In article , Mike Coslo
writes:

N2EY wrote:

Now EPA to PAC on 40 may not be DX to some, but back then it was the first
Hawaiian I'd ever heard on that band. He was way down in the noise and all
I
had was the Type 6's 100 watts and the dipole. He was working 6's and 7's,
and
my calls went unanswered. I tried moving up a little and down a little - no
soap. But he was soon working 8's and 9's, so maybe there was a chance.

I really enjoyed my first PAC, I know what you mean.

And the generator ran out of gas, sputtered and stopped. The lights on the
rig
faded and the control relays buzzed and dropped out. But I had the contact!

argg, I feel your pain, Jim!

No pain! We were done, the QSO was in both logs, the genset had run just long
enough to do the job.

snip

Or how about this one:

I knew from previous nights that they'd spend a half-hour trying to work
EU,
then go back to work NA stations. So I set the VFO right on their freq,
and
when I heard "NW QRV NA DE W1BCG" I was first in line. Right back they
came:
"N2EY DE W1BCG"! A quick exchange, 73s, and then the pack descended
again. But
I had the QSO! And some time later, the special QSL - for the first and so
far only 160 meter QSO from N2EY.

I sold the fixed-up Viking 2 and VFO a year or two later, and moved away
from that QTH in 1999. Someday I'll get back on 160.

I enjoyed those, Jim. Note that some of our best memories have a certain
amount of frustration built into them.

"If it was easy, anybody could do it"

Here's another:

Even before I was a ham, I was reading QST because a local club had old copies
they'd lend out. One author really captured my imagination - W2LYH, whose
homebrew projects were incredible combinations of ingenuity, skill,
craftsmanship and performance. His 23 tube sectionalized communications
receiver (about 1961) and high-stability Franklin VFO (1971) are "must" reading
for ham homebrewers, just for the ideas presented. I wondered if I'd ever build
such projects, or ever meet Bob. His articles were constant inspiration and
Elmering, but I'd never met him or even heard him on the air.

My homebrew projects have long been designed around parts-on-hand or 'found
objects" rather than ordering new parts from catalogs. (New parts are more
expensive). For example, back in 1978 at the Rochester, NY hamfest a guy was
selling old Heath parts, and I found the one 3395 kHz CW filter in a box of SSB
ones. $5. Built a complete transceiver around that filter - the Southgate Type
6, which entered service about 1984.

About 10 years later, at the Gaithersburg fest, a different guy was selling
xtal filters that looked interesting. They were gray painted boxes with center
frequency of 1.4 MHz and bandwidth of 500 Hz. He only wanted 50 cents each so I
bought four, since he had no tech data on them.

Made some calls and soon had the specs. They were 8 pole filters with really
good numbers - much better than the 4 pole Heath unit. But were the ones I had
any good? Only way to know for sure was to build a receiver and listen to the
things.

So I cobbled together a simple 80 meter CW receiver out of junk box parts. One
of those "schematic in the noggin" things. Scraps of PC board and aluminum made
up the "chassis" and the VFO was from another project, retuned a bit to cover
the needed frequencies. This wasn't a practical receiver, its only purpose was
to check out the filters.

One Sunday night it was done and I started tuning around the band. Lots of good
signals, which is what you need to check out a filter. There was some kind of
contest/QSO party going on, which is the best testbed for new gear anyway. It
was soon clear that the 50 cent filters were really good performers - I should
have bought the whole box! Here was the next project for me - build a
transceiver around these new filters.

The contest turned out to be the SOWP QSO party (Society of Wireless Pioneers)
event, open only to members. Which explained why the signals sounded so good.

I was listening more to how the filters behaved than to what they were saying.
One particular signal was very strong and stable, so I used it to check out
unwanted-sideband rejection, skirt selectivity, etc. Finally I tuned it on the
nose and listened. He signed - W2LYH!

I ran over to the Type 6 and fired up. When he called CQ again I gave him a
buzz. He said he'd work me in a few minutes when the contest was over. It was a
long wait.

When the clock came around he called me and we had a nice long QSO. Yes, Bob
was still using the 23 tube sectionalized receiver and the Franklin VFO. He was
quite tickled to hear that I was a homebrewer and fan of his articles, and that
I'd found him on a homebrew test receiver.

I found out that he'd been both a professional and amateur radio operator for
many years. He was on Long Island because of RCA's installations at Riverhead.
And a lot more adventures. Which explained the SOWP connection, too.

We had many more homebrew-to-homebrew QSOs after that, exchanged QSLs and
letters.Oddly enough, after that initial QSO I ran into him quite often, purely
at random. He won the "Best Fist" award on Straight Key Night many times. He
introduced me to the magazine "Electric Radio", which published a version of
this story. Unfortunately, I never got to meet him, and I found out a while
back that he became a Silent Key in 2000.

RIP R.V. McGraw, W2LYH. One of my Elmers, though I never met him.

73 de Jim, N2EY