RadioBanter - View Single Post

January 12th 05, 12:12 AM

In article . com,
(James Psychochief Miccolis, Kommandant uf
das Neugruppen Waffe) writes:

Or perhaps it's an attempt to bring others down to his level, get them
fighting with each other, etc.

Tsk, tsk, I'm not needed for such infighting. You lads do right
fine all by yourselves. :-)

Consider that Len is not a ham, has never been one, and probably
never will be one. He isn't even very knowledgeable about Part 97,
as illustrated by his ignorance of 97.21(b).

So why is he preaching to the FCC and the online world about
how ham radio should be? He won't tell us his motivation.

Well, Herr Gruppekommandant, it's time to "show you my papers"
and confess all -

Way back in prehistory of 1952 (der kommandant didn't exist
then), I had these terrible thoughts of Patriotism and stuff,
hadn't been to the sacred halls of ivy yet, and thought to volunteer
my body for Army service.

Ya see, as a poor ignorant soul, nobody had told me my body is
SO precious that I shouldn't put it in harm's way like volunteering
for the military when there was an actual War (shudders) On. We
had several hams in my home town but nobody thought to Elmer
me on being "able to serve in 'other' ways." That was the first
mistake.

The second mistake was the Army assigning me to Signal School
for a rarely-heard-of MOS called Microwave Radio Relay. (remember
that 1952 was, after all, "prehistory") Hams all knew that there was
only black magic above 30 MHz and that no REAL hams found it
useful. The rest of the radio world didn't matter...only REAL hams
knew what was good in radio and what was not.

The Army did a third mistake! They assigned me to an Army radio
station in Tokyo. One of those "small" places with only about 36
HF transmitters that was in operation 24/7 and serving the Far
East Command Headquarters. Microwave radio relay equipment
installation had been delayed by a year or so so I had to learn all
about high-power HF transmitters, how to operate them, how to do
maintenance on them, how to fix them when they went bad. Plus
the essentials of HF networking, TTY-RTTY, the original SSB, along
with VHF and UHF radio relay operation and maintenance that the
Army eventually replaced with microwaves.

In the midst of all that, I compounded the mistake by trying to LEARN
and do better at what I did. Shame on me. I should have read the
ARRL publications a lot more than I had. The Army wasn't using
any morse code whatsoever in carrying massive message traffic
across the Pacific! Maybe the ARRL was already falling down on
the Lobbying job because they had NO effect on the Signal Office,
USA! Lots of very olde-tyme hammes were sitting around shaking
their heads at the stupidity of the U.S. military for not using more
morse code mode in the 1950s! [it's a wonder hams didn't march
on the Pentagon to demand More CW!]

Tsk. The Mistakes didn't stop. I got a commercial radio operator's
license so that I could make some money in broadcasting before
moving to the sunbelt (I choice of Florida or California depending on
the art school). I've been told that I NEED TO GET A HAM LICENSE
FIRST in order to SHOW INTEREST IN RADIO! Except I remained
ignorant since nobody TOLD ME that back then.

So, getting accepted at Art Center School of Design (to be an
industrial illustrator), I'm also working at Hughes Aircraft Company
doing environmental testing. More new techniques to learn and be
good at, but, unfortunately, ARRL didn't have any useful literature
to Elmer me in that. Morsemanship wasn't needed in environmental
testing, or in radar sets (HAC El Segundo made military airborne
radars then). It might shock some to know that 20 WPM morse skill
isn't needed for 10g vibration testing and the temperature extremes
aren't found in ham shacks, except maybe Antarctica where hams
were supposedly the only link to the outside world (according to
the League). Had I become a ham and advanced to Extra, I no
doubt would have KNOWN all those things just by the license
grant (an epiphany) but I had to listen to other, non-hams, some
with degrees, some without, all working IN the aerospace industry.

Well, since HAC wasn't pioneering any morsemanship on HF
methods, the usual aerospace halts and groans caused a halt in
some salaries. I moved over to Ramo-Wooldridge and work in
Electronic Warfare systems (such as on the Quail decoy missle,
a weird little MacDonnell airbreather that could electronically
imitate one or more B-52s). No morsemanship needed there at
all, not even anything on HF! [must have been an oversight of
both Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge when they got Thompson
Products backing to start what would eventually grow into TRW]
I'm sure that Simon, Dean, and the USAF wasn't listening to
ARRL advice on radio as to what was the "best" for all. More
mistakes and more prominent ones too!

In late 1958 several more mistakes happened. I changed major
to electrical engineering from illustration. I was way to confused to
continue on an absolute straight-and-narrow immaculate path of
life and decided to be an engineer instead of illustrator (an artist
who depicts things as they really are). The FCC created the Class
C and D Citizens Band Service, a TOTALLY HORRIBLE MISTAKE
by them that shall be cursed to the end of time by all REAL hams,
the morsemen of the apocaleptic. Imagine! NO morse code skill
needed for ordinary citizens to get ON HF radio, not even any TEST
at all! Even worse was an individual changing their career goals
before their education is completed! HORRORS.

Oh, the mistakes get worse. I bought a Johnson Viking CB
transceiver and got a CB license...and could do only about 8 WPM
morse, if that. Several tried to verbally horse-whip me on that but
I got away. Worked great in the all-aluminum body '53 Austin-
Healey sports car, tooled around southern Cal talking to other
mistake-prone evil grownups who used HF without a valid morse
test! American-made CB radios! Talk about prehistoric times!
Law-breakers all, no shame, sort of like the Old West.

I know its hard to believe but USA university curricula do NOT
require any morsemanship or being-licensed-in-amateur-radio-to
show-interest-in-radio!!! Lots of college students in both day and
night classes were interested but, sadly, without that REQUISITE
ham license FIRST in order to show their interest. BIG mistake.
Done by all the little colleges out here...UCLA, USC, Berkeley,
you know, tha small ones without the ivy all over.

Tsk. More mistakes beginning early, like high-fidelity music
interest since high school. Instead of wanting to listen to good
sound, I should have worked very hard at perceiving the "music
of morse" (monotonal, aperiodic). My contemporaries liked to
hear the false music of symphonies and jazz bands. Shame on
us. We knew no better than to trust our own senses.

Then personal computing! Absolutely NO relationship to morse
or pioneering HF radio by working DX with morsemanship. We
hedonistic number-loving infidels went beyond the limited ranges of
"73" and "599" to enable the PC boom to explode in the late 1970s.
We should have spent our time in monastaries of morse copying
the treasures of Hiram's writings and REAL morse code, not the
graven images of source or assembler code of the false gods such
as the ACM or the IBM of Armonk. We sinned mightily and forsake
the divine ordained religious leaders at the holy city of Newington.

Yes, we infidels denigrating the True Calling should have worked our
morsemanship and pioneered the airwaves for Telstar, microwaves
across the continents, the communications satellites giving us
near-instant communications across the globe, the Deep Space
Network, Men ON the Moon televised live, the Internet, the cellular
telephone...all of which use absolutely NO morsemanship to devise
or build or perfect. We all had FALSE MOTIVATION.

Yes, it's a mighty CONSPIRACY against the amateur morsemen,
begun before most of them existed, deliberately kept up to humiliate
them and keep them from perfecting the Antique Radiotelegraphic
Society (ARS) of the United States. We are all WORKING AGAINST
YOU MORSEMEN in a titanic struggle for power (but only in news-
groups) and THREATENING YOUR MIGHTY EGOS!

It was all a mistake. An evil, antichrist-sort of mistake, compounded
many times, deliberately aimed at all those mighty macho morse-
men in this newsgroup. We have defiled your divine wishes, holy
fathers. We ask no penance, no absolution for our sins (or sines).

We answer to a Higher Order, not to your demands. Go thee and
perform auto-intercourse.