Uncovering a Ham Radio past

I was first licensed as KB5QYH while still in college. I had always wanted to be ham radio operator,  evening checking out a book ("So you want to be a Ham") from the local library while in high school. But I never knew how to find a club or even an individual who was already licensed. Google didn't exist, of course, and there was no Instructables to guide me through it.

I did know that my father had been a ham, and his father as well. My mother has a garage littered with relics of the 1950s and 1960s when he had been both an amateur and a professional in the radio industry. But he had died when I was five and all I could do was fiddle with the old equipment and wonder how it worked. 

While attending school in Oklahoma, a buddy of mine came across the Edmond Amateur Radio Club and signed up for a Novice Class. He invited me to go, almost as an aside one day, and soon I was more excited by the hobby than he. 

I was thrilled when the vanity callsign program came along. I had found my father's and grandfather's callsigns in an old callbook at a hamfest once. So, I eagerly filled an application for both, preferring my dad's as soon as the window opened up. Fortunately, I got it.

Over the past few months, my mother has been cleaning out old storage rooms in preparation to sell her house. She recently brought me a book...a logbook, that was among some old belongings of my father. Sure enough, tucked away in the pages, was an old license. "WN5CWT" it read and bore my father signature. Also folded in the book was his original application for an amateur radio station. Again, his signature appeared at the bottom, right above my grandfather's who, apparently being a notary public, had notarized it for him. 

Only one page of the log was filled out, but it was a good one. It read, "November, 1954...First Contact...W5CWW (Dad!)" and carried a small note "6AG7" beside it. By father and grandfather had passed their tests the same day and been issue consecutive callsigns. Also noted in the margin was four...yep, FOUR...attempts to pass the Morse code test, all of them failures! He noted that my grandfather pass his code test on the second try. (Its a little funny considering my grandfather was a banker and my dad had been a radio operator for Braniff Airlines for several years. 

In the back of the log was the then obligatory schematic of my father's station. It included a single-tube receiver and an accompanying transmitter. That "6AG7" in the log was a reference to the tube in his station.

My grandfather eventually earned his General license. My dad earned a technicians class ticket. I also found his Radio Operator First Class certificate.

Are we headed into a "Little Ice Age" again?

Many scientists are starting to think that lower sunspot numbers may be signal a dramatic, long-term quieting of the sun. Although hams have followed the sunspot number closely for decades, physicists, climatologists and even weather forecasters are starting to take notice of what appears to be a 30-year trend in declining sunspot cycles. And if history can be trusted, fewer sunspots means more extreme weather and that could cost everyone from the family farmer to the oil and gas industry one thing: money.

So, it's probably not surprising that even Forbes magazine has added its take on the looming solar future in an interesting article.  Forbes adds to a growing body of news articles and websites (such as NASA's page from the Marshal Flight Center explaining the cycles and New Scientist's prediction page) that are heralding a lull in solar activity (and for us, a drop in propagation).

Ground Radials by the Numbers

Taken from "http://www.antennasbyn6lf.com/"... 

Series of QEX articles on ground system experiments

Last year I posted results from a series of experiments on ground systems for vertical antennas. That series of reports was converted with some modifications into a series of seven articles in QEX magazine. The ARRL has kindly given me permission to post .pdf files of these seven articles for those who do not have access to QEX.

A summary of these articles was published in QST for March 2010, pp. 30-33. In QEX for May/June 2010 letters to the editor I made the following comments. "I think too many people are taking the QST article as gospel when it should be viewed only as an interesting set of expriments which shed some light on a few questions. Even the QEX series, which is much more detailed, raises far more questons than it answers. I was really hoping to encourage others to expand on my work (as I expanded on Sevick's) by showing how it might be done. 73, Rudy N6LF"

Click here for N6LF's website and a copy of the series.

Have you ever listened to a street light?

Street lights are a common source of RFI on 40 and 80 meters. How to diagnose them? Read On...

The following is a discussion from the RFI reflector on finding RFI from street lights by Frank Haas KB4T, a utility RFI investigator in Florida. With these RFI sources being a common irritant to the active contester, Frank's explanations and suggestions are good information. The article was reprinted in the recent ARRL's Contest Update.

"As a Utility Interference Investigator, I run into bad street lights all the time. The most common failures are cycling and constant "invisible" RFI. Listening with a radio tuned to a quiet spot (or 1710) on the broadcast band, you can usually hear the repetitive street light symphony. Sometimes the RFI produced by these failed cycling lights can be heard as high as 325 MHz.