In article , Leo
writes:


ARRL is 90 years old and they have not had much turnover at Hq.
That leads to "cronyism" in Hq and a resultant status-quo thinking
which has contributed to their lack of getting new membership.
St. Hiram hisself remained president since day one until he got too
old to show up at the office. Dave Sumner is "executive president"
and isn't votable out of office.

While there is a BoD at the ARRL, the publications arm takes its
direction direct from Hq staff. That leads to a concentration of
who-runs-what to the Newington group despite all the self-promotion
of "democratic principle" BoD "discussions." That publishing arm
is a mighty strong venue for getting readers to think the way the
Hq advisers say they should. Not that many publications left for
radio amateurs down here.

and just one here except for the bi-monthly RAC nagazine.......the
other options are QST and CQ.

Nothing from the RSGB? :-)

Never seen a single RSGB publication on the newsstands so far! The
Brits do seem to have a monopoly on the electronics hobby magazines,
though, since the last North American one went belly up years ago.

Electronics hobbyists, as a general group, have shied away from
"ham radio" in terms of monthly periodicals. That started roughly
three decades ago as hobbyists found lots more fun things to do
pushing electrons around.

Other than a certain membership magazine on this side of the globe
there is only CQ for hams. Popular Communications isn't just for
hams (and many hate that). There's still the off-shoots from Radio
Craft and Radio Electronics News (as they were once called) but
Popular Electronics and company rather restrict themselves to
little electronics projects. Reminiscent of the "Tuna Tin 2" and the
"Herring Aid" kind of thing.

Oddly enough, model aircraft flying has continued unabated and
almost totally embraced radio-control for both pleasure and
competition. Those old model magazines are still around plus a
couple concentrating on R/C. AMA membership is still as many
as in the ARRL but has never been pretentious about what the
model flyers do. AMA has finished its Hq with museum in Ohio.

Good construction plans, though pretty difficult to build without
wearing out the NTE substitution manual finding equivalents to all of
the European semiconductors......

That's getting to be a nuisance for the electronics industry as well.

Semi makers had reached impasse after impasse in the non-PC
field of electronics plus the off-shore semiconductor industry doing
big dents in specialty ICs. For example National Semiconductor
sold off its entire line of digital ICs to Fairchild. Motorola semi
split off into ON and Freescale (rather strange logo names?) but kept
a tiny part of their old product group. Intersil cut about a third of
their products. ST and Philips have long lists of discontinued part
numbers. Lansdale is in business of acquiring rights to and all
masks for certain legacy ICs, is keeping solvent. Lots and lots
of industry realignment in product lines. "Silicon foundaries" are
doing good making specialty semi products in big lots for OEMs,
all with house numbers.

Some on-line vendors are offering legacy devices as competitive
prices. Jameco is one. Jameco's products are sold to electronics
hobbyists, i.e. non-hams for the most part. They and JDR in the
San Francisco Bay area have been hanging in for a quarter century
doing that. Other on-line vendors that were once "ham radio"
product oriented have all added on non-ham electronics parts, just
to stay in business from my estimation.

J.W.Miller was once a source for all sorts of good "radio" parts that
had coil windings. IF cans to "shortwave coil sets" to slug-tuned
coils and blank forms. All of those left the Miller line-up (J.W.Miller
is a long-time Los Angeles company). Demand for those old "radio
parts" just evaporated and Miller had to change its line before it was
time.

Concentration of information dissemination is a very sharp two-
edged sword. The bad edge is that minimalization of venues
is a wonderful gift for those who would wish to dictate the proper
way to think and act. Those who publish periodicals control
everything in those publications. Everything.

Absolutely - a fact that is exploited in dictatorial countries - the
state controls the press.....the only news is what the state wants the
people to hear.

For the prposs of this group, the state seems to be CT

Heh!


Where I am (Toronto), the weather is pretty much the same as Northern
Illinois. There's much worse places to be........

Agreed. :-)


USA still doesn't have any LF ham bands, yet other countries do.
ARRL apparently doesn't want to get involved in computer code,
only morse code. Their foray into PC-compatible circuit analysis
went DEFUNCT when "Radio Designer" selling was stopped. Tsk.
[they couldn't call it a SPICE program which it was, but then they
use different names for circuits and things that the rest of the
electronics industry uses...SPICE core is absolutely free for
anyone to use]

I have a copy of the ARRL Radio Designer program - not bad, and pretty
easy to use. It's unfortunate that they didn't keep that up!

Considering their contacts with long-time members, it's a wonder
they didn't get someone to use the SPICE core routines (free, no
copyright) and make their own "screen wrapper" routines. That's
how ALL of the commercial SPICE programs got started.

Roy Lewallen did a wonderful job taking the NEC core and wrapping
it with good I/O, display routines, then selling it as a package
called EZNEC (or whatever derivatives he has now). Roy is a long-
time ham, also an industry veteran (of Tektronix). NEC or Numerical
Electromagnetic Code was devised in Monterey, CA, by the USN
and, as a government work, isn't copyrightable.

Nowadays, they publish deeply technical articles that illustrate how
to replace a #47 bulb with an LED

Heh. Maybe in the early 1980s (late 1970s?) I chanced on a CQ
"construction article" (at best a half page as I remember it) on how
to make an electric cigarette lighter for the shack...use a 12 VAC
transformer and an auto ligher and socket in a handy box. Very
"technical." :-)

QEX, still a bimonthly, was augmented by Communications
Quarterly a few years ago. CommQuart got started on left-overs
from CQ buying Ham Radio magazine and all its rights. About the
only North American ham radio specialty technical publication is
QEX now but I will predict it will eventually go downhill like
CommQuart did a few years after the CQ purchase.


Ben Tongue, co-founder of the Blonder-Tongue CATV company,
found a niche hobby in (of all things) "crystal sets." In his
pages on the Blonder-Tongue website he's done SPICE analysis
on various ways to hook up that awfully complicated, non-active-
device crystal receiver. :-)

Didn't know that - I'll have a look on the B-T site!

There's a logo name for ya...Blonder-Tongue! :-)

B-T got started in the mid-1950s with a premiere item that was
a UHF converter for existing VHF TV sets. Did right well at it.
B-T saw the "community cable TV" scene coming early and went
into that, made their big money in it. Cable TV equipment is a
specialty field but there's a LOT of it installed out there. All the
"pole equipment" has to withstand terrible environmental stuff yet
last and last.

But...cable TV "isn't 'real' ham radio" since it is above the
precious HF spectrum, can't "work DX" or have QSL cards. :-)

However, their spectrum occupancy is better than two decades
wide with terrible intermodulation problems (from all those
channels carried at once) and it must be reliable 24/7...the
stations and cable providers are and customers depend on that.


heh heh heh...I'm waiting for one of my "fan club" to make more
trashmouth about that... :-)

Won't be long now, I'll bet!

Didn't take them but a short time over our holiday weekend. :-)

I was gone but the "fans" were busy, busy, busy making me into
some radioactive Antichrist. :-)

Well, this wouldn't be the same old familiar place if they didn't!

I suppose so. :-)

It wouldn't be so bad in here if the PCTA extras weren't so die-hard.
None of them resemble Bruce Willis. :-)


No xerography machines back then. U.S. military made
copies by first "cutting stencils" for mimeographing. Paper
was acidic and didn't last more than 30 years or so before
crumbling in open air. More better was the paper roll from
teleprinters with use-once flimsy carbon paper. Paper tape
lasted longest of all, could repro exactly via a p-tape reading
teleprinter.

Yup - I remember using one of the old Gestetner spirit duplicating
machines back in public school. It worked, but wasn't
pretty.....mimeographs were much better!

The origin of the old military phrase "cut orders" (for somebody to
do something) derives from those mimeograph stencils...using
manual typewriters with the carbon ribbon temporarily removed
or lifted. The typewriter type ends literally cut into the stencil.

Started in before WW2 times. It worked. When there was no
xerography yet, it was best for small repro jobs rather than getting
over to an offset press.

But...some radio amateurs insist and insist and insist that ALL
new radio amateurs MUST learn morse code to get that license.
Otherwise they "aren't real amateurs."
:-)

Time marches on, however - and mandatory Morse will go with it. Morse
has been with us for a long, long time - but its time has come.

What you mean by "us," kimosabe? :-)

The whole reason I brought up my military experience at ADA was
that military radio did NOT use morse for any fixed-point to fixed-
point traffic...from 1948 onwards. In 1955 the monthly message
traffic at ADA was about 220,000 or roughly 7300 every 24-hour
period, 2400 every 8-hour shift. And that was for only the third
largest station in the Army Command and Administrative Network
(ACAN). Washington Army Radio (WAR...appropriate callsign)
did one and a quarter million messages per month!

There's just NO way that manual morsemanship could handle
that sort of traffic without way too many soldiers devoted to
nothing but morse. For 24-hour duty there would be at least
three shifts working. Machinery would be needed to relay all
those morse things efficiently on a 24/7 basis. Inefficient.

Prior to my military assignment at ADA, I'd bought into the myth
that "real radiomen" would be good at radiotelegraphy. Got a
rude shock with sudden immersion into reality of the day a half
century ago. Was NOT used! Teleprinter was king then. I did
some rapid realignment of thinking, threw out lots of old myths,
applied myself. Teleprinter WORKED. Very well, too.

I'd bet that 20 years from now, people will still be using Morse on
the bands. Not because the want to be 'real hams' - but because they
are interested in it as a communications protocol. Or a curiosity.

I have nothing against that. Lots of folks are into recreating old
times...such as re-enacting our Civil War or (shudder) our old
Revolutionary War. :-)

I'm against the requirement that radio hobbyists MUST learn
morsemanship - at any rate - in order to be authorized an amateur
radio license. That's nonsense.

I sure won't buy into the absurd idea that anyone "must do the
tests that olde-tymers took" to somehow "prove themselves and
their dedication to ham radio." Nonsense. Self-glorification by
the olde-tymers with a large dose of self-righteousness.

The very best stagecoaches are made today, either in southern
California or Arizona (depending on which guild/craft one talks to
in the movie industry). Reliable, long-lasting, made with the best
materials, driven by seasoned drivers/handlers. Looks good in
the western moom pitchas. But, not a single working stagecoach
line in the country going city to city today. Been a long time since
that was fact. Licensed public transport drivers do NOT need to
demonstrate stagecoach or horse handling now. :-)

As far as I'm concerned with USA radio laws, the U.S. amateur
radio service below 30 MHz has always been called 'ARS' ...for
Archaic Radiotelegraphy Service. De facto if not de jure.

It's way past time for that nonsense morsemanship test
requirement to go.

My best wishes to the Radio Amateurs of Canada for modernization
of their own rules and regulations!