Jon, I'm pleased that you found my story of interest. I have just put together
another war story that I may post tomorrow. It concerns how the FCC saved
thousands of military personnel and more than 600 aircraft from ditching in the
sea between the mainland and Hawaii during WW2.

And yes, Jon, I remember the beer can article. A cute one, to say the least.

Walt

On Thu, 22 Sep 2005 14:58:59 -0400, J. Teske wrote:

Most interesting story. I suspect that this may have been the
precursor to CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service
(FIBS...pronounced by those in the trade as Fibbis). CIA has these
overt monitoring posts to pick up broadcasts from a whole host of
stations. These are transcribed and translated into English and put in
a daily summary. They are unclassified and freely disseminated at
least within government. They are quite distinct from monitoring for
intelligence purposes and totally different personnel participate. The
FBIS folks are often foreign nationals hired as contract workers and
as such do not participate in intelligence analysis or see
intelligence product (except for CIA's cleared managers.)

On a humorous note, early in my ham career about 50 years ago, there
was another kind of beverage antenna. CQ magazine published a story on
building a 40 meter vertical antenna by soldering end to end
sufficient numbers of beer cans to reach the required 32 feet. Beer
cans I guess were made of ferrous products back then (I was too young
to drink at the time.) Several letters to the editor pointed out that
the same thing could have been accomplished by 32 feet of aluminum
tubing which of course was true. I think the same article also had an
accompanying matching coil made out of semi-flexible copper tubing
which the author said he straightened out prior to coiling in the
appropriate size in what he described at "the time honored method."
What he did was secure one end of the tubing to a vise on a workbench
in his garage, secured the other end somehow (don't remember exactly
how he did this) to his automobile and then straightening the tubing
by slowly driving forward.

Several follow-on stories appeared following publication, most dealing
with the process of acquireing the requisite number of beer cans. One
author did what today we would call a blog as he tried to acquire the
cans all at once by drinking the contents. As the story progressed,
his written words became more and more unintelligible.

I am far too young to know about these WW II stories first hand (I was
born in 1942), but I did have a long career in Signals Intelligence
and I had heard some similar stories from my earliest supervisors,
most of whom were WW II veterans.

Thanks for sharing this with us.

Jon W3JT