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CQ Magazine Announces DX Marathon CQ magazine recently announced the revival of the long-dormant CQ DX Marathon, last run in 1948. The new CQ DX Marathon will essentially be a year-long DX contest, with stations competing to contact as many different countries (“entities”) and CQ Zones of the World as possible over a full-year period, then starting again at zero at the beginning of the next year. The new CQ DX Marathon is part of CQ’s broader “Waking Up DXing” program, the goal of which is to reinvigorate DXing, or contacting hams in faraway places. The program was outlined for the first time at the International DX Convention in Visalia, California, on April 16. “DXing has always been the heart of ham radio,” says CQ Editor Rich Moseson, W2VU, “and it continues to be the biggest thing that sets us apart from other forms of electronic communication. Healthy DXing activity is vital to the long-term health of amateur radio.” Bob Locher, W9KNI, of Idiom Press, provided the inspiration for the new activity and joined in the announcement at Visalia. “Many active DXers have noticed a drop-off in general DXing activity outside of contests and DXpeditions,” notes Locher. “I suggested that CQ start up an event that would promote activity all year long, would minimize geographic advantages, and provide for simple scoring. It turns out that the CQ DX Marathon, which evolved after 1948 into the CQ World Wide DX Contest, was already based on the same concepts.”
Scoring will be very simple, consisting of the
total number of DX entities and CQ zones contacted over the course of a
year. There will be no multipliers and each country and zone will count
only once. In the case of a tie, the station whose last qualifying contact
came earliest in the year will be the winner.
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She was probably, the most famous—or infamous, depending on your viewpoint—radio personality in the history of broadcasting, with an audience of hundreds of thousands spread over millions of square miles. Everyone who was anyone at the time—especially in the U.S. government—listened to her. Her name was Tokyo Rose, and one of the most important facts about her history is that she never existed. Tokyo Rose was a general term created by the GIs who tuned in to dozens of female radio announcers who broadcast propaganda for the Japanese during World War II. Tokyo Rose was a composite of Foumy Saisho, who used the name “Madam Tojo,” Myrtle Lipton (aka “Little Margie”), Ruth Hayakawa (aka “Nightingale of Nanking”), Iva Toguri (aka “Orphan Ann or Annie”), and dozens of others, with names like “Manila Myrtle” and “Manila Rose,” who all could put forth a soft, pleasant female voice without too much trace of a foreign accent.
In an official statement issued in August of
1945, the U.S. Office of War Information said, “There is no ‘Tokyo
Rose’—the name is strictly a GI invention. The name has been applied to at
least two lilting Japanese voices on Japanese radio…Government monitors
listen in 24 hours a day and have never heard the words ‘Tokyo Rose’ over
a Japanese-controlled Far Eastern radio.” The only American citizen
broadcasting for the Japanese was Iva Toguri. She was the one sent to
prison and fined for being the famous Tokyo Rose. Iva Toguri was the “perfect” American girl. Born on the 4th of July in 1916, she was the daughter of Japanese immigrant parents living in south central Los Angeles. Raised as a Methodist, she never learned to speak Japanese at home. She listened to The Shadow and Little Orphan Annie on the radio, joined the Girl Scouts, played varsity tennis, took piano lessons, and had a crush on Jimmy Stewart. She took care of her diabetes-crippled mother and wanted to become a medical doctor. To this end she enrolled in UCLA and graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Zoology in 1941. In 1940, she registered as a Republican in order to vote for Wendell Wilke. After she graduated from college, Toguri’s family learned that an aunt was very ill and needed medical care. Japanese family tradition required that a family member be sent as a representative to provide this care. Unable to get a passport processed quickly, Toguri left the country with a Certificate of Identification. The Certificate, she was told, would get her into the country and a passport could be applied for at the U.S. Embassy in Japan. Toguri listed her occupation as pre-medical student and the purpose of her trip as providing care for a sick relative and looking into the possibility of attending medical school in Japan. She left the day after her 25th birthday, July 5, 1941.
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WASHINGTON BEAT
by Richard Fisher, KI6SN Simulated terrorist attacks in Connecticut and New Jersey in April drew communications volunteers from around the northeast to exercises sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Called TOPOFF 3, the exercise depicted a complex terrorist campaign that drove the “exercise play through the homeland security system, beginning in Connecticut and New Jersey, and leading to national and international response,” according to the DHS. Over several days fire personnel conducted search and rescue operations, hospitals treated the injured (played by role players), experts analyzed the effects of the attack on public health, and top officials deployed resources and “made the difficult decisions needed to save lives.” The emergency exercises relied heavily on radio amateurs for disaster communications. “TOPOFF 3’s goal was to push the system of first responders to beyond its limits to find the weak spots,” the American Radio Relay League reported. American Red Cross emergency services director Mario J. Bruno applauded the amateurs’ performance. “Operators were there when we needed them,” he said in a note to the ARRL Connecticut Section leadership. “We have learned a lot about what ARES [Amateur Radio Emergency Service] can really do when things get messy, and TOPOFF 3 has been a clear example of how complicated a disaster can get.” According to the ARRL Letter, visual realism played a key role in Connecticut, and prospective ARES volunteers were cautioned in advance. An explosion in New London “loud enough that the organizers passed out earplugs for the media gathered on the bluffs above” marked the start of the test. “As the mushroom cloud of smoke drifted away, hundreds of victims processed into the site to assume positions of death and agony,” said Allen Pitts, W1AGP, the League’s media and public relations manager. In New Jersey, the scenario was a bioterrorism incident in Union and Middlesex counties. In addition to the disaster simulation, the state’s ARES members also provided communications with amateurs from New York and Pennsylvania during real-life flooding that plagued the area.
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Getting
Inside Tropo Every July and August, high-pressure weather systems provide us with exciting VHF, UHF, and microwave-extended propagation conditions. Known as “tropospheric ducting,” or tropo for short, this propagation mode allows scanner listeners and hams on VHF and UHF to pick up signals from up to 1,000 miles away! And, unlike sporadic-E (Es) ionospheric skip, tropospheric ducting leads to an extended communications path lasting for days on end. Most of the time our local weather is considered “normal,” resulting in the equally “normal” refraction of radio signals. Under those normal weather conditions, you pick up the weather stations on 162 MHz from up to about 50 miles away, right?
Our atmosphere usually exhibits a decrease in
air pressure with altitude in an approximately logarithmic ratio: the
higher up we go, the less air pressure there is. Air temperature also
decreases with altitude, dropping 20 degrees Fahrenheit for every mile of
increasing height, up to around 40,000 feet. The number of water molecules
also decreases with altitude, resulting in atmospheric density decreasing
with height above the surface of the Earth. So let’s talk about abnormal weather conditions that regularly occur in July and August, the conditions that lead to some great VHF and UHF DX! Ham operators refer to this as the “Julaugust Tropo Time,” and it’s triggered by a west-to-east, slow-moving, high-pressure-system cell moving in over a stable, warm, moist “normal” surface weather layer, influenced by the regular flow of subtropical weather feeding in from the south. As this concentrated dry air from the high-pressure system traps the warm air below, distinct stratification can be seen on the horizon. With little surface wind to disturb the warm moist air below, descending heavier air from the high-pressure cell flattens out at about 1,000 feet (called subsidence), causing rising smoke to abruptly turn horizontal. This traps all the pollution right down at ground level, and it becomes one of those unbearable July and August “bad air” days that will soon turn wonderful when you turn on the VHF and UHF receivers!
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THE
PROPAGATION CORNER
Earth’s atmosphere is a mixture of gases held to the surface of the Earth by gravity. These gases vary in density and composition as the altitude increases above the surface. As the atmosphere extends outward from Earth, it becomes thinner and blends with particles of interplanetary space. We have discovered distinct layers in this atmosphere, one of which is the ionosphere. The ionosphere, as we discussed recently, is further divided into roughly three to five main layers, the D, E, F1, F2, and F3 ionospheric regions. Between the D and F regions of the ionosphere lies the E region, which extends from about 56 to 65 miles. The region’s height varies, as does its electron density (ionization), which depends on solar zenith angle and solar activity. During daylight hours, electron density (a measure of the ionization level) increases, while at night, when the supply of energy from the sun is cut off, ionization levels drop. These ionization densities and variations are expected under normal conditions. Occasionally, though, very thin regions of extremely dense ionization can form within the E layer. These regions can apparently be caused by several mechanisms, and they are marked by a wide variety of characteristics. At times, these thin regions form into dense clouds, or patches, which are capable of reflecting radiowaves of frequencies much higher than those normally reflected. At times, these clouds make it possible to communicate over long distances on frequencies as high as 220 MHz. These clouds usually cover a rather small geographical region, approximately 50 to 100 miles in diameter. They occur more or less at random and are relatively short lived, usually disappearing within a few hours. Sporadic-E (Es) is normally defined as transient, localized patches of relatively high electron density in the E region of the ionosphere that significantly affect radiowave propagation. Es can occur during daytime or nighttime, and it varies markedly with latitude.
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by Harold Ort, N2RLL, Editor
Out of the box, the Magellan RoadMate 700 is as plug-n-play as you can get for a state-of-the-art vehicle Global Positioning System (GPS)—you really don’t need to read the manual or listen to and view the free built-in tutorial. If you think that fact sets the stage for a fantastic driving adventure, you’re absolutely correct. I’ve been using the RoadMate 700 for over a year now and can tell you with certainty after putting it through its paces that it’s a worthwhile investment for your arsenal of mobile electronics.
The Magellan RoadMate 700 is about the
size of a couple of digital cameras placed next to each other and is
designed to be mounted on your vehicle’s front windshield with the
provided flexible goose-neck suction mount and bracket. It took less than
three minutes from the time I opened the box to have the RoadMate
operating. The unit itself connects to a cradle that fastens to the
mounting assembly, which in turn simply sticks to the window. Because the
windshield mount is flexible you can direct the front of the unit toward
the driver or even a passenger for easy viewing. Bring the 12-VDC power
cord down to your cigarette lighter socket, turn it on, and you’re ready
to go! The RoadMate 700 has a built-in hard drive that’s pre-loaded with mapping data and over two million points of interest in the United States and Canada. I’d be wrong to say it includes everything you’d need or the specific point of interest you want to drive to, but even if your destination is one of the rare ones not in the database, you can easily program it into the unit with a few simple key presses. The front of the RoadMate 700 has a large color display (you can change the contrast and brightness for your particular driving situation and visibility). There are a total of 12 controls on the unit at your disposal. Please don’t think that because there are more than three or four buttons the operation of the RoadMate 700 is complicated— nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it’s quite easy to use.
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by Gerry L. Dexter, gdex@genevaonline.com The kindly old BBC has tossed another egg at us. They have decided to discontinue use of the Antigua relay, which provided solid evening reception on 5975, even though it was no longer intended for a North American audience. The Antigua station is managed by the Caribbean Relay Company, which operates the facility for the BBC as well as Deutsche Welle. Consideration is being given to putting the station up for sale to a commercial broadcaster. You don’t have to be a genius to guess what that kind of programming we’d be getting if that happens! They’re back! A once elusive DX target, silent for over a decade, has returned to the air. Radio Djibouti has been reactivated on its old frequency of 4780 and has been quite widely heard from sign on just before 0300. In earlier days they used a mere 4 kW, but their new transmitter is reported to be either 20, 50, or100 kW, depending on which source you believe. SW Radio Africa, a clandestine in opposition to the Mugabe government of Zimbabwe has recently expanded its broadcasts. It’s begun using 15145 at 1600 (widely heard), 11770 at 1700, and 11995 at 1800, all via VT Merlin sites. The Zimbabwe government is jamming the station. Also in use is 3230, which has been heard in North America from 0300 sign on.
Another clandestine suddenly being noted
is Radio Horyall, beamed at Somalia. It is currently using 12130, signing
on at 1730 and running just to 1800. This appears to be based in Ontario
and relayed from a transmitter in Russia. The programming is in Somali,
and possibly Amharic as well.
Believe it or not, there’s another U.S.
shortwave broadcaster on the horizon. A group calling itself
Transformation Media International, based in Albany, Oregon, has applied
for a license to operate a 50-kW station to be located near Lebanon,
Oregon. They plan to broadcast a variety of programming in several
languages for foreign residents in the area. What will you wager that six
months after this goes on the air they will be selling half-hour blocks, a
la WHRI and all the others?
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HOMELAND SECURITY
Observant readers of this column will realize that I have a long-standing commitment to Emergency Communications (EmComm), training, and QRP (under 5-watt ham radio). Without a doubt, QRP and EmComm are NOT mutually exclusive terms. There is only a 13-dB (approximately 2.5-S-unit) difference between a 100-watt and a 5-watt signal over identical HF circuit paths. Add the American Radio Relay League’s annual Field Day exercise into the mix, and you have a perfect opportunity to get out of the shack, hit the bush, and play radio. The ultimate goal, of course, is to test your EmComm skills, your “coping skills,” do some outside-the-box thinking, and improve your ability to provide emergency communications in a field environment using expedient stations and antennas. QRP provides a small, but growing, faction of radio amateurs the opportunity to use ultra-small, extremely portable radio gear, much of which can be built from scratch or kits, to provide communications on a worldwide scale. Antennas range from simple dipole antennas erected in the trees to beams on towers, and literally everything in between. QRP and antenna experimentation go hand in hand, as does the kit/scratch building of gear.
It’s one thing to plan and participate in
emergency training exercises but it’s quite another to be involved in an
actual emergency with little or no warning. Typically in emergency
disaster training scenarios, there is a “ramp-up” time and everyone knows
when and where the exercise will take place, where they’re supposed to
report, and what their basic duties are. Things go smoothly thanks to this
“anticipatory thinking.”
In the various military and civilian survival
manuals I have in my library, it is stressed that the first few things you
do, your initial reactions, to the emergency/disaster can mean the
difference between life and death for you and your party. Knowing what to
do and taking the time to think things through will enable you and your
party to survive, whether we’re talking about responding to a
communications emergency or finding shelter during a tornado or
earthquake, or reacting to terrorist actions like the events of 9/11.
Confidence in your own abilities plus appropriate training, coupled with
your ability to critically analyze a rapidly changing situation and to
react properly to this dangerous situation (or multiple situations), will
be your best weapons against terrorism and/or natural/man-made disasters
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ON-THE-GO
RADIO
by Jock Elliott, KB2GOM In the movie Marathon Man there is a truly creepy scene in which an evil ex-Nazi (played by Lawrence Olivier) tortures a Jewish graduate student (Dustin Hoffman) by drilling the student’s teeth without anesthesia while repeatedly asking, “Is it safe?” What follows in this article is equally creepy and may well have you asking, “Is it safe?” Early in December, 1999, Bill Baran, N2FNH, was returning from a dinner with a bunch of fellow hams when he was pulled over by a Colonie, New York, police officer for a minor traffic infraction. The officer noticed an Alinco handi-talkie in the car. “Can it transmit?” the officer asked. Baran answered, “Yes, I’m a licensed ham.” “Can it scan?” the officer asked. He wanted to see the radio. Then he saw another handheld in Baran’s workbag. The officer seemed visibly upset that the radios were in the car, and his questioning became very abrupt.
“Can this radio scan? Is it a scanner?” He
keyed his police radio, trying to get the handheld to lock in on a police
frequency. The policeman said, “If these are scanners, and they receive
police frequencies, these radios will be taken from your possession.” In Baran’s words, “The officer spent about four-and-a-half minutes of the first five minutes talking about the radios, trying to get the radios to do something. He asked barrage of questions, and he didn’t ask me to prove that I am an amateur. It appears that he simply wanted to get the word scanner affixed to the radios so he could confiscate them.”
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REACT IN
ACTION
Planning a road trip this summer? Well, here’s a tip. Dig out that CB and put it to work for you. It can literally save your life. Oh, yes, take along the cell phone, too. But it can’t touch your CB for getting important road information. I know. I just completed a road trip north from Florida. I never used the cell, but the CB was on all the way.
Once again, that CB saved me all kinds of
grief, thanks to those professional drivers along my route. Truckers
tipped me to two serious wrecks on I-95 in Georgia alone. I knew about one
when I was still an hour away, so I was ready when the slowdowns came. In
North Carolina, an overhead sign on I-77 flashed “Road blockage ahead.
Tune to CB Ch. 17 for detour.” On I-90 in New York, a trucker asked,
“Anybody out there?” No one answered, so in case he was in trouble I
replied. He told me, “You’ve got two 18-wheelers wrecked up ahead. Take
the next exit or you will be sitting for hours,” he warned. I did, and I
also kept ahead of a winter storm thanks to his kindness. I was home and
snug in bed long before they ever cleared those two 18-wheelers, I’m sure.
Yep, pack that CB (yes, and your cell) before you head very far.
Penobscot (Maine) REACT doesn’t fool around.
Chartered only last January, the Team participated with the Maine
Emergency Management Agency in an emergency preparedness test just two
weeks later. In March, Team members took an Incident Command System
seminar with Pine Tree Red Cross. Later that month REACTers shared with
Penobscot County ARES in presenting an emergency communications program to
the northern section of the Maine VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active In
Disaster). Penobscot REACT wrapped up its first four months by cooperating
with Pine State ARC and Penobscot ARES to support the Bangor Multiple
Sclerosis walk with radio links. Five hundred walkers raised over $80,000
for MS, and the radio groups got to know each other a lot better. A few
weeks later, they joined forces again to raise an antenna at the Pine Tree
Red Cross Chapter. Not bad for starters, right? Southeast Louisiana REACT (SELA REACT) was spared from serious effects of the hurricanes last summer—and that allowed it to put its system of linked amateur repeaters at the disposal of the state EOC. Currently, the system extends from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Designed to pass emergency traffic, the REACT repeaters are also available for routine traffic by any licensed amateur. SELA REACT plans to expand the repeater network to Lafayette along I-10 and the Gulf Coast. Quite the achievement!
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SCANTECH
Painless
Programming For
The RadioShack PRO-96 has certainly attracted a lot of attention, as have many new trunktracking models lately. The PRO-96 is a full-featured, full-sized handheld scanner that adds a built-in digital decoder to an already impressive array of features, including trunking and alpha tagged memories. All in all, it’s quite a package in a small box.
Unfortunately, all this convenience comes at a
price. Many trunktrackers are not intuitive to program. Many longtime
scanner enthusiasts who are new to the concept of trunking find themselves
with a radio they can’t figure out without lots of digging in a
complicated manual. And to make matters more confusing, no two radio
manufacturers seem to implement the programming in quite the same way. So,
in an effort to be helpful, we present here the short guide to programming
a trunked system on a PRO-96. If you don’t own or aspire to own a PRO-96
you may find these instructions slightly less than helpful for your
scanner. If that’s the case, save yourself some aggravation and skip down
to the “Frequency of the Month.”
We’ll pick Motorola trunking first because
it’s the most common by a long shot for public safety applications. If
you’re interested in another type of system, drop me a note and I’ll
certainly address it if there’s enough interest.
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HAM
DISCOVERIES Don’t AMPLIFY Your On-Air Problems!
The other day I happened to run into a pair of relatively new hams as we were all coming out of the main doors of a local health club. The topics the two were discussing were long-range “intertie”-style repeater networks and the perceived glory of linear amplifiers. Because I don’t even own a VHF/UHF rig beyond the 6-meter coverage of my HF transceiver, the repeater topic went in one ear and out the other, but the amplifier issue struck a nerve. I remember my own Elmers giving me the “skill versus brute force” lectures, and I am always eager to pass on the wisdom. In short, I’ve ranted about this topic before, but it’s important, so please bear with me! We’ve all probably thought about buying a big amplifier at one time or another, but I’m here to tell you that for most hams, station amplifiers aren’t terribly useful. In fact, they may be more trouble than they’re worth—even if they’re free! Taking this to the extreme, if it were up to me I’d limit U.S. amateur operators to 250 watts PEP output on all bands. This would annoy a small subset of the population, but it would almost certainly improve our hobby. Attention regulators: hint, hint!
If you think you need a linear amplifier to
chase away your radio blues, think again. Your 100-watt barefoot signal
almost certainly provides more than enough power. If you need a bigger
signal, what you likely need is a better antenna and/or a better feedline.
Beginning hams often struggle with deciding
whether to buy an amplifier or improve their antenna system, or maybe
both. It’s a logical concern. They want to improve their station’s signal
quality, make more QSOs, work more DX stations, rack up higher contest
scores, and chat with others while enjoying armchair copy. But which way
to go? Are amplifiers a good investment? Will they provide the boost in
readability you’ve been looking for? They are legal, but are they really
in keeping wit
Back To
Basics: Shortwave Antennas,
by Steve Douglass If you’re a newbie and, after absorbing all the information in our Back to Basics series, are still having trouble intercepting utility communications, you’ve come to the right place. To you old crows, the following might seem like familiar stuff, but even so you might like to brush up on your knowledge of basic HF antenna construction, and you might even be inspired to build one for yourself.
One of the cool things about shortwave is that
it is very easy and inexpensive to build your own antenna. Oh, sure you
could slap down big bucks on a ready-made super-duper manufactured antenna
(and they work well by the way). But for less than $20 you can do it
yourself and wind up with an antenna one that works almost as well as
those fancy ones. This month we’ll start with the most basic of SW antenna designs that will improve the sensitivity of your radio tenfold over that back-of-the-set antenna. It’s called the random length center-fed dipole because it’s just that, a random (meaning non-calculated) string of copper wire attached at the center point by a balun (an impedance matching transformer) and a feedline that leads to the antenna input on your radio.
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by Joe Cooper Last month I introduced you to a significant trend that is going to have a big impact on radio communication in the immediate future. That new trend is being spearheaded by the development of two new technologies called “Software Defined Radio” (or SD Radio) and “Cognitive Radio” (or Cog Radio). This month I’m going to outline the theory and practice behind the construction of a SD Radio so you can better understand how this technology differs so radically from how radios have been designed and constructed in the past. This will lead into the next column, where I will outline how you can actually build your own SD Radio using a home computer running the LINX operating system and some special (but not hard to get) hardware components.
If you have been following this column since
its beginnings three years ago you have all the technical background
required to understand the theory and practice of SD Radio. This is where
all the ideas I’ve discussed come together and become extremely relevant
to the “new school” of radio monitoring that I’ve been talking about. I’m
not talking about a “fad” here, but a complete paradigm shift in
technology that’s being driven by a $25 billion investment by the United
States military through the JTRS (Joint Tactical Radio System) initiative.
The goal is to have one platform that will support 33 waveform profiles,
including cellular phone standards, over a frequency range of 2 MHz to 55
GHz. There is also a massive international involvement in the development
of this technology for JTRS on the part of companies such as Boeing,
Singular Wireless, General Dynamics, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Northrop
Grumman, and Raytheon, just to name a handful of those involved (and I’ve
not even touched on universities, research groups, government agencies
like NASA, and so forth). The goal of all of this work and research is to eliminate the need to have a truck filled with multiple radios and operators, along with a patch system for cross-mode or agency communications, and to replace it with one small box about the size of a mini-fridge. More importantly, once you have this small box in place, all you have to do is plug your computerized device into it and it connects up automatically. Once that happens you will be talking to the person you need to without interference and in a mode that will give you the proper amount of information (voice, text, graphics or whatever). This device can do all this because, other than the “container” (which is really nothing more than a specialized computer), all its radio components and circuits are “virtual.” By that I mean that rather than being the “real” physical components that used to take up large amounts of space and power, they are now represented as mathematical equations in computer software.
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by Peter J. Bertini
On the surface it appears easy: melt a small
amount of lead-tin metal alloy (solder) so it flows over an electrical
connection, thus ensuring a good mechanical and electrical bond when it
cools and hardens. For simplicity, and to keep this month’s column down to
earth, I’ll limit this discussion to what you’ll need to know and have on
hand to handle the soldering chores encountered in day-to-day working with
tube-based radio gear. One important note: many of the soldering tools
I’ll be showing you shouldn’t be used on sensitive solid-state equipment.
There are good reasons for this. Some of these irons aren’t grounded and
may have enough AC leakage voltages to damage sensitive semiconductors;
for that same reason, they may not provide protection from static
electrical charges. The Weller Solder Stations are the exceptions. The solder used in electronic or electrical equipment is a lead and tin alloy; the exact percentages determine the melting point and other characteristics of the solder. Electrical solder is generally sold in wire form and is available wound on one-pound spools for convenient handling. Solder comes with and without fluxes. The flux is very important first step in making a good solder connection as it cleans the metal surfaces of dirt and oxidation so the solder can flow and adhere to the metal. Never use an acid flux solder for radio or electrical work! The acid flux residue is forever corrosive, gradually eating away and corroding the wire and terminals in the soldered connections for years to come.
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All Peter Knight did was miss just one of the Pawtucket, Rhode Island AM’s quarter-hour meter readings. Even though, by 1973, the FCC no longer required stations to chronicle transmitter performance that frequently, a stickler WGNG engineer, who seemed to materialize like a spy through the dimly lit studio hallway, shook the official operating log at the novice DJ and shouted, “Where did you learn radio regulations, over in Cranston at WLOV-FM?”
Knight had no idea what the agitated tech
meant, but was shaken enough to sheepishly apologize and make several
extra xmtr readings before his all-night weekend air-shift ended. A week
later, while nervously filling in for the station’s ailing mid-day jock,
Knight heard another reference to the mysterious FM. “Hey, you’re careless
enough to work at WLOV!” one of the practical-joking ad salesmen quipped
when Knight accidentally spilled coffee on a stack of papers covering the
receptionist’s desk. And it wasn’t long before Knight noted the WGNG
production director referring to that weird Cranston broadcast outlet. The
guy promised the bookkeeper to look again for some notarized affidavit
form he’d misplaced. It was requisite for properly billing a big
advertising client. “Don’t worry,” he chuckled, “if the darn thing is
actually lost, we can always send them a sworn statement from WLOV!”
Reacting poorly to that remark, the accountant shouted, “I’ll WLOV you
right in the nose!” and slammed her door. Knight resolved to open the next
Broadcasting Yearbook he found in order to investigate where this WLOV was
on the dial and why it seemed to be such an object of derision in Rhode
Island radio. But neither the 1972 Yearbook nor a 1965 edition squirreled away on the chief engineer’s bookcase contained any evidence that a Cranston, Rhode Island, FM had existed. Knight asked a few broadcast veterans about WLOV, but got little response other than, “You don’t want to know,” or “Don’t ask, kid. It was bad news.” With his curiosity having been unceremoniously put on hold by those who didn’t care to discuss the enigmatic FM, Knight pretty much forgot about it until he was hired by WGNG’s main rival, WPRO Providence. Soon after his arrival, Knight’s new employer (Capital Cities Communications, which later bought ABC) relocated the WPRO AM and FM studios to the big-signaled station’s AM transmitter site near Barrington, Rhode Island. While in transition mode, the WPRO engineering head mounted the FM remote control unit in a newsroom equipment rack, but temporarily made a daily trip to the FM transmitter site in Johnston to directly read the meters himself.
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LOOSE
CONNECTION
Cowboy Norm
by Bill Price, N3AVY It’s been a while since I’ve seen Norm (you all remember Norm, whose Spaniel drove his car into the lake? Whose kilowatt AM transmitter caused just a little bit of interference with his apartment-dwelling neighbors? Who had me on a New England rooftop in a winter wind trying to solder a 14-gauge wire with a butane soldering iron in a 30-mph wind? Oh, I could go on and on but by the time I got through reminding you who Norm is, there’d be no room to tell you of the latest incident. But I don’t want to leave you with the impression that Norm is a bad person, or less than smart, or any such thing. Norm is first of all a good friend. Even after some three years of not seeing one another and only an occasional letter, I know I could count on him for anything I needed, and vice versa. He has had some hair-brained ideas from time to time, but so have I. And I would bet that you loyal readers have had a few that you’re not sharing with the world either. So Norm arrived at my rented farmhouse here in Cowfield County, Virginia, just as my landlord had brought a trailer-load of heifers or hoofers or some kind of young cows over to the part of the farm where I live to practice their mooing or whatever it is that they do here. Before I remembered that I’d told Norm that the landlord had strictly prohibited any antennas, he introduced himself and asked if it would be alright to string a longwire antenna up to the top of that silo over there. Now my landlord is the kindest person this side of the Continental Divide, or maybe even the International Dateline, and his list of prohibited activities involves only those things that might hurt something or someone or some animal. “Long as it doesn’t hurt anything, put up anything you want—just so it doesn’t look ugly.”
Oh no. Norm would be here for a whole
week—with carte blanche from my landlord, and me with enough bare copper
wire to wrap the Earth a few times over. Now for sure I was going to own
an antenna farm before the week was over. And I just knew he had some
monstrous old tube transmitter in the back of the humongous old station
wagon he was driving. At least one—maybe more. I could see my excuses for
not getting on the air blowing away in the wind as my landlord hauled the
empty trailer down the dusty lane and the new neighbors began mooing
behind me.
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