Dayton Hamvention II

Roberta X peruses a variable....er, variator.

1967: Civil Defense Club

I'm second from the right. I was more or less drafted into this august body of men due to my recently having acquired a General Class amateur radio license. This allowed me to operate all of their radios. There was only one other ham in this picture. Can you spot him?

No, not the guy with the pocket protector; good guess though. It's the guy in the lower left. As I recall his father and mother were chauffeur and housekeeper to some rich family. This was in Greenwich, Connecticut. I was fifteen, nearly sixteen.

On The Border

Thanks to reader Bob, we have one more Wullenweber. This one on the Virginia/North Carolina border (the horizontal gray line is the border.)

This one looks like it's been converted into a secret squirrel site.

Or a Walmart.

Wullenweber Antennas

Sobe, Japan

These are very large arrays for high-frequency reception and direction-finding, mostly by governments. Here is the Wikipedia article.

All of the installations were originally super-secret, but most have been dismantled and only a few are left, all of them inactive.

In addition to RAF Credenhill in the previous post, these Wullenweber sites remain:

Chicksands, UK

Elmendorf AFB, Alaska

Misawa, Japan

Imperial Beach, California

This one has an interesting history. Built in Karamursel, Turkey, it was dismantled by the Turkish government in 1977 in retaliation for a U.S. arms embargo. That was 34 years ago and it's still easy to spot.

They're anachronisms now, but as this 1955 snapshot shows, security at Misawa was serious.

What Color Is The Boathouse At Hereford?

There seem to be many different possible answers to that time-honored question.

But first, what is this Big Round Thing?

And what is this Little Round Thing?

They've got their own orchard, we know that.

And some sort of Big Square Thingy. Avec flagpole.

Nice antenna.

What say you, Bobbi? Appears to me to be a broadband ten-element high-frequency Yagi. I'd love to own one.


There's a double fence around the whole place, with camera towers every hundred meters or so.

And a bit farther down the road we see the antenna in the distance. More like twelve to fifteen elements, I'd say. Like the one at the Pentagon. Maybe they talk to each other: "dit-dit-dit-dit-dit..."

They've got lots of stuff, but I don't see a boathouse. Musta been one of those trick questions.

Hey, what's that weird tower on the horizon? How'd I miss that?

OK, there it is. Maybe that's the mysterious boathouse.

"'ello, 'ello, 'ello! What's all this, then? That's as far as you go, Yank. Nothing to see 'ere. Just turn your fancy camera car around and get yer arse back to Cupertino."

"You think we're barmy? Get lost!"

"Um, Constable, is there a boathouse around here?"
"Bloody git!"

See for yourself here.

Tesla Coil Car Theft Deterrent

h/t Snowflakes In Hell.

I think I may have seen one of these in the parking lot at the Dayton Hamvention, but it might just have been a humongous screwdriver antenna.

Text Messages In 1890

Article about after-hours chatter among telegraph operators...the first "texting".

From Sunday Magazine.

Via Neatorama.

Further This Respondent Sayeth Not

Overheard at the outdoor flea market at the Dayton Hamvention:

Turk: "Check out that great-looking 19" Bud equipment cabinet."

Roberta X: "I wish I had a rack like that!"

Turk: "#%*?@!"

Dayton 23

Big tubes!

Dayton 22

Manual Microstatic Frequency Modulation.

Dayton 21

A genuine BC-AG-229!

Dayton 20

More tubes!

Dayton 19

Tubular!

Dayton 14

Keys! Uh-oh!

Dayton 08

Crypt on!

1911 Call Sign

Currently (9:30 PM EST) you can hear (at 7175 kHz) on SSB the ham radio station OL1911VP in the Czech Republic. It's a special callsign to recognize the 100th anniversary of the Victoria Plzen Football Club. Needless to say, there is quite a "pile-up" trying to work this guy. In just a few minutes he has worked stations in Martinique, Barbados, Venezuela and all over the U.S.

UPDATE: and, as always, there's an app for that:

Augustus Owsley Stanley III

His obit is in the NYT here.

And there's a 2007 article about him in Rolling Stone here.

Excerpt:

Over the course of the next fourteen years, Owsley — known to his friends as "Bear" because of his prematurely hairy chest as a teenager — enlisted in the Air Force, became a ham- radio operator, obtained a first-class radiotelephone operator's license, worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and served as a summer-relief broadcast engineer at TV and radio stations in Los Angeles. He married and divorced twice, fathered two children and got himself arrested on a variety of charges. He also studied ballet, Russian and French.

Fire Leapt From Their Telegraph Keys

It was the worst solar storm in history, the Carrington Event in 1859:

In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.

NatGeo.

A Third Opinion

I've been working on getting my ham radio station back on the air. The new place is a tiny apartment, so a stealth antenna is called for. I used a slingshot to loft about 100 feet of stranded #26 copper wire (with black insulation) into the trees outside the window. The far end is in the trees and the other end travels under the window screen and into the room, where it is soldered to a banana plug. The banana plug is inserted into the post of a 4:1 balun. On the hot end, the output of the transmitter runs to the Daiwa 2-needle SWR meter, then to the LDG tuner, then to the 50-ohm side of the balun.

I had read that the little SWR indicator on the Yaesu 857 was not only too small (it's about the size of a cellphone signal strength indicator) but was inaccurate, too. So I wanted to verify the SWR. For that I got a little LDG analog meter that plugs directly into the "meter output" connector of the transceiver. Much easier to read, and with much more precision.

There's an HRO (Ham Radio Outlet) about 2 miles from my new address; I'm doomed!

So I put it on the air tonight, at only 10 watts, just to check the SWR. After adjusting the tuner (just push the button, actually, and it does all the work) I obtained the results shown: All three meters indicate a perfect match on 40 meters.

Then I switched the transceiver to 3675 kHz and pressed the key down. The two analog meters both read 5:1 and the Yaesu SWR indicator was offscale and flashing "SWR-SWR-SWR".

So technically this looks like a successful foray, but on the non-technical side not so much: my morse code skills have deteriorated to about 8-10 wpm. Very slow, even on the (so-called) Novice CW bands. I found some morse code practice sessions on iTunes (ain't life grand!?) and downloaded 'em to the iPhone. I can copy 8 wpm in my head no problem, but you know there's more to it than that. There's dealing with fading and noise and interference and those ham abbreviations: "VY GD ON YR QTH" and so on. I need some practice!

There's An App For That

A software defined receiver running on an iPhone 4.