on an ego
trip…but then again maybe it is part of being a ham. Don’t hams yell, using maximum RF power to out shout others
in DX pileups? Don’t they often
call CQ for hours in order to make a 5 minute QSO? Enuf sed es 73. You have to stop me if I talk too much. I know that the role of an editor is to
edit what others write and I must take care not to write only about myself
and so fellow hams I am asking you to try to contribute articles and
relative news items. I need your
inputs. I don’t however expect a
repeat of something that is in QST, CQ , ASQC Journal or WorldRadio. Many of us get those pubs and just
parroting anything in them that is not urgent news GRUMMAN
AMATEUR RADIO CLUB OFFICERS FOR 2005 President Pat Masterson KE2LJ V01-01 516-346-7125 Vice President Gordon
Sammis KB2UB Retiree 631-666-7563 Secretary Peter
Rapelje N2PYV Retiree
516-676-0694 2Yr Board Member
Zack Zilavy WB2PUE Retiree 631-667-4628 2Yr Board Member
Bob Christen W2FPF 1Yr Board Member
Bob Wexelbaum W2ILP Retiree
631-499-2214 1Yr Board Member
Jack Cotterell WA2PYK
Retiree 516-249-0979 Trustee
WA2LQO Ray Schubnel W2DKM Retiree STANDING
COMMITTEE CHAIRMEN Meeting
Programs Contact a Board Member FCC
Exam Coord. Bob Wexelbaum W2ILP
631-499-2214
EDITORIAL
Treasurer Ed Gellender WB2EAV X02-14 516-575-0013
2YrBoard Member Dave Ledo AB2EF
TECHNICAL BITS
I can remember when kilohertz was kilocycles and Gigahertz
was kilomegacycles. The unit of frequency was cycles per sec. It all changed
some time in the early 60s, when Hertz became the unit of frequency. The IEEE supported this change and
even though some members thought that Marconi rather than
Hertz should have been honored, the official SI, which includes metric
standards, says Hz. Now in this
digital age there is another change.
The usual metric prefixes k (kilo), M (Mega), and (Giga)
.
prefixes
were often loosely used to represent powers of two in the computer world. This is not mathematically correct, so now
there is a new way to represent powers of two when we mean powers of two. A small “I” is now added to each prefix when
we are working in the two power age of
Boole. Thus: k (kilo) = 1000
M (Mega) = 1,000,000
G (Giga) = 1,000,000,000
And
now:-
Ki
= 1024
Mi = 1,048,576
Gi = 1,073,741,820
This will make the specs given for RAM and hard drives more accurate. Now
we will get exactly what we pay for.
This will make up for the deceiving kind of accuracy denoted by pricing stuff
at $999.99 instead of a kilobuck.
Hams should
not care about this change too much because the RF units are still ” i
“less. I know that even RF prefixes
might change, however, when we get computer software to produce an entire radio
transceiver.
Philosophically
we might never have used ten as a radix if we did not have ten fingers. Maybe some E.T.s only have two fingers,and,
like me, can never become expert typists, but were earlier than us Earthlings
to be prepared to use Boolean logic and binary computers. Oh well… 0.073k for now. --w2ilp--