Thruth revealed about ham radio

Just pointing out that this one little item was missing from this Frankenfunk Kurzwellensender. No wonder it wasn't happy.

RL

Fred expounded in news:Xns9E7D214AD91ABnobodyhomecom@74.209.131.13:

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Yes, that's the thing alright. I have no bragging rights there. My only "reverse sales" were not stressing the table enough.

But I bet I could do well by looking at the boxes of items under the table (usually the less valuable items are found there). Nobody would notice if I set my boat anchor down to rummage through a box or two.

Rummage a bit and then move on. ;-)

Warren.

Michael A. Terrell expounded in news:YvadndfLNeALt9jQnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

I'm sure mother would love having us kids playing with dad's razor blades! It was already enough that we were burning cigarette buts with magnifying glasses and being looked at sideways for buying 5 tubes of model airplane glue at the corner store.

Those were also the good ole days when the garage next to the corner store had a tube tester. I only dreamed of owning one then, which I do now, but barely use.

Toilet paper or paper towel rolls. Built a high frequency tesla coil from paper towel roll and a model-T Ford coil.

Warren

Michael A. Terrell expounded in news:T8SdnQEuCsLSAN7QnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

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Good grief, I soldered all my serial cables until 10+ years later they started showing up in computer stores at affordable prices. What a weenie.

In fact I also sprung for the serial black box to aid in troubleshooting. I still use it occasionally for testing serial links (Linux or Sun UNIX serial consoles mostly). At the time it cost me a small fortune, while I was raising a family and broke.

Warren

You are snipping a message to destroy the context, so tell us what you're practicing.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

Used blades were good enough.

Not where I lived. The store was owned by a retired drill sergeant.

I had a job at the closest TV shop at 13. I also had an account to buy parts from the local distributor. The TV tech would need to stop in at least once a week, and if I was riding with him that day i could buy whatever I needed. Back in the mid '60s some distributors had traveling salesmen who stopped by to take orders and deliver the parts a few days later.

I prefer the plastic. Polystyrene tubing used to be easy to find, and cheap. You could wind nice coils on it, and coil dope stuck very well, since it was liquid polystyrene.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

He was red faced from others laughing at him as he left.

I have a dead RS232 test set with a CRT display that analyzed the data to show you the data rate, parity and stop bits, along with any ringing, noise or hum. It had some bad RAM when i got it, then the power supply died. I'll dig it out one of these days and see if it's worth fixing.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

Not much context to ruin. You called me an idiot because I don't like a certain style of soldering device. I was taught a long time ago that you pick on IDEAS and refrain from personal attacks. The Ad Hominem stuff detracts from the value of your argument.

I have never said or done anything to you that merits you calling me an idiot. Society in general is degenerating. Will you be carrying a handgun to the next polling booth? If someone thinks differently than you, they must be idiots, right? They are of less value than you, right?

Be a MAN, cleanse the gene pool of 'idiots'. I get the feeling you will be a very lonely old man when you're done.

mike

Your statement :"> Weller guns are the most useless pieces of garbage made. Anything more than two joints to be soldered and I reach for the

35 watt pencil style iron." speaks for itself. You don't like the gun, so it's a useless piece of garbage. That is an idiotic statement, whether you like it, or not. Soldering irons are great on a production line. They aren't suited to filed work. PERIOD.

Sigh. What a fantasy world you live in. I haven't fired any weapon since 1974 and I've only handled a couple pistols since then. Since you brought it up, it appears that you're the one wanting to shoot people.

You need mental health care, ands soon.

Yawn. Do you read anything worthwhile, or do you just have these whacked fantasies?

it sounds like we'll see you on the TV news some time soon, as soon as you pick your target.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in news:kuOdnaqw7Kt7ndrQnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

in

traveling

I was very lucky in our little town in upstate NY, Moravia. On Main Street, in an old dilapidated store, Jerry Hess, K2HWC (katch two howling wild cats) owned a big surplus electronics store. He bought and sold all kinds of govt surplus, still pouring in from WW2 and Korea in the late

1950's. Anything that didn't sell well, and it was a lot, was fair game for young boys who hung out with the old hams around Jerry's pot bellied stove on a cold Saturday morning. Many mornings it would take extra laborers, called up on our American Morse kid telegraph system, which had a terminal in Jerry's store, to come help us haul off some electronic treasure that may have once been seen by General, then President, Eisenhower as he drove by it in France in 1944.

Our dads' garages overflowed, at times, with such treasures. My dad gave up trying to make a "den" out of the extra room in his garage I had commandeered for an electronics lab and ham radio station. At least it kept all those "wires and things" out of my mother's house....a useful tactic when discussing my using the garage room with Dad...(c;]

"Meet us at Jerry's early Saturday morning! We saw him coming and helped him unload some really neat stuff he got at a surplus auction, yesterday!" That would set the agenda for the whole weekend as we nerds decended upon his shop begging next Saturday morning, around 8.

Ever seen my C-47 altimeter he gave me?

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

We must be getting out! The neighbors can't turn out the hall lights!

Warren wrote in news:Xns9E7E83BA189FWarrensBlatherings@

188.40.43.230:

I wondered where that old magnetron came from!

That's another issue entirely ..... quality of traffic content.

With an antenna, properly tuned and oriented, your immediate neighbours might no longer be persecuted by their teeth fillings ringing out your CQ, every time you get home from finishing your paper route.

RL

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in news:DqednSN5LeFatNjQnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

I was a young sailor coming back from NY on US 17 to Charleston, circa

1966, when I passed one of the antenna farms of VOA, Greenville, NC.

There was a threatening sign at the entrance to the facility, but it had a contact at the receiving site miles away but right near Greenville, so I figured I'd ask if I could have a look, there.

I think my wearing my little sailor uniform had a pleasing effect on the duty engineers I met that day. I was even introduced to the chief engineer who took great interest in Navy ET school and PMEL School I had just graduated from a couple of years earlier. They seemed glad to have someone new to talk to during their boring shifts.

After the tour of the receiving facility, a phone call was made to the transmitter site to get my fantastic tour of the really serious HF transmitters at the base of those Sterba Curtains lined up. By the time I left the transmitter site, it was well past dark and one of the engineers called someone he knew to get me a really cheap motel room for the night. I still have the pictures from inside the transmitters I took in a drawer somewhere that impressed all the other ETs back on the ship.

Sorry it's gone, now. Technology moves on.

Back in the 1980's, I met a ham from St Kitts/Nevis on a small ship at a boatyard here in Charleston on our 2m repeater. He invited me aboard to see his new pirate radio station made from one of the VOA small transmitters they had mounted in the fish hold of an old Canadian fishing trawler. Rev RG Stair, a religious nut who runs Overcomer Ministries near Walterboro, SC, and is constantly on short wave radio spewing his nonsense, runs a religious commune of men with long beards. Rev Stair also has a perpensity for little girls he's been prosecuted for. The Rev bought the trawler and hired this ham who used to run a pirate radio FM station off NY in the Atlantic playing rock music until the Navy sunk his boat. The ham was terrified the "brothers" were going to feed him to the fish as soon as the boat was anchored in international waters off Belize where Rev Stair had made arrangements to beam microwave links from shore to the boat for transmission. So, the ham I met, I can't remember his name or call any more, provoked the FCC into confiscating it all by "testing" the huge old TMC GA-10 military transmitter from the dock in Charleston. There were interesting technical problems related to using a

600 ohm balanced output terminating in a T-cage antenna through the hatch with ONE huge insulator in it above the deck, the other side of the line left open inside the hold. I was there the night the feedthru insulator exploded as we were all glowing blue with RF inside the fish hold watching the meters in the haze. It's a fuzzy, warm feeling...(c;]

FCC commandeered a big floating crane from Detyen's Shipyard, a Navy contractor, and offloaded all the equipment the government had sold Rev Stair from the old VOA. FCC Engineer is proudly holding up an old Heath DX-35 ham transmitter in the picture of the local newpaper. Here's a picture of the main transmitter:

part of Jim Hawkins' Radio Museum:

Jim's great website for the NC VOA transmitter/antenna installations is here:

That transmitter was used for shortwave relay transmissions to VOA Africa, I think. It was amazing what crazy impedances it would load on the trawler.

Ah, my souvenir exploded insulator is on my qrz.com webpage. Just enter my ham call W4CSC to see the effects of the transmitter, that big black flashover that blew the top off the deck feedthru insulator. I'm holding the bottom half of it, that flashed over right above my head....(c;]

That ugly old fart holding it must be my Dad..... I don't look that old.

brent wrote in news:75f68ffe-66fb-4d34-b06d- snipped-for-privacy@u4g2000yqi.googlegroups.com:

Thank you. I love to remember something a long time ago.

You sound like you would have loved Okinawa in the early 1970's. You couldn't go two blocks without seeing a surplus store - WWII, you know. One of my buddies built a killowatt linear entirely from surplus parts, except for the 4-400A and socket that I stole for him from supply. (I was in avionics - the 4-400A was used to series modulate a magnetron for radar jammers.)

It was kinda scary seeing the plate get cherry-red, but apparently it worked!

Cheers! Rich

I was allowed into the VOA Bethany (Mason Ohio) facility in the late '60s. They were in the middle of their conversion from the original Crosley transmitters to 10 new national transmitters. That site had a huge three twoer curtain array, along with a lot of smaller antennas. Som of these were still on wood poles, but they were being rebuild to steel towers, because of frequent fires.

Bethany was linked by private microwave relays to Washington DC, and was the secondary control center where the feeds to most other stations were routed.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

,

I am a lousy typist and never was able to touch type until I switched to the Dvorak keyboard. It took me about a month to get my speed back up to the same as it was on a regular Qwerty ( Sholes ) keyboard. In the last couple of years I have been touch typing, because my wife and I share a computer and the keys are labeled for the Qwerty.

Dan =A0 =A0 =A0 = =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0

Responses of various NA hams to requests for amateur radio 'assistance' in the current Egyptian cell and internet black-out. Like all bulletin board threads, it gets off-topic fairly easily.

RL