OK, I'm A Geezer

Back before the Internet, before cable, before cell phones, before color TV, before there was anything fun to do, freckle-faced kids wound wire around toilet paper tubes and built radios. Just a little more effort resulted in a transmitter with which they could talk to their buddy across the street, or, with enough power and a tall enough antenna, another freckle-faced kid half-way around the world.

Ham Radio Demo at the local shopping center, 1972.
Dig those crazy pants.

Amateur ("Ham") Radio is a hobby for a bygone era. But unfortunately it formed a huge part of my childhood and like all aging boomers who realize they now have the income to purchase the stuff they only dreamed about as a child, I have returned to dabble in ham radio.

I got my first ham license in March of 1972 at the age of 12 (callsign WNØGUU). It required that I learn Morse Code and a little electrical theory. My dad bought me a Heathkit HW-16, which was a box full of parts to which one would apply solder and heat and the result was a simple transceiver. I later built the HG-10B VFO that went with it.

Building the HW-16. The partially completed radio is on the right. Dad's operating the soldering iron while I model another pair of cool pants.

I strung a 40-meter dipole antenna (66' of wire with a feedline in the middle) between a tree in the back yard and our television antenna (remember those?) and started transmitting. Later I added a HyGain 18AVQ/WB (?) vertical antenna to expand the number of bands I could transmit on.

In April 1974 I upgraded to General Class and got a new callsign (WBØGUU). This required 13 words-per-minute Morse Code and some more electrical theory. In July I got a Tempo One, built by Yaesu, which let me transmit using voice.

My station ca. 1974. Tempo One HF transceiver in the
center, a borrowed Heathkit Linear amp and Heathkit
receiver on the left and right.

Operating the Tempo One with my brother Brent looking on.

Field Day 1972. Novice Station. Jim Buttleman's (WB0KFB)
Heathkit SB-102 and my Vibroplex bug.

Field Day 1974. Me (behind the hair) and Jim. Jim just always 
looked that giddy. Rig is a Collins S-Line. Note the spare
Collins equipment in the background. Being in Cedar Rapids, IA
there was no shortage of Collins employees and Collins rigs.

After college and marriage I got on the air briefly and tinkered with interfacing my transceiver to my Atari 400 computer. I wrote a program that could decode Morse Code. You would tap code in using the "fire" button on a joystick. Then I built a little box that plugged into my radio and my joystick port. It converted the sound of Morse Code into electronic presses of the "fire" button. This allowed my program to copy Morse Code off the air. Then I made the box so I could plug it into the code key jack on the radio so my program could send Morse Code as well.

That was fun but I eventually sold all that and was off the air after the mid-1980's.

Fast-forward to January 2005. I'm watching an Andy Griffith reunion show, and there in the background, disguised to look like a police radio at the old courthouse in Mayberry, is a Heathkit HW-16. I thought it looked familiar so I went to the Internet to find a picture to compare it to. I ended up on eBay where someone had one for sale.

To my wife's delight, I didn't buy the HW-16. But it did get my curiosity up. Over the next week or so I did some looking around and stumbled onto Elecraft (www.elecraft.com). They make radio kits. It didn't take long before I had an Elecraft K1 kit on order, and not long after that until it was completed.

It's been a long time since I've been on the air, so I have none of the requisite equipment for an electronics project of this magnitude. Other than a digital voltmeter, I had to go buy all the tools and equipment to build this thing (in the end I upgraded my digital voltmeter, too). It was a lot of fun to build.

The K1 has a built-in antenna tuner, which means it will drive any kind of antenna, including "random wire" antennas. I took them at their word and unrolled 30 feet of Radio Shack hook-up wire and strung it around my office. In the picture to the left you can see the wire starting in the upper right corner. It goes across to the cabinets on the other side of window, then to the ones on the far wall, then across the floor to the transceiver, which is not visible but is under the lamp. Believe it or not, I fired this thing up after some simple tuning and talked to WØSJS in St Louis, MO. By "talked" I mean Morse Code. My code is a little rusty, but we managed to exchange the basics.

You gotta admit, that's pretty amazing: five watts into a random piece of wire and you can communicate 500 miles away.

Frankly, with the Internet and cell phones, I think ham radio is a dying hobby. It's a lot of fun for those who are in it, and I'll probably take some heat from the die-hards and old-timers but that's fine. Every once in a while a tornado knocks out a cell tower and the hams step in to provide communication for civil defense officials and the Red Cross until the phone company gets back on the air. That's valuable. But it's not like the old days when long distance was expensive and nobody carried phones in their pockets everywhere they went.

I Passed the Extra Class Exam!

There used to be five levels of ham licenses: Novice, Technician, General, Advanced, and Extra. Sometime while I was inactive they whacked it down to Technician, General, and Extra. With each higher class of license comes more privileges. Extra Class hams have the most frequencies and modes available to them than the others.

My favorite mode is CW ("Morse Code"). Extra Class operators have 25 KHz to 50 KHz of extra CW bandwidth on the high frequency bands. I've always wanted to get this license so I could take advantage of those frequencies.

For the last three weeks or so I've been studying for the test using HamTestOnline (www.hamtestonline.com). I spent a total of about 10-12 hours going through sample tests at their site. They have the actual questions that are used on the tests, so even if you don't understand all the material, at least you will have seen the questions before and you'll have a high likelihood of recognizing the answers.

I took the test on February 17, 2005 and scored 100%. If you're taking a ham radio exam, you gotta check out HamTestOnline. It costs a few bucks but you're going to spend that on books anyway. Run the study mode for a few hours, then do 3-5 sample tests a day for a couple weeks and you'll be amazed at how well you do on the test.

In March 2005 I got a new callsign: NZ0R. 

Also installed a new multiband dipole to replace the indoor longwire.

Ham Links

Here's my study guide for the Extra Class exam. It's all the questions followed only by the correct answer for each one. Read all of them through three or four times as review before taking the test and you'll recognize the right answers when you see them.

HamTestOnline is a great site for studying for the various FAA written tests.

ARRL is the main organization for Ham Radio operators.

QRZ.com and eHam.net are two Ham portal sites.

VanityHQ.com is the place to go to find a cool callsign.

QSL Cards

This was my card as a Novice in 1972. They were standard issue for Collins Radio employees. My dad had these printed for me. 

This was a special bicentennial commemorative card that dad and I designed and then printed in his darkroom. The "ABØ" call prefix was allowed during 1976 to commemorate the bicentennial. For some reason I never had any cards with my "WBØ" callsign on them.

This is my new QSL card. The photo on the front was shot by Jim VanDuzer during a sightseeing flight over downtown Cedar Rapids. I think it was in my Bonanza but it may have been taken before I got that airplane.

Building the Elecraft K1 QRP Transceiver

The K1 kit took me just under 30 hours to build. That includes a thorough parts inventory before starting, building the basic K1 with the 4-band board and ATU.

Everybody who builds one of these posts pictures of their progress on their Web site. Do a search for Elecraft K1 in Google and you'll find a couple hundred of 'em. Here are mine.

This is the kit as it arrives from Elecraft. Lots of plastic bags.

4-band filter board in progress. I found the plastic bead tray in the background at a craft shop. It was good for sorting parts. The hobby vise is from Sears and works pretty good for holding the board while you solder, but it needs a heavier base.

The completed 4-band filter board. You have to wind all those toroids by hand. It's not bad but it's tedious.

The second major component you build is the front panel board. This is the back of the front panel board, partially complete.

This is the front of the front panel board with the switches in place.

The front panel board mounted in the panel. The PIC controller is the big black thing; it's the brains of the radio. The round blue thing is the main tuning pot.

Here's the front panel with the board mounted behind it.

The third main component is the RF board. This shows it partially complete with most of the receiver circuitry installed.

One of the nice things about the way you build the kit is you get to put it together and turn it on before you're completely done. At this stage, the receiver components are installed. You mount the filter board across the rear of the RF board and do initial receiver alignment. Keep in mind I have almost no experience building radios, but this thing worked the first time I turned it on. That's a testimony to the quality of the instructions.

Here's the inside with the filter board mounted and all transmitter parts in place. Ready for final testing and alignment.