Dad’s legacy
Last Sunday several family members including myself trekked out to Whiteman Park to visit the clubrooms of the Northern Corridor Radio Group to see Dad’s ham radio tower in its new home.
The group has an impressive setup, with well-organised rooms and workshops, and many different radio towers. (It’s an aerial farm, so Dad’s tower “went to the farm” in a good way.) They have a very modern shack setup, but it was perhaps telling that I felt most at home in the museum sections, the workshops, and the scavenger piles. I quite literally felt at home with the old gear and the piles of cables and bits and pieces. The displays of valves and Morse keys particularly sparked my interest as I’d made a special effort to preserve those parts of Dad’s collection.
Dad’s tower has been very sturdily mounted in plenty of concrete, and shares a small fenced area with a potentially slightly lethal microwave transmitter. Not the sort of thing you’d want to stand right in front of at any rate. The tower doesn’t look quite the same as it now has a smaller and different selection of aerials on board, and there’s no home-made satellite dish, but most of the infrastructure was instantly recognisable. It felt a little odd to look at the very familiar base in its concrete foundation and not see the names and marks of all the family, including some very reluctant finger impressions from a nervous toddler version of myself. That concrete base has been preserved at home though, albeit under a large potted lemon tree.
Dad’s satellite dish was on the grounds and someone has been enthusiastically playing with it, so it’s nice that that got a home as well. I was very proud of that satellite dish - it was home-made for a start, and this was well before the age of pay TV so we had the only one on the street for a very long time. Dad’s rack and amplifiers were partially disassembled in one of the sheds. The man who’d been working on them tore his Achilles's tendon so was out of action for a while, but before that he was apparently cooing over the equipment.
There was a *lot* of cooing over Dad’s equipment - it was really nice to see.
I gave the rack a pat and said hello, feeling a little twinge at seeing Dad’s call sign and the familiar gear. I wasn’t remotely concerned about what anyone thought of this behaviour, but I got the impression that the hams understood perfectly.
We were very well looked after by the members who escorted us around and greeted us in various spots. I found out at the funeral that Dad was unusual in the degree to which he included his family in his hobby, so the other hams appreciated our interest. We were told that several had been inspired by Dad’s forethought in organising his ham-related affairs, and were following his example in organising notes about disassembling their gear, and recording the market value of various bits and pieces. Such organisation will have a positive knock-on effect for many ham families when faced with the traumatic task of decommissioning a fully operational Death Star ham shack.
It was a surprisingly emotional visit, but very much so in a good way. The museum in particular just screamed of home, of a home that no longer exists. I suppose that’s what museums are for. It was also lovely to be in the company of familiar geeky enthusiasm. Many grins-and a few sad smiles-were exchanged, and that can only be a good thing.
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PS I learned an interesting thing - one of the towers was designed to use the conductive quality of earth between various guy wires to make an enormous circuit. It was a huge spindly construction and lots of trouble to put up. Unfortunately the soil at Whiteman Park is so dry and sandy it doesn’t conduct electricity, and the enormous thing doesn’t work at all. On to the next project.