Personal Triage, Part 4: Ham Radio
Continuing the multipart discussion I left off on December 23, 2005: I came to ham radio through electronics, and in part through my father, who had been an Army Airways Communcations System (AACS) radio operator during WWII. He could copy Morse Code at 25 or 30 words per minute in his head, even twenty five years after the War was over. As a sixteen-year-old I had hoped that we would get our licenses together, but just about that time he was diagnosed with cancer, and everything changed. It took a few more years, but I got my license finally in May of 1973, and have had it ever since. My current call is K7JPD.
I've never been a contester, and my antennas have always been modest or even bizarre. I met George Ewing (WA8WTE) at the Clarion SF workshop when we realized we were both considering how to load up the copper downspout outside the basement level of Abbott Hall on 40 meters. I've met a lot of other worthy people in ham radio since then, even without devastatingly effective equipment. In fact, one of the reasons that I've gone soft on ham radio in the past decade is that it's gotten a little too easy. My Icom IC736 radio is basically spin-the-dial and push-the-mic-button. Everything else happens automagically inside its computer-controlled guts, and most of the sense of challenge is gone.
Furthermore, ham radio's ecological niche has changed radically. As the famous Jim Kyle pointed out long ago, as soon as he discovered the Internet, he realized that all of the techie socializing he used to do on ham radio was now being done on the Net. It worked the same way for me. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and what we now (somewhat unfortunately) call blogs are the natural inheritors of the Friday Night Nets that most local ham groups held until the 80s, and many still do today. Most of modern ham radio net activity (and by "net" I mean a gathering of radio signals on a single frequency at a given time) is focused on emergency preparedness and public service. Ham radio saved lives during our recent hurricane crises, and although I didn't take part, I'm proud of those who did.
I've maintained my interest in hamming in part by going retro. Since the early 1990s, most of my ham radio energy has gone into "classic" tube-based gear from the 50s and 60s, and building my own from loose parts, especially tubes. We used to have a "Junkbox Radio Net" using rattletrap AM transceivers every Sunday night in north Scottsdale, but over the years people moved, some lost interest, and over time it just went away. I still have the gear, but I don't hear the signals locally. If I ever do I'll join them, but I'm not optimistic on that score.
So in terms of personal triage, ham radio has mostly merged with electronics. As time allows I've been developing a single-tube AM-FM detector using the 6BN6 gated beam tube and the 6Z10 Compactron gated beam/power audio amp combo tube. I hope to build both a broadcast superhet receiver and a 6M ham FM receiver using the circuits I'm developing. The 6BN6 tube is amazing: By changing the cathode bias you can make it detect either AM or FM signals. On FM it does its own limiting, and it puts out enough audio voltage to feed directly to a pentode power amplifier. I'm using 4.5 MHz TV audio IF amp transformers and quad coils, which can still be had, and using mid-60s portable TV circuits as a starting point. It may take awhile, but I'd very much like to design and build my own all-tube 50 MHz FM transceiver. I spend a few hours on it every so often, like I did this past Saturday. I consider it a ham radio project, even if it won't involve getting on the air for some time yet. I may eventually have a lowband attic antenna, and will certainly have a VHF discone up in the eaves, but the core of the issue is this: I have to keep learning new things (where "new" means new to me) or I can't keep up with an activity. As long as I can build things for ham radio, I'll stick with itbut I suspect that my random ragchewing days are over.