For all you hams who are boaters...

I plan on using this on my boat this coming summer so I can have HF capability for contesting - rare grid squares don't 'cha know.

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Eisboch

Eisboch

I was so excited about it that I forgot my call sign at the time.

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Just not my cup of tea.

Although somebody close to me would much prefer it to zipping along.

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Let's not make me sick saying "Ipod". Let's say MP3 players. Ah, that's better. Ipods suck but are expertly marketed....

Will go faster than 10 knots.

Damn straight. :>)

Currently, my shack consists of a FT-1000 D with the narrow filters, Henry 2KD amp highly modified, a FT-900 as a back up radio with external DSP, KAM, computer and key. I keep the microphone in the drawer.

Antenna farm is also pretty simple - Vertical 2m, R3 for listening on the house, TH-11 @ 105 feet, two fixed 20 monobanders one at 60 feet and one at 90 feet, a true Beverage out through the woods for low bands (1600 feet) and two G5RVs NW/SE and NE/SW @ 60 feet.

Back in the day though.. :>)

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I mean, none of these kids will ever know the excitement of loading up a 100 watt light bulb as a dummy load and working a ham 100 miles away by accident. :>)

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The old guys hung around Jerry's stove one Saturday morning, as they did EVERY Saturday morning since before WW2, and finally decided if they ever wanted to get to use their own stations, again, they'd better get us our own ham licenses and build some Novice stations for us to take home.

For weeks, on Jerry's tired old wooden workbench I can still visualize piled up with the residue of years of building and repairing junk, they pulled stuff out of Jerry's attic warehouse, tore apart priceless WW2 equipments and we each ended up with a homebrew novice transmitter (5Y3 rectifier and a 6V6 xtal oscillator/power amp with plugin coils lovingly hand wound for 80, 40 and 15 meters. An assortment of huge old Navy and Army crystals materialized that us boys used to swap amoungst ourselves so we could move across the bands to new territories without encroaching onto the old ham's off-limits DX. 15 watts, TV twinlead balanced feeders to 3 folded dipoles, also made of TV twinlead Jerry must have had 10 miles of on various spools and we were on the air! Several old, not-so- stable receivers, like my Hallicrafters Sky Buddy, came to us after some feelers put out on the central NY 75 meter AM phone net. Many old hams responded with receivers, parts, coils-to-drool-over for exotic antenna tuners....mostly built on scraps of 2X4s our mothers were terrified of because they had seen some of our more famous flashovers and arcs or exploding 6V6s. (If the plate falls into the grounded beam forming plates it takes out the 5Y3, too. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.)

I wore the dial cord out on the Sky Buddy more than once scanning for DX. I also was moved from my bedroom to my fathers garage in a little heated room he made for my hamshack so they could get some sleep at night away from my whooping and ranting from working some Russian or Japan or other exotic place. I remember causing quite a stir in 5th grade by bringing in my first QSL card from a Russian, via the Moscow Radio Club at KGB headquarters, of course. That was on 15M Novice CW about 1957. I was already famous for bringing in cards and letters from WOM, WCC, NSS, etc. confirming my copying (sometimes better than they could) some ship comms to the shore stations on the old marine bands. That's where I learned how to copy CW to get my license. (I didn't know until I heard the code machine that Morse was supposed to be sent WITHOUT the chirping from the ship's nasty CW transmitter jumping frequency.)

Of course, this sealed my fate in school as a smartass and none of the girls would have anything to do with me....unless their record player wasn't working, of course. (This hasn't changed since I was 12. They still call me only to fix something.) Such is our fate....It's all ham radio's fault, you know...(c;

I built a homebrew back in the 70's when an unlimited supply of 4-1000A tetrodes became available from a broadcast biz run by a friend. Lots of stations were converting to ceramic tubes in those days.

The amp was in a WW2 Navy M series rack that was about 7' high and 24" wide. Power supply was a 7200V, 5KVA pole pig running off the output of a 30A, 240VAC Variac marked "Plate Kilovolts" to match the 270 degree GE monster meters up on the power amp module. A pair of 6080 power tubes provided a nicely regulated screen power supply because, unlike most hams that hook them up in grounded grid for simplicity, I was bound to use them as they were intended, tetrode AB1, common cathode. A regulated fixed grid bias supply had a front panel control marked "IDLE CURRENT". The grid input circuit was a 200 watt carbon pile of resistors at 52 ohms, cooled by the fan pressurizing the chassis of the power amp module, which blew up through the two 4-1000A proper airflow sockets into their nice chimneys....all very commercial quality. A screen-shielded window in the front of the amp module let you watch the pair of 4-1000As in action.

Filament current for two tubes meant unwinding the secondaries off a big 240VAC primary transformer and winding my own to provide that much stable current. A security keyswitch on the front panel and two 240VAC air conditioner contactors provided primary power control. Coaxial relays on the amp provided antenna changeover control. There was even an antenna selection rotary relay with 6 outputs selectable from the front panel of the amp. My favorite antenna was a 75 meter full wave loop strung horizontally between 4 perfectly-place oak trees in my neighbor's pasture he kept horses in next door, one of the trees right over my hamshack.

The power amp had a WW2 Navy rotary inductor with front panel turns counter. The coil was square conductor about 1/8" square cross section an about 8" in diameter. I never had it on 160M, but it would tune down to the top of the AM broadcast band, easily. Plate tuning cap of this shunt-fed pi output matching was a 30KV, 30A, 1500pf vacuum variable. Output cap was an open air beast in 2 sections that came out of the antenna tuning unit of a 5KW AM station that went dark, as did my rectifier stack and filter chokes. Fed up with blowing the coupling capacitor from the plates to the output pi, a rather large .01uf, 30A, 15KV broadcast ceramic cap was refitted. The others I had melted, not flashed over...(c;

Of course, all this was overkill running it at 1KW on the ham bands, even 100% duty cycle on 20M RTTY for hours on end. I'm not a real math wiz when it comes to calculating plate power, especially in the heat of workin' some rare DX on a Pacific island that only is out of the water at low tide, hmm.....950ma, 6200VDC....lessee....yeah, that's pretty close to a kilowatt in, right?....(c; Hearing the 5KVA power transformer that ran THREE houses buzzing away when it was on the air, I called the stupid rural electric coop to warn them before it exploded. They poo-pooed my request for more amps, but became believers when I blew the bottom out of the transformer, setting an oil fire that burned up the whole pole to the ground! A new pole and 15KVA beast seemed to cure the problem. I told them my neighbor had a new hot water heater...(c;

You could get about 3500 W out of it with 10 watts of drive into the grid dummy load resistor. It was so high gain I added a "volume control" pot marked "GRID DRIVE" so you could turn the input power up to a more easily manageable level for a 100W transceiver, then adjust the drive to what you needed...minimum power, of course....and that prevented those impressive flashovers unwanted modulation peaks created when you were trying NOT to overdrive it running 10W from a 100W radio.

The crowning moment was when I came into the local ham club meeting with a 2' section of completely melted RG-8 coax soon after building it. You could see the smile on my face miles away...(c; One of our members was chief engineer of another AM station that had an end-fed halfwave on 1220 Khz. He used RG-17A/U to feed it at that high voltage and gave me a few hundred feet of 17A claiming I couldn't melt it. He was right...

About 10 years later, I moved to smaller quarters in Florida and sold that amp to a North Carolina CBer who had been drooling over it for years for $3500. I gave him 8 sets of 4-1000As in the deal, knowing he was going to blow them trying to be king of the hill on CB...(c;

That was my last big amp....The next amp I had was the best one ever made, a National NCL-2000 2KW desk amp with a pair of 8122 ceramic tetrodes from RCA hooked up, also, as proper tetrode amps, common cathode. Hams never learned how to properly tune them for SCREEN CURRENT, not plate current, and blew lots of 8122s in the process. Properly tuned, a desktop NCL2000 was has loud as a Collins or Henry floor amp and would also operate on RTTY for hours without exploding at a kilowatt. I've kicked myself ever since for selling it to W4ZMZ, a Baptist preacher who lost the amp in a fire. What a waste....(snif)

Carrier on my signal? No problem(c; I used to tell them I was rotating my 75M tower array around as I cranked up the big variac with my foot. "How's that? Can you hear me over his carrier, now?", I'd ask. My buddy a hundred miles away said I was the only one on the air that could pin the S-meter on his Collins 75S3-B...

Can you say "EMP", without cursing this time?

I worked a guy in Arizona on 146.52 simplex from the top of Paris Mountain in Greenville, SC, with it...(c; He was running his moonbounce station around 30KW ERP at the time...4 stacked KLM 15 element yagis and a kilowatt GE FM amp. Nice station for 2M.

The Gonset had a 4X150 in it when I got it. We built it a voltage doubler to raise the plate up for the 250B and put newfangled silicon transistors in the power switcher for more amps. Man that was a nice amp....useless today.

WA4USN, the club station aboard the Aircraft Carrier Yorktown (CV-10) in Charleston Harbor, uses a Butternut HF-6V bolted to the handrail of the "World's Largest Ground Plane". Man, that thing radiates like mad!...(c;

Along with the fighting chair, outriggers and tuna tower. :>)

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They just don't make them like they used to.

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I have German relatives who were hams before the war - had their radios confiscated for much the same reason.

Like a German Uboat would ever show up in Lake Michigan. :>)

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Eisboch

My boat doesn't even plane at 10 knots.

Whoof...

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I can't tell you how many times I've had faster boats flying by me, only to see them tied up at the next fuel dock as we go by.

We get to pick when and where we refuel. Only one stop required between SWFL and CT, carefuly selected for best price.

Larry used a Butternut rigged to the top of the bridge with the Yaesu rig on his desk in the master's stateroom. Worked great and I set him up on packet/APRS many, many years ago. I've lost track of him, now, but used to track him on 20M APRS unless he was chatting away on the phone bands.

The first time I was in his stateroom, I had to use the head. When I came out of the captain's private head, I had an amused look on my face. He asked me what was so funny. I said, "I'm an old enlisted sailor. Do you know what they would have done to me if they'd caught me coming out of the captain's head?!" Then he told me he was enlisted, too, when he was in the Navy. Too funny....

Oh ... thanks for posting those CG freqs. That will be fun to play with as the weather gets colder.

Eisboch

I was very pleased with myself when the code speed came up to snuff. I'm still 10 wpm short of 100% copy at 55 wpm which is my comfort zone in sending - it will take a little time to get it back.

It should be fun operating off the boat this summer. The last time I went Maritime Mobile in a UHF contest, I had pileups wanting both my prefix and grid square.

And I need to concentrate on what the new boat is going to be. I'd prefer to operate from a cabin rather than an open center console. :>)

>Oh ... thanks for posting those CG freqs. That will be fun to play with as >the weather gets colder.

They can be fun. Two winters ago, I was listening to USCG New Orleans coordinating aircraft with USCG Houston looking for a fishing boat that went astray.

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Eisboch

Hey, listen around enough you might even get the bug - who knows. :>)

There are a couple of amateur cruising services on 20 meters - one that operates from Germany and one from the UK that follow cruisers all around the world. They give out wx forecasts, report on wx conditions and all sorts of cruising coordination.

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I learned code back in the Navy. It wasn't used much anymore, but we still had to learn it. To pass the course we had to do 20 wpm minimum with no more than 1 or two mistakes IIRC. I passed with 35 wpm. Right now I doubt I could do the alphabet in 10 minutes and would still need a book.

Eisboch

A lot of people don't know this, but learning the code, you've passed the test. When you learn the code, it's actually at 5 wpm, a little closer to 7 wpm actually.

Funny thing about code. When the USCG finally put code to bed and out of service, they had this big ceremony out where the old Marconi station was on the Cape - whole big last transmission - Auld Lang Syne - never more to be used - I have a copy of the last transmission and a certificate from the USCG about the last transmission (you had to copy it and send in the transcript) - big deal - historical, blah, blah, blah. Ten minutes later, USCG signed off with SK and that was that.

In theory.

Half hour later, SOS from a freighter off the coast of Alaska and rescue operations coordinated.

In Morse. :>)

During one of our patrols in the Med on a DE a radioman inadvertently shredded the key codes for the crypto gear during a mid-watch. He didn't fess up right away and therefore all codes had to be considered compromised. (He finally admitted his guilt)

Meanwhile, they couldn't use the secure HF TTY, so they rousted the old seasoned Radioman Chief out of his rack and he had to set up and send encrypted CW for about 4 hours. It took him at least an hour just to raise somebody. I was dragged out of my rack because nobody could figure out how to set the transmitter up for CW. (I figured it out, but it was the first and last time I ever had to do that).

The CO was not a happy camper.

Definitely dates me though. I don't think they even use HF anymore.

Eisboch

You could run 3 rigs at the same time with air conditioning and the 20kw genset wouldn't even be breathing hard. :-)

Sure hope it works better than it used to. Something that expensive shouldn't just suck so bad....

If I keyed both TBKs at full power, I could load the M-G sets enough to actually drop our head pressure...(c;

You boys need CW or AM to shore on MF or HF, just let me know what freq. After she's tuned up, it's best to keep your bare hands away from the shrouds on the mast. Don't wanna see anybody get burned....(c; On some freqs, they'd turn the air blue around the longwires at night in the wet.

Rock and Roll radio in Charleston was WTMA on 1250 Khz. My fav test freq used to be 1253, which made a nice hi-pitched note on any radios on deck.

Antennas were long wires between the king post crossarms with a vertical component down to big brown ceramic feedthroughs into Radio Two, aft superstructure. Inside the transmitter shack, RF ran in a box trunk on 3/4" copper tubing, unbalanced to the antenna tuner atop the TBx transmitters. On 4 Mhz, I could easily pin the antenna current meters and had great reports from hams and Charleston Test Control on 2150 Khz, even from half way to the Med.

Many times the old girls with the bright filaments had good signals ashore when the new Collins AN/URC-32s sending 500W to their 35' whips could barely be heard ashore or afloat. We had one FSK unit, I don't remember the model, that would give one of the 3 big transmitters FSK capability, fed by the crypto machines in Radio Central, KWR-7 and 37s.

BM deck techs were terrified of them after one BMSN took the grounding strap off a turnbuckle to clog it with paint and got his hands burned. They'd always call me, after that, to coordinate when they would be properly secured with a working aloft chit.

After the transmitters were trashed by our pencil pusher RM teletype operators, causing these old manually tuned transmitters grief, I made a deal with the comm officer. I took over Radio 2 and had the ONLY key. If he needed a freq I wasn't already up on during the night, they got me out of my rack to retune in minutes.....instead of having to rebuild the amps and clean out the melted tube parts for hours when his geniuses changed freq and tuned some stage on the wrong multiplier setting.... (sigh)

Thanks for the memories. Butler ET1 - (call us Glitter Delta)

Radio one and two? Ha. Our transmitter shop was about 8 feet wide by 14 feet long. Radio Central was one deck above and was about the same size. Then there was an ancient emergency transmitter installed somewhere in the stern that nobody paid any attention to. I was one of the few ET's in the Navy that also had a Mod 28 teletype repair job code, so I was kept busy. That job code was usually held by the RMs. I was in from 1968 until 1977 and went through the warrant selection program. Almost was forced to made it a career by continuing to accept school opportunities, but thankfully bailed out when I had the chance.

Eisboch

Be perfect for the boat though.

THE HORROR, THE HUMANITY!!!

Although I know somebody who would embrace the concept with great huzzahs.

I know they make a version of that radio for marine use - maybe the 502?

I know when I was a kid, we used to use a small AM radio to radio locate WESX in Salem, one in Beverly (which doesn't exist anymore) and WBZ in Boston. You could get a pretty solid fix on your position doing that. You would fix north, then compare the signal bearing from WESX, Beverly and WBZ. Head for the station. :>)

Eventually, my Dad purchased one of those Zenith portable radios with the swing antenna with a compass rose - you'd fix North, then sweep for a bearing on the AM signal. That thing would put you in a box 100 yards by 100 yards.

Ah - those were the days. Navigating by the seat of your pants.

Nothing like it.

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My Dad had one of those in his basement when I was still learning basic radio electronics.

I can remember that thing pounding away when he talked to his buddies who were still in the service and at sea.

Unreal.

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Speaking of Collins, I have my Dad's S-line and his KWM-2 "mobile" transceiver which was a civilian version of a Navy aircraft transceiver.

He used to take the KWM out on his boat and run MM with a homemade Rube Goldberg antenna which his buddy concocted out of aircraft tubing. I swear to you (and this is my memory here, so it's suspect) it looked exactly like a very early version of the Butternut HF-6 vertical. :>)

I'd have to go down to the radio shack in the barn and riffle through my QSL cards, but I have a couple of Navy submarine contacts - one is a nuke - a 680 attack sub. One of those sub QSOs was underwater which I thought, at the time, wasn't possible, but I actually talked to the guy who made the QSO and he confirmed it was underwater.

I don't know how they defined "underwater". :>)

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