Thruth revealed about ham radio

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in news:KPqdnZxWk7rbWd_QnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

Try buying an A to A connector USB cable today. I have an old MP3 player that needs an A to A cable. I had to search Ebay to find some. Everybody has printer and mini/micro cables, today.

I should have pointed out... if you're under 30, you're still "wet behind the ears", and should craft your questions carefully to avoid appearing ignorant ;-) ...Jim Thompson

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in news:8oudnZqU4dFIW9_QnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

We had an HP 1Khz-motored mechanical clock back in the 1960's. I don't know what its number was. The 1Khz drive motor that turned the chiclet clock drive ran off our lab's AN/URQ-9 quartz frequency standard used to cal the portable freq counters.

One of the drive gears, that rotated 1 rpm, had a hole in it with a light bulb on one side and photocell on the other. This generated a 1 pps pulse that was sent to a little scope to trigger it. A 10 Mhz receiver in the unit had a whip antenna atop the mast of our destroyer tender ship, USS Everglades (AD-24). The audio of the receiver had a little speaker you could turn off to keep from going crazy, but use to roughly align WWV's 5-cycle 1Khz "tick" with the trigger on the scope. Once you got this 5 cycle long, 1Khz sinewave on the screen, you adjusted the clock's phase adjustment to align the very start of the 1st cycle of the "tick" with the trigger at the left of the screen. By monitoring the long term drift of this tick on the scope, you adjusted the fine freq adjustment of the freq standard, at the same time each day to balance out the phase change caused by propagation change at different ionospheric levels, until the tick stopped drifting for days on end at this time.

You could, amazingly, get the freq standard very, very close to the national standard....from any place on the planet....with this little clock.

Navy finally sent us a nice chart recorder receiver for WWVB and another VLF antenna for the mast, which rendered the old HF clock moot. VLF was easier to use, but no more accurate as its propagation path drifted a lot from day to day, screwing up my phase measurement on its chart recorder....creating chart noise. You could see the ionosphere move, which is very cool.

After the VLF was installed, the only time we lit off the noisy clock and its 1000 Hz audible motor was when the admirals were coming to set their windup watches to it. Just before they arrived, I'd give the starting wheel a spin, spin the number dials around to the time off WWV or set the clock with my watch......so the admirals could sync their time with mine....(c;] Noone ever complained, so I suppose it was close enough for government work.

Greegor wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@d21g2000vbf.googlegroups.com:

Nope.

legg wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

The reason ham radio has always had a place on the air and the bandwidth it uses is more military related in the USA. Ham radio operators have been the draftees-of-choice in all major wars where trained radio operators were in very short supply (WW1, WW2, Korea of note). From Vietnam on, hams were of less use as the technology allowed the common soldier/sailor/airman to talk into a secure encrypted voice system. There are no "radiomen" left, now. Everything is digital so it can be easily jammed on its uplink to the satellites. Computers love extensive jamming on their radio links. Laser links can be blinded by intense ground stations. But, we don't think beyond the end of our noses that we'll need the old hams and their immense brain computers for comms any more. It's moot, I suppose. The next "war" will only last a few hours until most all are dead.

Damn kids nowadays, hippy hoppy music and them eye phones. EAR phones were good enough, back in the day...

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I hope you took your wife out for a nice vacation or at least dinner! :-)

Hmm... do you like cruises?

Rich Webb wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

The rich kids had foam covered earphones. The rest of us had surplus WW2 Army earphones that never had the rubber cups on them any more.

Poor people had little Japanese crystal earphones with tiny hand-wrapped flesh-colored wires that broke.

When I was a kid, making my own radios, I walked into a hearing aid fitter... back when they really had labs... and they gave me an earpiece ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Yep, did that, and bought the #2 daughter a French horn.

Never been on one, but we did stay on the QE2 one night... the tour is exhausting, particularly when you have 4 kids in tow, so we stayed over and returned to Scottsdale a day later than planned. Really nice restaurants. ...Jim Thompson

Fred expounded in news:Xns9E7AA95234DBnobodyhomecom@74.209.131.13: ..

Ins't that the truth! I gave up on packet radio back when we only had DOS because of this.

Now that we have multi-tasking operating systems this is less of an issue since you can go do something else at least. The only thing more painful than a ham that won't stop talking and turn over the link is one on a digital link that can't type.

Yep yep yep. Their bad.

Warren

Almost.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Fred expounded in news:Xns9E7AAAB25AA92nobodyhomecom@74.209.131.13:

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Never been there, but I've heard that the bargaining is a bit different there. ;-)

Warren

Mmm... I'd have to argue that SSB/AM/FM and other traditional analog modulation schemes are, if anything, rather easier to jam than digital modulation schemes: With the later, if you have a transmitter with enough frequency agility, you can spread bits all over the place to the point where the guy trying to jam you doesn't know where you are anyway, so often all he can do is to spread his jamming power over a large swath of spectrum, which renders him far less effective.

Of course, the trick in such systems is figuring out how the good guys initially establish sync. :-)

That being said, it is valuable to keep the older, simpler technology around. It's just that -- as you mention -- these days anyone can pick up an HT and start using it; you don't need highly-trained radiomen to do so.

---Joel

Jamie expounded in news:sIp0p.47147$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe21.iad:

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Heh heh, this is not news to me (I have a callsign too).

...

There's a lot of truth in all of that.

There's only one thing better than a great hamfest deal (free or not) -- the reverse sale!

That's when you casually leave that unwanted item on somebody else's table. The trick is to set it down while you look at something on his table. Then just forget about it when you move on.

I must confess that I did this once when someone pressured me at the hamfest to take something I didn't really want. After thinking about it later on, I paid it forward anonymously.

Warren

Jim Thompson expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

In those days I thought I needed a cat to get a cat whisker. Who knew without the internet?

Warren

February is the birth month for excellent scientists and engineers, and good presidents ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Jim Thompson expounded in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

You're close to my target retirement.

Long way off yet, but I'm working on Freedom-75!

Warren