From: jawod on Sun, Aug 13 2006 8:16 am


an old friend wrote:
Al Klein wrote:
On 12 Aug 2006 10:10:55 -0700, "an old friend" wrote:


Anyway,,
Back in the old days, we used to walk 5 miles in the snow to the FCC
field office to take our exams.

You forgot: "uphill both ways, barefoot..."

We had to kneel on radiators while we
took the test. We used slide rules and crayons AND WE LIKED IT!!!

You are still using crayons but I doubt you know how to
use a 1950 slide-rule...too complex for brass-pounders.

Oh, and FCC Field Offices were NOT 10 miles apart in the USA
now, in 1956 (when I took a train 80 miles into Chicago), nor
before then.

Then we'd wait 3 years to receive our license which gave us time to
teach electrons to enter and exit all the tubes...stupid little buggers,
those.

Wrongo, olde-fahrt. Electrons, fields, and waves will ONLY
obey THEIR rules. You can't "teach" them anything. All you
can do is provide paths for them...on THEIR terms.

Boy, those were the days. When a ham was a ham, brass was for pounding
and AM signals were as wide as the day is long.

That was well before 1960...like before WW2.

These "young" whippersnappers get off too easy.

Pizza off, olde-fahrt. 51 years ago I would be walking a mile
from a corner of an airfield NE of Tokyo to the transmitter
house in the center which housed 41 HF transmitters ranging
in power output from 1 KW to 40 KW. Not a single one of
them used manual (morse code) radiotelegraphy modes. About
two square miles of wire antennas doing 24/7 radio circuit
transmission to CONUS, Hawaii, Phillippines, Okinawa, Korea,
and a MAG in Vietnam. Six of those circuits used multichannel
SSB (the commercial variety, like in-use prior to WW2).

I STARTED that HF transmitter site work in '53, NO military
schooling on kilowatt transmitters, RTTY, or SSB and NO
"CW" skill necessary.

I say, rank priveleges on the basis of how big an RF burn you can take,
or on the basis of personal weight.

Sounds like you had TOO MANY of those "RF burns."

See Dr. Robeson in here...he will bandage your "burns" with
one of his medical-practice certificates...those are sterile.


I may have said it befo take the FCC out of it completely and go with
the FDA. Those boys know how to grade.

"Ham is the butchered meat of swine?"

Last guy I heard utter that phrase is SK...used to work with him
(he was a code-tested Extra)...he came out with that every once
in a while when some amateur morseman got too full of himself.

(Too much tea this morning!)

Try a detox program, okay? QRT.