WB4SON

In the fall of 1971 I entered Virgil I. Grissom High School, named for the astronaut who died in the Apollo 1 fire (Huntsville had two other new schools;  Chaffee Elementary and White Junior High named after the other astronauts who perished in that horrible fire).  I remember three things about High School.  First, despite the fact that the school was only a year old, it was already very overcrowded, and I spent most of my time in “pods” which were portable school rooms that lacked air conditioning (the main school had AC for the 2,000 or so students lucky enough to be inside the main building).  The second, that our Debate Club was very good (and I was part of that club).  And the third, that Ham Radio continued to be important despite everything else that was going on.

By the time I was in high school, I was driving a car and had purchased a Drake TR-22 2-meter FM radio.  It was a shoulder-portable radio that had an internal battery pack.  It produced about 1 watt of power, and was enough to work several local repeaters.  Somehow (?) I had obtained a touch-tone pad from a phone and adapted it to my Drake.  It allowed me to make phone calls from my car — something that was unheard of at the time (remember that the first cell phones didn’t show up for another 15 years).

A Drake TR-22 portable 2 meter FM rig.

One of the advantages of living in Huntsville during the early 70’s was it was the home of the space program.  I can remember that there were some lunatics insisting that the space landing had been nothing but a stunt faked on a Hollywood set (Hollywood did make a movie with that as the plot and planned to release it in April of 1970 — which just happend to be the time of the Apollo 13 problem — the distributor pulled the movie back and didn’t let it run until everyone returned safe and sound).  I had personal knowledge that it wasn’t a fake as I had gone with a scout group to visit a ham who had obtained a huge dish antenna on the surplus market (it was at least 20 meters in diameter if not larger).  While it had electric controls to adjust the azimuth and elevation, the tracking had to be done by hand — by turning knobs that drove the motors.  There was no computer or automatic control.  I was assigned to operate one knob and another scout was assigned to operate the other.  As the moon moved across the sky we were given instructions to adjust the knobs so that the dish tracked the moon.  The fruit of our labors was that we were able to listen in to radio signal used by the astronauts on the moon.  By observing the tracking and by calculating the doppler shift and comparing it to the measured value we were able to prove that the messages were coming from the surface of the moon.

By 1972, the Apollo program was grinding to a halt and was actually shortened.  The public had waning interest because it was so darned successful — the thrill had gone (tell that to Grissom, Chaffee and White, plus the crew of Apollo 13).  But more importantly, there was little money available for NASA since the country was spending money it didn’t have fighting the Vietnam War.

It was bitter-sweet when the crew of Apollo 17 returned to earth on December 19, 1972 (12 days after they took off).  It was a very successful mission, but it was to be the last Apollo flight.  It also meant that thousands of talented people who had worked the last decade or more on the space program were going to lose their jobs.  One of those impacted was my father, who wrote the flight operation manuals for the Apollo missions.  He managed to hang onto his job in Huntsville by doing odds and ends for General Electric until December of 1973.  As they were turning off the lights and nailing the doors closed on the GE facility, we were headed to the frozen north — Niskayuna NY, a suburb of Schenectady, the original home of GE.  My father would spend the rest of his working days at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, writing manuals for naval vessels.  When he retired in 1985, he moved back to Madison AL to be near my brother’s family.

So I moved in the middle of my junior year of high school to a place that was about as different climate wise as it was culture wise.  Not showing much common sense, I managed to get my feet badly frost-bitten when we moved into our apartment (my tennis shoes were soaked and it was cold and snowy).  To make things even more challenging, the country was in the middle of a terrible gas shortage.  I spent many a day after school parked in lines trying to buy gas for my parents car.  To add insult to injury, New York had different rules about licenses.  I had a full unrestricted license from Alabama, and had been driving since I was 12.  New York took away my license and forced me to obtain a restricted permit until the summer of 1974 when I was old enough for a full license again.

But the Schenectady area wasn’t all bad.  It had the best food I had ever eaten.  When I lived in Alabama, we thought of Italian food as pizza at the one pizza place in town.  In Schenectady, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a family Italian restaurant with absolutely wonderful food.  And don’t even get me started about the Jewish Delis!

Schenectady also had a very large and active ham radio community.  My father and I joined up and attend many meetings.  I changed my call sign to WB2ZIB (yech — the ‘ZIB’ part not the ‘2’ part), but kept my WB4SON call registered back at my brother’s home in Alabama.  I put wire into trees at the apartment complex and operated in stealth mode.

For good or bad, I happened to be right across the street from one of the world’s most renowned hams, W2PV, Dr. Jim Lawson.  This fella had dozens of acres of land with some of the largest towers I have ever seen poking hundreds of feet into the air.  One of them had a full-size three element 40-meter beam on the top.  When he was on the air, my HW-16 would produce nothing but noise.  I popped over to his house a few times to say hello, but he was a serious DX and contest operator and had little time for a teenager unless I was willing to take the graveyard shift during one of his multi-op contests (which I did — once).

By the summer of 1974 we had located a house in Niskayuna and moved in.  I became good friends with a ham at school and spent that summer installing a tower in his back yard topped with a tri-band beam.  Despite the fancy tower, he was mostly interested in QRP, and had a wonderful little radio called the Argonaut.

The two of us decided that satellites seemed pretty cool, so we set about making a 2-meter transmitter so that we could send CW on the uplink, and listen to the 10-meter downlink on the Argonaut.  We purchased the parts for pennies from a surplus dealer named Les Couch (Albany, NY).  It was probably the world’s worst and least efficient 2-meter transmitter but it worked.  We both made exactly one contact on AO-6 that summer before the tube turned bright red and burned out.   It was wonderfully exciting, and not unlike my first QSO four years earlier — except for the blown tube part.

By early January of 1971, I was having a ball using my “Hot Water 16”.  I had joined several traffic nets, helping the folks at home keep in touch with their loved ones serving in the Vietnam War.  It was pretty strange to be a kid of 13 and call a parent of some 19 year old to relay a message saying their son was never dry, but everything was OK under the circumstances.  I never quite felt old enough for that task even when the news was happy.

One nice thing about the traffic handling was that it really built up your Morse code skills.  Many folks would pass their Novice Class exam, which required the ability to copy 5 words a minute, but never make the leap to 13 words a minute, which was the requirement of the General and Advanced Class licenses.  By March of 1971 my code speed was over 20 WPM (according to a W1AW Code Proficiency Test), so that wasn’t an issue.  During the summer a friend of mine, John Meadows, WN4SFV and I decided we wanted to shoot for the gold and take our Advanced Class Exam together, skipping over the Technician and General Class license.  (Just a historical note: At the time you couldn’t take the Extra Class Exam unless you had a license other than Novice Class for at least two years, I believe.  Had that not been the case, then John and I would have surely taken the Extra Exam and passed it on the spot even with the 20 WPM requirement).

So we studied the electrical theory, rules and regulations over the summer.  While I don’t have a clear recollection as to exactly when we took the exam, I believe my father drove John and I down to Birmingham sometime in the summer of 1971.  In those days everything was done by hand and it took many weeks if not months for the FCC to send you the results of your exam.  You either got a new license in the mail or a notice that you needed to take the exam again (after a ‘cooling off’ period).  Both of us passed and we we celebrated with a 6-meter AM chat that ran all day and night when we got the results in the mail around December of 1971 (My father had purchased a used Lafayette HA-460, which was a 20 watt 6-meter AM radio).  As per usual I used it a lot and he hardly used it at all.

Lafayette HA-460 6 Meter AM Rig

The other nice thing about no longer being a Novice (not to mention new bands and voice modes), was that we could now use a VFO to operate on any frequency we wanted to (as opposed to a fixed crystal frequency).  A Heathkit HG-10 VFO was added to my HW-16.

Heathkit HG-10 VFO

John and I remained close friends until he went off to college (he was a year or two older than I was), and I moved on to New York with my parents.

In addition to the 6-meter AM rig, my father bought a used SBE-33 radio for SSB on the HF bands (80, 40, 20 and 15).  His ham shack was in the laundry room and he used a base-loaded vertical antenna.  I would go and use the radio there.  Eventually I took it over and moved it to my bedroom with all my other ham stuff.  About a year later he bought the companion amplifier, which went directly into my room.  The amplifier was a nightmare as it use six 6LQ6 tubes in parallel for about 600 watts of input power.  More than one set of tubes went up in smoke, their glass caving in from heat and vacuum.  It also produced enough power that my resonant on no band inverted-v antenna caused all sorts of issues with my antenna tuner (zapping and sparks were common).

My father and I never did have a combined shack.  I always spent far more time on the air with his equipment than he did.  His one or two contact a year seemed to satisfy his need for ham radio, while I would fill a logbook each year with contacts.

SBE 33 SSB HF Rig

SBE-SB1 Amplifier

I think it would be fair to say that the teenagers that were involved with ham radio during the early ’70s were the lesser equivalent of the computer geeks today.  The differences was that there were fewer of us (ham radio was not nearly as widespread as computing), nor the level of respect.  Many a ham would grow into a full fledged computer geek, but prior to the dot com craze, the ladies didn’t see ham geeks as a ticket to financial security like the computer geeks were.  In Alabama, in particular, folks were revered for their physical agility on the football field, not their mental agility.

So maybe out of self protection as much as common interest, we tended to flock together with fellow ham friends.  One example of this was in the summer of 1972, when a bunch of teens who had gotten to know each other through radio contacts and various traffic nets met at the home of David Barnes, WB4KDI.  He was nice enough to convince his parents to host a hoard of ravenous kids they had never met in person in the basement of their house during the Birmingham Hamfest.  This was so long ago that I only remember a few things, such as the group being pretty big (maybe a dozen or more), a pool table, and a fantastic breakfast the next morning. (David tells me that it was a ping-pong table, not a pool table — so much for my memory!!)

A memory that is very vivid about that trip was that John Meadows and I drove down together in his Ford Pinto.  We had the SBE-33 radio in the car with us and had shoved the DC power supply in the glove compartment to keep it out of the way.  As we were screaming down I-65 at about 70 MPH, a paper capacitor in the power supply decide it was time to fail dramatically.  There was a loud explosion, the glove box door flew open, and smoke with bits of paper and tin foil filled the car.  Somehow John managed to bring us to a safe stop.  A replacement capacitor was acquired at the Hamfest, and all was good with the world.  Oh yes, and one more thing; Sonny and Cher’s song “The beat goes on” playing on the car radio.

For my 13th birthday in June of 1970, my parents gave me a metronome kit from Heathkit.  It was actually a beautiful thing with a wooden cabinet.  I was playing guitar at the time, so it made some sense, but it still seemed odd.  You could buy a wind-up Bakelite one from a music store for a few dollars.  This was several times the cost and you had to put it together to boot.  My parents really surprised me with that gift.  I had the thing built and working within a few hours even though it was my first time using a soldering iron to put together the electronics.  Little did I know what was in store for me later on.

A few months later the guitar was gathering dust as I spent most of my time struggling to make QSOs using my WWII-era surplus radio equipment.  I would wake up in the morning before school and give it a go, then rush home afterward and try again.  Each day when my dad came home I would tell him about the contacts that had gotten away (the ones I only heard), and on rare occasion the ones I actually got through to.  Occasionally he would pop into my room and watch me soldier on.

It was the time of the Vietnam War, and ham radio operators were providing a valuable service to the public simply by relaying short messages from home to their loved ones and getting the replies back.  (Remember long distance phone calls were very expensive, several dollars a minute, and very hit or miss — especially with international calls.  Nobody was speaking to their soldier sons/husbands via telephone, and overseas mail service took many weeks.)

One weekend the local radio club had setup a demonstration of ham radio equipment in a shopping mall.  It was our family habit to eat at a cafeteria there Saturday night, so we stopped to chat with a couple of the club members on our way to dinner.  I remember showing my dad a couple of pieces of radio equipment assembled from Heathkits, but one in particular almost spoke to me.  It was a HW-16.  A radio designed for the novice.  It had an unheard of ‘low’ price of $99 (that’s about $550 in today’s dollar).  Years later my father told me that I stroked the top of that radio with eyes as large as saucers and said “Could you imagine what it would be like to have something like that?”.

We were blessed to have my brother with us through the Christmas holiday of 1970.  My mother was in seventh heaven trying to fatten him up.  He had taken some electronic classes during his Army training,  and was used to radio communication as he was flying helicopters during the war.  So I was always trying to show off my fancy equipment, and he was loving enough to pretend to be impressed.

When Christmas morning came, I was awestruck when he gave me a pilot’s jacket (dark green silk on the outside and bright orange on the inside).  I wore that with great pride for years.  I was even more awestruck when my parents brought out a large box from Heathkit and placed it in front of me.

As I said before, my parents were thrifty folks, having survived the depression.  They didn’t believe in extravagant gifts.  Most of the time it was things that were needed, like clothing.  A big treat was a book, or maybe a toy — but those things were the exception.  That Heathkit box contained what I forevermore described as the best present I ever received — a HW-16 of my own.

I spent the rest of my Christmas break from junior high putting that kit together and I almost passed out when I turned it on and — it didn’t work!  Oh the tubes lit up, and nothing bad happened (like smoke), but it didn’t make a sound either.  I was too nervous to read further in the instruction book (beyond the first two steps: plug it in and turn it on).

My brother was quick to volunteer to help.  He and I swapped places in front of the radio and within a few minutes he had the sweet sound of Morse code coming out of the speaker.  Everything worked, I had been careful putting it together, but tuning-up a radio receiver was a new experience to me.

This gift opened up a new world for me, and I used it to fill up several log books with contacts (over a thousand of them) until I retired it in May of 1979.

Heathkit HW-16 Transceiver

My father was my inspiration to get involved with Ham Radio.  He never spent much time on the hobby himself, a few contacts a year were all that was required to keep him happy.  So few folks heard of WA4SAU (and later WB2UMW and finally KC2ON).  But he did venture out of the house once a month to attend the local radio club meeting in Huntsville, Alabama.

Having access to his radio equipment as a child provided me with many hours of listening entertainment back in a time before video games, personal computers,  or even inexpensive telephone calls.  The thought of hearing someone who lived on the other side of the planet was almost incomprehensible.  I loved to listen to shortwave broadcasts from all over the world and tried to figure out what all those dots and dashes meant.

Around the time that I turned 12, my dad figured I was old enough to get more directly involved in ham radio.  He started taking me to the monthly club meeting and eventually had me join a class to learn Morse code and the electronic theory necessary to get my first license, which I did in October of 1970 — WN4SON.

My father scrounged up an old Ameco AC-1 dual band radio (80 and 40 meters).  It was a crystal controlled transmitter that you swapped a coil out to change bands.  I had three or four crystals in the novice band of 80 meters.  On a good day it might put out about 3 or 4 watts.

For a receiver, I used an ARC-5 3 to 6 MHz unit that had been removed from a WWII airplane.  The novice band took up all of about a half turn of the tuning knob, which meant that all the signals pretty much blended together.

My antenna was a wire that was nailed to the eve of the house — maybe 75 feet long.

With such equipment, I didn’t have much luck.  I called CQ for hours on end without success in the days immediately following the receipt of my license in the mail.  Finally, in frustration, I scheduled a contact with Bob Gingras, WB4JMH, who was my radio instructor.  Since he lived about 10 miles away, on the other side of town, things were bound to work.  At 3:30 in the afternoon of October 17th, 1970, I made my first contact.  Somehow I managed to send readable code despite my trembling hands, and Bob wished me success in all the QSOs to follow.

When my brother returned on leave from Vietnam over the 1970 Thanksgiving holiday, he, my father, and I erected an inverted-V antenna that was maybe 30 feet tall at the peak.  It was 50 feet long on each side because we bought a 100 foot spool of wire.  The fact that it wasn’t resonant at any ham frequency didn’t seem to be an issue, and I used that antenna for the next 3 years.

Other contacts gradually followed that first one — all of them the random unscheduled variety over the next few months.  By the end of December I had made a few dozen contacts in several near-by states.  I had QSL cards from 15 stations in 7 different states as proof of my efforts.

Ameco AC-1 80/40 QRP Transmitter

My first receiver -- A WWII ARC-5