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KB2VXA > CB 02.04.11 15:07l 65 Lines 3495 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 1043_VK6ZRT
Read: GUEST DK3UZ
Subj: Re: VE3WBZ > reply #1 (;->)
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Sent: 110402/1202Z @:VK6ZRT.#BUN.#WA.AUS.OC #:1043 [Boyanup] $:1043_VK6ZRT
From: KB2VXA@VK6ZRT.#BUN.#WA.AUS.OC
To : CB@WW
Hi Pete and all,
Since I mentioned myself and several CBers going on to ham you could say
that's where we cut our radio teeth and did a lot of experimenting. We
built a lot of acessories and antennas, one of the latter rather amazed
me. At the time I had a fiberglass dipole up about 30' which would have
been OK but for one thing, I lived in a dead spot. Yeah, coming around
the corner of my block signals faded down and my house was in the middle
of it. Anyway, I made a J-pole out of bell wire and TV twin lead, this
thing was way too big to even temporarily go on the roof so I tossed the
end up in a tree which left the bottom almost dragging on the ground.
Funny thing, signals were right up there far stronger than the dipole,
too bad it was so huge and I really didn't want to take it down but
parents don't like ugly things hanging in backyard trees or coax all over
the ground.
I agree, giving Master Control publicity can encourage copy cats but it
didn't in my area at least, we had vigilantes long before that mob
organized. What really irked me about the mags is they started endorsing
all sorts of illegal activities and publishing "how to" mods, many of
which caused interference so that's when I cancelled my subscriptions
being they became more garbage than CB. The long and short of it is I
have no interest sifting through garbage to find there is no meat to the
mag, then there is this ham mag that went from useful to ads and fluff
but I digress.
I never had a crystal defective from ther factory but one annoying thing
is the plated wafers have a bad habit of drifting with age. What ever
happened to the FT-243 pressure holders? You could do some amazing things
with those rocks and the best part was with a variable cap in the right
spot you could tweak them dead on frequency and they stayed there. Too
big and too expensive for CB I suppose.
Speaking of hill topping, it became one of my favorite things once I got
the VXAmobile together. One odd experience, atop Mount Mitchell in
Highlands which happens to be the highest spot along the Atlantic Coast
overlooking NYC and Long Island I found a parrot. I was calling on 146.52
and heard something faint in the distance and thinking it was a reply
tried several times to make contact. Then I realized it had the same
pattern as my transmissions so I ran a confirmation test, turned out I
was talking to myself. Some dope put a simplex repeater on the 2M calling
frequency! <grrr> If that wasn't bad enough, a few years later some lid
put linked repeaters on all the VHF/UHF calling frequencies making them
quite userless. What really torched me off was his attitude, he told
complainers where to get stuffed but I think the Amateur version of
Master Control finally put a stop to it.
Oh, you reminded me that my first "skip" contact was in 1964 too, a year
before I was licensed. A friend had a Polycomm Poly 23 (the forerunner of
the Courrier) AND A "Scanner" antenna, an electronically rotatable 3
dipole phased array. Since activity was sparse back then and the
Caribbean was in solid I had a nice chat for a couple of minutes before
handing him off. FYI, SELCAL is nothing new, Poly was one of the first to
use selective tone calling but like the rest Polycall didn't catch on.
73 de Warren
Station powered by JCP&L atomic energy, operator powered by natural gas.
Message timed by NIST: 11:50 on 2011-Apr-02 GMT
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