Vol.1 No.1 March 2004
INTRODUCTION
I have a dream. It is that somehow this society that I am a part of will someday, before it is too late, find a way to save itself from self-destruction. As certainly as the sun spots bless us with their appearance every 11 years, we are systematically equipping ourselves with lethal technological toys whose primary purpose is mass destruction of humanity. (That last phrase has certainly become the buzz word of ’03 and is hanging in there pretty well into ’04.) This mass destruction is very likely to be visited upon many or all of us in the not-too-far-off future at the rate things are going.
It seems that the biggest problem we face is that, for reasons somewhat mysterious to me, as a born-again agnostic, large groups of us fervently believe that the world must be rid of everyone who doesn’t believe in our own particular brand of black magic (a/k/a hocus pocus, a/k/a religion.) My limited study of history has shown me that this theme is the most constant. factor in human behavior since we crawled out the swamp, learned how to walk upright, and then - the most dangerous of all – to think. What better thing to think about than how much better we are than the infidels who would question our beliefs or worship their own god(s).
Myself, I managed to get past that arrested stage of development and on to some of the more important problems that can plague a human being and drive him into frenzied activity that could be life-threatening. Namely, how to get a few more db. of strength into the far-field of my antenna which is used for long distance DX’ing. If there really was a god, he would have made the ether far more friendly to the formation of those waves, and the ionosphere ready to quickly ionize and form reflective layers at our every whim.
But alas, I think Mr. Maxwell made an inside deal with you-know-who, so that his special equations would hold us hostage for eternity and force us to actually work hard at this game we call Ham Radio. You probably wouldn’t guess it, but I am one of these radio hams. As an avid enthusiast and a slave to Mr. Maxwell, not to mention his partners-in crime such as Mr. Ohm, Mr. Faraday, Mr. Ampere, Mr. Volta, and a whole rogues gallery of others, my life has been ruled by the laws that carry their names. Imagine that Mr. Ampere hadn’t passed his law (let’s forget, for now, about Mr. Maxwell co-opting it and building it into his insidious equations, which nobody can solve anyway). Then I would be free to induce an electric field with very little current or energy expenditure, and I could order this field to fly out of my antenna at the speed of light and travel around the world to be heard by another ham in Fiji or Australia or New Zealand or Heard Island or ……No more 4-1000A’s, towers, big transformers, etc.
Well, I am not trying to complain about something whose evolution I did not really participate in, and I am actually glad that those guys showed me, although it took some time ( a lot of time?) to catch on to, how to do it bigger and better. It’s been a long and difficult path from Mr. Hertz’s first experiments with a setup that was closer to being the ignition system of a motorcycle than it is to my all-band, solid-state SSB transceiver. The most salient feature of this odyssey is that it is a time-integral – the minute summation of incremental advances spanning well over a hundred years of time. This is in clear opposition to the modern media notion that important and great advances are made regularly and instantly, bestowing wisdom – and stardom – on people who have really accomplished very little. By today’s standards the giants of history are truly gigantic but rarely receive the real credit for the things that really matter.
In reality, I must admit that (this statement will probably get me tarred and feathered) ham radio is really a bastard child of science, especially in its present form. But the good news is that it is still a blood child and is always welcome home, on holidays at least. As both a scientist and a radio ham, it is a constant source of perplexity to me as to how to deal with my various friends and colleagues in both camps. When I discuss quantum theory or statistical mechanics with my physicist friends and veer off into the ‘other’ world, they really can’t understand my desire to go on 160 meters and engage in ham radio’s equivalent of the barroom brawl – the DX pileup. And when I talk to many of my ham friends, they don’t (or won’t) understand how I can be obsessed with trying to understand why some materials (e.g. ferrites) won’t obey Mr. Ohm’s law.
That said, I won’t beleaguer that subject any further other than to profess that like my childhood friend and idol, Popeye the Sailorman, “I yam what I yam” and as a result, I do what I do. In particular, as a radio ham I do a lot of varied things, some very simple and some arcane. I believe that some of these things, and the way that I do them, may be of some interest to many of my ham brethern.
I am speaking primarily to my LIVING brethern in these chronicles. But I also hold out that evanescent hope, implicit in the opening theme of this introductory chronicle, that perhaps these chronicles will carry forward in time like a plane wave that once radiated, travels outward in all directions and is theoretically detectable and readable at all times in the future.
So if you, dear reader, are actually reading this at t>>>>2004, what you are reading about in these chronicles is an inside view of some typical aspects of an activity that was an important, but not life-dependent, aspect of the daily life of this group of techno-geeks (sorry guys, it was the best word I came up right now) in the twentieth and twenty-first earth centuries I really hope there will be a twenty-second, but it is certain that I won’t be in attendance.
I think it would be appropriate to formally introduce the chronicler, since if you are interested in this subject – ham radio and its related areas of electronics and physics – I hope to have some things to say that will interest you. By telling you a little about my history and experiences now, you will understand why many of my statements take the forms that they do. You may not always agree with me, and I always welcome any contrary views or discussion. But I will make one promise and claim, and that is that I will always support my views with the best information that I can obtain or have obtained in the past. These chronicles will contain mostly valid data from the fields of science and engineering, but I will inject occasional opinions based upon various degrees of speculation. I will try to make it clear when I am expressing an opinion as opposed to a studied scientific view.
For me, ham radio began when I first made illegal, undercover sorties into the secret caches of radio equipment owned by my father and ex-radio ham W8TLG. Unboxing a shiny, unused 250TH from its yellow Eimac box and staring at it with my 10 year old’s laser-beam eyes was truly a trip to exciting, unknown places. I had already started to assimilate the fact that this intriguing device could produce the magical radio waves that could travel across space and arrive at far places with my voice or other signature encoded in them. It took no external forces to motivate me into pursuing this whole world of excitement with the kind of passion and determination that is required for mastering its deepest secrets.
I became a licensed ham at eleven, one of the first wave of ‘novices’ that were produced in the late 50’s when the FCC first introduced the novice license. As most of you know, mastering the morse code at slow speeds is not especially difficult, especially for youngsters with their uncluttered brains and uncontrollable curiosities.
I can remember building my first transmitter, a single stage 6L6 xtal oscillator for 80 meters. I wired it with all connections carefully twisted in the little holes in the tube sockets, because I wasn’t yet allowed to own a ‘dangerous’ soldering iron of my own. My first receiver was a two-tube regen detector and audio amplifier, which was presented to me in ‘kit’ form by my father as a christmas present. He had to help me build it, and it actually worked when I connected it to short wire strung out from the basement window. I was so proud of that radio that I took it to school to show it off to my science class, which required pulling it the half-mile trip to the school house in my little red wagon (I am not making this up!). My science teacher was astounded and the rest of the class was totally confused – ‘what is this all about?” was clearly written all over their faces. I just knew that I had the keys to the future in my hand and from that time forward, radio was my world.
My teen years were dominated totally with ham radio and I had a clan of teenage friends, all newly minted hams, who were also drawn into our circle of ‘radio boys’. With our 807’s and dipole antennas we were in orbit. My friend W8ROF (now W8WA and still good buddy Lee) and I began to seriously chase DX and put up Yagi beams, as well as beginning to build big amplifiers (he used 4-125A’s and I used a scavenged 304TL) while we were still trying to keep up with the high school routine. We would be up before school trying the snare the rare pacific DX on 20, before heading off to the bus stop for the trip to school. After school it was back home to catch the African opening, ZS’s and 5A2’s and all of those exotic VQ’s.
We operated on budgets ‘funded’ by newspaper routes and bag-boy jobs in local stores, and I can tell you that there are few thrills in this world that match those of a 15 year old working his first VK or JA with a transmitter and antenna that he built himself with no adult assistance. For me, this era ended with entry into the army at 18, and did not continue smoothly into adult life.
One major benefit of this extended adventure was that it seriously whetted my appetite for mathematics, as it was clear to me from the start, as I began to read all of the adult books on radio and electronics, that mathematics was the lingua franca of everything remotely connected to the activities of electrons and waves.
With some help from other adult hams who befriended me, I began to seriously study the basic foundations of trigonometry and calculus and became fluent in them quickly enough to begin to understand the arcane contents of the radio books. This ignited a kind of deeply routed love of the scientific ‘method’ of analysis of nature, particularly in areas related to basic physics (which naturally leads right into the entire field of electronics.).
After emerging from the army I did not return to ham radio, feeling somewhat ‘burned out’ from the feverish activity of my teen years. After a few diversions that typically occupy (plague?) many young American boys, I finally landed in college where I proceeded to really delve into the scientific world with a passion. After about 8 years and several degrees later, I became fully immersed in the world of electronic engineering, eager to put to work as much as possible all of that wonderful knowledge acquired while attending a first-class university. Some of my teachers were world authorities in their areas of specialty, and spending time in their presence and under their tutelage was indeed the highlight of my life. It also prepared me to face the technical world in a way that I had never dreamed of.
After spending 40+ years in the professional world of engineering, primarily as a designer and researcher, I somehow completed the circle. Starting in 1999 and over a short period of time I was suddenly drawn back into the magical world of ham radio. I won’t bore you with the details of how this happened other than to note that I was starting from scratch again. I had to get a new license and acquire a minimal amount of equipment to get started (the latter thanks to Lee who had been active all along and after building a big, modern station, passed some hand-me-downs to this fresh, new OT ham.).
The whole aura of ham radio has an entirely new and different meaning to me, this time around. Rather than approaching it as an awe-inspiring, deeply complex venture into a black-hole of technical mysteries that I experienced as a young boy, it is now a branch of engineering which I spent a lifetime mastering. The problems are no longer quagmires of never-ending searches for the ‘final answer’, but rather well-defined sets of data to be analyzed, synthesized, and optimized. But there are some interesting twists to this theme, and they will be a major focus of these chronicles.
I have found that there are certain important technical issues in ham radio which are still in need of much further study and explanation. Despite the enormous progress in the entire field of electronics that has transpired since those days in the early 50’s when a young boy just began to contemplate how to generate, transmit, and receive simple CW radio waves, these lingering issues still cry out for help. People like me are drawn to those cries and thrive on trying to still them.
These chronicles will simply be discussions of interesting problems related to the technological side of ham radio, as viewed thru the eyes of a veteran engineer and physicist. I reserve the right to occasionally venture into areas outside of my claimed expertise and discuss ‘secular’ issues of ham radio practice. After all, we all need to have a little fun now and then! But for the most part I will be sharing my thoughts with you on subjects which I believe to be relevant brain food for serious radio hams.
Several years ago I treated myself to a lifelong desire to have a summer home on a lake. I love the water and spend as much time in it as possible. The dream was answered with the acquisition of this house on Fish Lake, in Oakland county, adjacent to Detroit, my childhood home and setting for my first ham radio life. One of my first additions was a beautiful, spacious, second floor room that has become the radio shack and electronics lab – the Fish Lake Laboratory. The latter is well-stocked with high-quality test equipment that I acquired during my professional days. I can now do lab tests on anything that comes along, a far cry from the early years with Heathkit/Eico test gear and free-running timebased scopes. This has opened up a new chapter in my ham radio experience, as you will hear about in the coming chronicles. In fact, I will be talking quite a bit about test equipment, which is a subject of considerable new interest to me, and has been a source of considerable professional activity for me.
With K8LV once again on the loose on the ham bands, life here at Fish Lake has become somewhat untypical of your average Michigan vacation site. The time is now occupied with activities that include standard operating activities, such as casual rag chewing and occasional contest participation, not to mention some occasional DX chasing ( I think that is in incurable illness.) But most of the time is occupied with interesting ‘projects’ which cover a wide-range of technical subjects. Some of these are design and construction of new gear for the radio station, large and small, and others are basic scientific and/or engineering investigations of things that are very familiar to all of us, but that I find are still not at all understood well enough to allow their proper design usage.
For example, I have found that there is virtually no one in the universe who can tell you or supply the necessary data to properly design high-level ferrite RF transformers. I discovered this while designing baluns and matching transformers for a new type of HF directional antenna (also in progress here). I have also found that certain detailed aspects of ordinary RF power amplifiers are still beyond explanation, although very few hams realize this. I will be discussing that area in several different contexts.
Then, of course, there is the whole area of antennas and the abyss of electromagnetic field theory. Most hams currently believe that this field (no pun intended) has all been put to rest with modern “Modelling” programs, which have spawned a whole new generation of would-be antenna theorists. Well, I will have some very interesting revelations in this area. I am currently in progress on some theoretical studies of antennas that are poorly (and even incorrectly) understood. As this research begins to bear fruit, that fruit will drip juicily into the chronicles, and hopefully into your brains also.
It will be obvious, and I admit it openly, that my interest so far in this life centers on the HF region of radio, and I would like to comment on that briefly. I have never actively pursued VHF for the simple reason that I find the HF region, which in many ways is an order of magnitude simpler, so challenging that it fully occupies my attention. If I ever arrive at the point that I understand everything below 50MHZ well-enough to control it and design for it, I will then attempt to extend that knowledge into the higher frequency regions. As for two-meter repeaters and related activities, I can’t find any distinction between that milieu and CB radio, which I am also not interested in. But trying to properly explain how and why a simple 160M antenna that I put up this winter works so well - THAT may take me a lot of time and effort and it will be an enjoyable and challenging adventure.
Generally speaking, I have found a rich garden of interesting problems to investigate, some of which require a level of expertise way beyond what is commonly believed. As I solve these problems, in varying degrees, I will chronicle them when I feel it would be of interest to other radio hams. I hope that you enjoy reading them and possibly benefit from whatever new knowledge they will bring into your life. I will attempt to take subjects which are inherently very difficult, and reduce them to basic physical terms which can be understood by non-mathematicians.
But you can also expect a few real head-bangers here and there, which will be directed mainly to readers whose interest may be more advanced. The first chronicle will be issued shortly and will tell the story of the Fish Lake Beverage. It is not a drink, but a really cool LF RX antenna (literally!).
FEB. 2004
Updated March 26, 2008
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