Saturday, June 18, 2016 — After a number of years with the same old blog format, I’m throwing caution (and some may say, common sense) to the wind and shaking things up a bit in the Zed Man’s corner of the online world. I’m still trying to figure out the new theme for my WordPress blog … as you might expect, the live demos of these things are almost always optioned out and developed to look like you’re going to wind up with a site like CNN or something. And yeah, after monkeying around with the “light” version of this theme (and muttering “Damn! You mean I can’t change that?!” for the 99th time), I decided the XYL needed to buy me a Father’s Day gift.
Thank you, Sweetie. Eventually I’ll tell her what she got me.
These theme gives me a lot of options I never had before; I can dedicate certain topics of my posts to appear in certain areas of the site. I’ve decided that with this new option, some of my posts (like this one) that are general in nature can have their own section. I have a bazillion posts in this blog, and no, I don’t plan on going back to categorize each of them to fit this new formatting opportunity. The search bar will give you the ability to search for certain terms, and should get you where you want to go.
TUNING THE BANDS. After checking into the Georgia CW net, I hooked up my Yaesu Ft-817 transceiver in order to confirm it operates properly on both RX and TX (it does). My secondary motive was to shoot some video of the rig in action for use in my upcoming eBay auction listing for the radio. I had forgotten what a nice rig the 817 really is; if I was going to keep it however, I would HAVE to add a CW filter (this is not the ND version).
Tuning across 75 meters, I come across an interesting conversation about radios … not ham radio, but CB and freeband radios. Now these guys go back to the days when I was in CB (very early 1970s), as were discussing some of the top CB rigs of the 1970s, which in my book come down to just two: The Tram D201 and the Browning Golden Eagle set.
I never wanted to own a set of Brownings. They were just dog ugly radios in my book. The Tram was a different story. I have always wanted a Tram, and in fact, about five years ago I had the chance to buy one in decent shape for $75. Now the truth is that I don’t need one, but the nostalgia bug was working on me. I didn’t buy it, but if I had, I could have resold it for a fair profit.
The conversation then turned to freebanding, “sliders” and such, and it was interesting to listen to these licensed hams recall so fondly their days “shooting” DX and calling “QSK?” and other such bastardizations of the amateur radio Q signals. Actually several really good operators who I helped get into the hobby were freebanders, but they tired of the all the nonsense. Of course, if you tune 75 meters some nights, it sounds almost like Channel 19.
Yeah, go ahead and say it … you think I’m a ham radio snob. Not hardly. I got my start in radio with a Hallicrafters CB-3A, “upgraded” to a CB-7 and finally a Multi-Elmac Citi-Fone SS 23 channel synthesized CB. I still have the Citi-Fone, by the way.
My thoughts are that if you leave CB for ham radio, you should leave the CB habits behind, though I know how hard it can be to quit saying “10-4” after years of doing so. It took me years to stop saying 10-4 to my brother, whom I talked with multiple times a day via CB once we both were licensed hams, it was an automatic thing with him, and the source of a lot of good-natured ribbing from my local ham friends.
When I was still in an official, elected, ARRL leadership position, I used to get a steady stream of phone calls and emails from a chap who fancied himself as some sort of Freebanding Police — not just with operators in his area, but also radios. He stopped at truck stops whenever he traveled and reported them if they had “export” radios for sale. He wanted me to help him go after more of these sorts of scofflaws, and he insisted that export radios were not only illegal for use on CB, but also on the ham bands.
It was my understanding that their sale was indeed illegal, but only because they could easily be converted for illegal use on CB. They aren’t exactly quality transceivers, but their use isn’t illegal on amateur bands unless they violate some technical standards (possible, I’m sure). I never worried much about it for a couple of reasons: 1. The FCC hasn’t regulated CB for many years, and does precious little enforcement in regard to illegal export rigs; and 2. There will always be illegal export rigs bought and sold because there’s little concern about what freebanders do.
I haven’t had a CB radio in any vehicle of mine for many, many years, but I will admit to having 27.185 MHz — Channel 19 — in my mobile rig’s memory in the event we are traveling wind up in a traffic back-up.
Speaking of CB frequencies, I find it amusing when I’m browsing eBay to see older transceivers for sale — one of the most common seems to be the Yaesu FT-757GX/GXII — and the listing photos will show it on a CB frequency in AM mode. I’ve owned a couple of ex-CB 757s that lost the finals due to trying to get that “full” 100 watts out. You can go in and flip a switch to enable all-band transmit, and you can crank the output up, but doing so risks the loss of your finals. One ex-CB FT-757GX I owned replaced the auto-sensing fan circuitry with a toggle switch; presumably, operating the rig on AM required the fan to stay “full on” all the time. Noisy! I had to fix that, the fan noise was obnoxious.
Enough of this trip down memory lane, 10-4?
73 es CUL de KY4Z SK … dit dit (beep beep) …