Concerning advice on tools, if you please. km6x7.

[tonequester]

A friend is a blessing, and a great deal speaks for itself !

@tonequester
If you're serious about wanting an old ARRL Handbook I have a 1957 copy in fairly decent shape. Yours for a small donation to the Forum (apparently they sell for $15 so say $5-10?). PM your address.

tonequester here.


madkatb. Today, I got a wonderful surprise in the mail. The 34th edition of the Radio Amateur's Handbook arrived in perfect shape. The year of publication is special for me. I was born in 1957. I will TREASURE this book, and never forget the generosity of a Canadian gentleman who will always be known to me as madkatb.
Generosity is a grace from God, that is all to rare these days. I do find it frequently on this forum, in the time spent sharing advice with each other. If there is a "rotten apple"
in this "barrel", I haven't found it yet , I will donate $10.00 to the forum, in your name, by Postal
Money Order this week, but I will reimburse you for the shipping with a money order sent to the return address on the padded envelope that the book came in. I can tell
you that I would not take $100.00 for the book. My S.S.D.I. will be deposited in a few days and I will make my monthly trip to the bank. I'll pick up the two money orders at
that time. I'll waste no time sending you the shipping, and making the forum donation in your name. Once again, I can't conceive of a way to truly express my happiness
at your generous gesture. The book is precious to me. Your gesture is PRICELESS ! Many Thanks My FRIEND ! If I can be of help to you,... type tonequester.


Quote : "The grass may look greener on the other side, but believe me, it's just as hard to cut." Little Richard.

[madkatb]

No problem tonequester. I was born in 58 so it's a little bit too "old school" for me.

[tonequester]

tonequester here.


Glad you got my post madkatb. With this super freaking sensitive Toshiba laptop I got about a month ago, I am never sure until I get a reply. You've got some nerve.
"Old School". We're both 6 foot over, not under. I had about an hour with the book this evening and it's great. It blows me away how popular Ham used to be, and that was a principle method of learning to be a tech, in "the day". I was facinated by the forward. I had no ideas that Hiram Maxim, of machine gun fame, founded the ARRL. Also, it had never occured to me that Ham operators were bound to such principles, nor that they had been so valuable to the U.S. interest in the "BIG" wars. The ad section at the end of the book brought back memories of
the kind of ads that were the stuff of dreams for kids of our generation. I never was a big Bob Hope fan but........"Thanks for the memories." tonequester.

[tonequester]

tonequester here.



km6xz. Thanks to madkatb I recieved the 1957 handbook in the daily mail. It's list price was $3.50 as well. I spent an hour just skimming it today. What a trip down memory lane it turned out to be for even me, who never had the Ham experience. The Amateurs Code alone took me back to the days when before class started at school everyday, we said the Pledge of Allegiance with hands over hearts, looking at the flag. I read the history part of Amateur Radio and learned that Hiram Maxim founded the ARRL, and how important important
amateur radio was in the "BIG" wars. Even the old ad section at the end of the book brought back a flood of memories. Most of all, I could easily see that if I can assimilate the majority of this 54 year old book, I may be giving advice on this forum one day instead of always asking for it. I would have taken it to show and tell too ! I hope all is well with you and yours in St.
Petersburg. OH ! By the way. I'm going to skip that "old Bugaboo".........the Code ! tonequester, cookin' in Kansas.

[km6xz]

The main reason ham ham radio got government approval when other commercial and government services wanted all the ham bands of frequencies was due to the civil defense and emergency communications that hams traditionally supplied.
In March of '64, Alaska had what was at the time, the largest earthquake ever recorded. A 9.2 magnitude in the early evening their time. I was doing what I was often doing, tuning around the frequencies hoping to hear a far off countries to talk with. I was 14 at the time. I noticed some weak signals with in transmissions between a ham in Canada and one I could hardly hear in Alaska. The Canadian ham was trying to understand so was repeating some incomplete phrases so the Alaskan ham could fill in the missing parts. Eventually I understood it to be about an earthquake, so I turned on the radio and found a mention and Tsunami warning for the north coast of California. There was almost no details. By late evening a little news started filtering down to the ConUS. I stayed glued to my equipment hoping to hear what details could be found but very few hams were on the air up there. The propagation had shifted so signals on 40 meters were getting a lot better at my location so was able to relay information from the strongest signal ham I heard. As it turned out, my location was hearing them the best and that start an all night message handling event. I kept switching bands as propagation shifted and kept relaying messages, many at first were from government offices and from the air force base near Anchorage but for the first 10 hours or so my signals were the main link between aid requests and services in the lower 48. After late morning the next day, government and air force communications systems came on the air so my activity shifted to health and welfare messages of a civilian nature. There were only a few hams in Alaska that knew what was going on and had functioning equipment so, although there were a thousands in the lower 48 who wanted to help, there were few to communicate with who had battery or mobile systems that could be heard down in the states or even over to Canada. I was pretty lucky to have a location and antenna system that favored that region. Ham radio was vital for initial emergency communications, all on short wave, mostly on International Morse code because that mode was better with weak signals that were coming from a couple mobile or battery powered stations.
It made the local news that a 14 year old kid was handling much of the first hours of emergency messages so eventually the mayor gave me a large plaque for being a "radio hero"....the only reason it was me who was doing it was the luck of radio propagation between the stricken area and my home location. But that was the typical use of ham radio by communities for local and national emergencies, the war(ham radio was suspended during WWI and WWII) by supplying a major portion of the trained radio operators for the first phases of the war. Millions of messages between military bases in Korea and later in Viet Nam between soldiers and their families were relayed via ham radio as about the only way to get messages to or from home.
Any time there was a missing child, flood, large forest fire, parade or whatever that needed communications, local communities called on hams to provide communications. So there was a real reason to exist other than just the hobby aspects, and for the innovation that occurred when hundreds of thousands of technically savvy people who got their start with ham radio expanded their activities to include invention and creating businesses around it. The computer industry, the US leadership in instrumentation, Silicon Valley and thousands of technology businesses or scientific careers began through ham radio.
It is too bad there is no equivalent now to challenge and motive kids. At least in the 1970s and 80s programming caught the attention of kids who were significant players in developing programs and companies but that died off so kids are consumers of ready made applications and games, not the designers of them. One hobby that is popular here but I doubt it is in the US, among kids and adults alike is microprocessor based programming for robotics and communications. Every electronics parts store has display cases full of development boards, modules and sub-assemblies that are used in programming embedded devices. It seems that all electronics before microprocessors has been skipped and the main hobby is programming at machine level.
There is a direct connection between the open ended avid involvement in technical and science based hobbies of the 1930-1960s is what made the US the leader in technology but that home grown innovation is now focused on other regions of the world, mainly Asia and Central Asia. Science has become a dirty word, in the US, with polarized political beliefs preventing the population from supporting it, encouraging it or understanding it so the kids learn by example and remain outside the sphere of the rational. Science, scientists, explorers, the quest for space exploration, were revered in the 1950s, more than rock stars or celebrities, and certainly more than billionaires, the country accepted that knowledge was a good thing. Most of our problems stem from believing the opposite.
I think the intentional glorification of ignorance is the main reason I will never live in the US again, the rest of the world is more rational and normal, with the ideals that would have been very much appreciated in the US 50 years ago except in some backwards religious enclaves that thinking people ignored. When I travel I see the "American Dream" alive and well in just about every country...except the US where few people believe in it and fewer act on it.

[tonequester]

Land of the Free ???

The main reason ham ham radio got government approval when other commercial and government services wanted all the ham bands of frequencies was due to the civil defense and emergency communications that hams traditionally supplied.
In March of '64, Alaska had what was at the time, the largest earthquake ever recorded. A 9.2 magnitude in the early evening their time. I was doing what I was often doing, tuning around the frequencies hoping to hear a far off countries to talk with. I was 14 at the time. I noticed some weak signals with in transmissions between a ham in Canada and one I could hardly hear in Alaska. The Canadian ham was trying to understand so was repeating some incomplete phrases so the Alaskan ham could fill in the missing parts. Eventually I understood it to be about an earthquake, so I turned on the radio and found a mention and Tsunami warning for the north coast of California. There was almost no details. By late evening a little news started filtering down to the ConUS. I stayed glued to my equipment hoping to hear what details could be found but very few hams were on the air up there. The propagation had shifted so signals on 40 meters were getting a lot better at my location so was able to relay information from the strongest signal ham I heard. As it turned out, my location was hearing them the best and that start an all night message handling event. I kept switching bands as propagation shifted and kept relaying messages, many at first were from government offices and from the air force base near Anchorage but for the first 10 hours or so my signals were the main link between aid requests and services in the lower 48. After late morning the next day, government and air force communications systems came on the air so my activity shifted to health and welfare messages of a civilian nature. There were only a few hams in Alaska that knew what was going on and had functioning equipment so, although there were a thousands in the lower 48 who wanted to help, there were few to communicate with who had battery or mobile systems that could be heard down in the states or even over to Canada. I was pretty lucky to have a location and antenna system that favored that region. Ham radio was vital for initial emergency communications, all on short wave, mostly on International Morse code because that mode was better with weak signals that were coming from a couple mobile or battery powered stations.
It made the local news that a 14 year old kid was handling much of the first hours of emergency messages so eventually the mayor gave me a large plaque for being a "radio hero"....the only reason it was me who was doing it was the luck of radio propagation between the stricken area and my home location. But that was the typical use of ham radio by communities for local and national emergencies, the war(ham radio was suspended during WWI and WWII) by supplying a major portion of the trained radio operators for the first phases of the war. Millions of messages between military bases in Korea and later in Viet Nam between soldiers and their families were relayed via ham radio as about the only way to get messages to or from home.
Any time there was a missing child, flood, large forest fire, parade or whatever that needed communications, local communities called on hams to provide communications. So there was a real reason to exist other than just the hobby aspects, and for the innovation that occurred when hundreds of thousands of technically savvy people who got their start with ham radio expanded their activities to include invention and creating businesses around it. The computer industry, the US leadership in instrumentation, Silicon Valley and thousands of technology businesses or scientific careers began through ham radio.
It is too bad there is no equivalent now to challenge and motive kids. At least in the 1970s and 80s programming caught the attention of kids who were significant players in developing programs and companies but that died off so kids are consumers of ready made applications and games, not the designers of them. One hobby that is popular here but I doubt it is in the US, among kids and adults alike is microprocessor based programming for robotics and communications. Every electronics parts store has display cases full of development boards, modules and sub-assemblies that are used in programming embedded devices. It seems that all electronics before microprocessors has been skipped and the main hobby is programming at machine level.
There is a direct connection between the open ended avid involvement in technical and science based hobbies of the 1930-1960s is what made the US the leader in technology but that home grown innovation is now focused on other regions of the world, mainly Asia and Central Asia. Science has become a dirty word, in the US, with polarized political beliefs preventing the population from supporting it, encouraging it or understanding it so the kids learn by example and remain outside the sphere of the rational. Science, scientists, explorers, the quest for space exploration, were revered in the 1950s, more than rock stars or celebrities, and certainly more than billionaires, the country accepted that knowledge was a good thing. Most of our problems stem from believing the opposite.
I think the intentional glorification of ignorance is the main reason I will never live in the US again, the rest of the world is more rational and normal, with the ideals that would have been very much appreciated in the US 50 years ago except in some backwards religious enclaves that thinking people ignored. When I travel I see the "American Dream" alive and well in just about every country...except the US where few people believe in it and fewer act on it.

tonequester here.


Greeting's km6xz ! As always, your post gives me pause to think, and to wonder. In my 54 years there has been so much change in the world that it all
seems like a dream that we haven't yet arisen from. I really have no problem with change. I remember when our t.v. would go on the "fritz" and my dad would pull all of the tubes out(carefully labeling them) and we'd take them to the grocery store and use a tube tester the size of a juke box to find out which one was bad. Then we'd buy the replacement right there. I remember thinking how great it was when S.S. came out, and so quickly increased the variety of products, decreased their size, and soon enough even brought costs down. However, those were also the days of great upheaval over the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement. At least in that day, the U.S. seemed to "get it right" half of the time. Both events were tragic for so many, but at least one brought about positive changes, not that all was/is perfect. At least being from Kansas
I never had to see a "whites only" sign, except on the news. Now America is owned "lock, stock, and barrel" by 2 or 3% of the population, truth be known, and these few
do not have a true American agenda. Whoever first said that "money is the root of all evil" must have had a vision of the future, and in the vision watched the evening news.
The saddest thing, and the thing that will destroy the "American Dream's last remnents" is the sheer ignorance of the voting population, combined with apathy about what is
happening to the country. My grandfather was a welder for General Motors from the mid-30's until he retired. He was involved in the first "sit down strike" at Kansas City's
Leeds plant. He built B-17's and M-10 tank destroyers during WWII when car production halted. he was of course a die hard union man. He was also the only Liberal in our small town. He told me that in my day, we'd have to fight for "it all again". From an early age he impressed on me his belief in the "American Dream", but he told me that
anyone who thought that our rights couldn';t be taken away was an imbicile. He believed that no war would defeat us, but he greatly feared the rich. You are right in pointing out the differences in what influences the younger generation these days. I have a nephew who by his own admission plays video games until 1:00am during the week. He has no end of problems with schoolwork and it seems that he has A.D.H.D. I know that rebellion is natural to an extent when one is young. I grew my hair long and
went to rock concerts my last year in high school. I also made National Honor Society with straight A's all the way. We didn't dare touch the t.v. until all homework was done, and if I had ever brought home even a C........I shudder to think ! Some people over here would have a problem with a successful person leaving this country for St. Petersburg. I wonder that more
haven't. I know that you must be a man of conviction and principals. It's getting very hard to be that kind of man in this country. You have led one of the most interesting lives that I can recall hearing about in my life. You are much younger than my grandfather was. However, I believe that the two of you would have had wonderful conversations to listen in on. He was
quite patriotic, but it was not the "Flag Waving,...We can do no wrong" type. Everyone in my family says that I "take after him". I don't think that I could fill his shoes, but like him, I don't fear invasion, we've already been invaded by greedy liars.
Polititcians, and the rich that nown them. I envy your life's experience, and I appreciate your coorespondence with me. In a way, it seems that you're from another world(being so far away), and yet you also seem to be firmly anchored to the Earth,
and it's humanity. I count you as my friend, as well as my electronics advisor.


Quote : "He mocks the people who proposes that the government shall protect the rich and that they will in turn care for the laboring poor." Grover Cleveland.