On Sun, 7 Sep 2008, raypsi wrote:

On Sep 6, 9:03*pm, wrote:
They didn't do away with Morse Code. They did away with the test
for
it. It was done a little at a time over the past 30 years.
hey jim:
Sorry I wasn't talking Morse code, .
Real Morse code nobody knows. That is lost already gone kaput history.
Vail invented the code you so aptly call Morse, So it's not real Morse
code
it's Vail code. What is really lost: everybody still calls it Morse
code.

I think I could make some money fire up the ole solar powered kiln and
start growing quartz.
I break out that old ARRL handbook that tells you exactly how to cut
the crystals
for the desired frequencies and sell them for 50 cent apiece.
I'd make so much money in volume sales.

Nobody has ground their crystals from scratch since about the 1930's,
if even then. I've been licensed since 1972 and in all the time since
then I've never seen anything about it, not in magazines and books
going back to the late 1940's and not in more recent material. I do
recall the 1964 article in QST about a buy in SOuth America who made
his own tubes.

Go back far enough, and hams just needed crystals within the band.
They had relatively little need for exact frequencies.

I suspect even if the Handbook did give such details at one time,
little bits may be lost since when something is current, "everyone
knows" things that may not be obvious to someone who comes later.

Now, they need them on exact frequencies, and they want them in
nice small packages, none of those FT-243 ones that were held together
with pressure.

Even if you can so easily grind a piece of quartz to frequency, packaging
them will be problematic, since a sealed metal case is going to be a lot
more trouble than an FT-243 package.


Michael VE2BVW