AmateurRadio.com

I met KE9V at the Dayton Hamvention a few days ago and told him this story. Jeff invited me to share it with you in the interest of public safety…

I was licensed in 1959 having been bitten by the radio bug when I was a just a wisp of a boy. I spent every possible spare moment building gear, antennas, and learning the ways of radio. At some point fairly early in my journey, I fell in with a bunch of 4’s who met on 75 meter phone almost every night for long-winded late night bull sessions. We all lived within a five-hundred mile circle except for one fellow who told us his name was “LG” – just letters, no name – and when asked, he would swear on his mother’s grave that they weren’t his initials, it was just his ‘name’.

That caused a few of us to privately wonder about the character of a man without a real name but LG was a nice enough fellow except that on most nights would ask everyone in the roundtable to open their icebox and look carefully at our bottles of milk.

He wanted us to report back on the color of the cap and the type of milk. I couldn’t see much sense in it though LG was insistent. He was working on a theory that enemy spies were signaling each other about big events by changing certain colors. For instance, if 2-percent milk usually had a green cap, but was suddenly switched to blue then that meant that something bad was soon to happen.

“Stuff and nonsense” was the usual reply though we were all more than a little shook when shortly after the skim milk cap colors were changed from red to blue a DC-10 crashed on takeoff from Chicago killing everyone onboard. “Could have been an inside job”, LG said and who were we to protest having been eyewitnesses to the change in milk cap colors just a week before the tragedy?

Having known about the milk caps and yet not alerting the local authorities weighed heavy on me like a man condemned. So much so that before long I dropped out of the roundtable.

I didn’t want the responsibility that comes with such great power and foreknowledge.

Besides, I needed a bigger challenge and somehow got it in my head that I would become a world-class CW operator. That was just the sort of thing I needed to challenge me and to hold my interest. Though I had passed the Morse test years earlier to get my ticket, I thought of the code mostly as an annoyance, a barrier to keep dimwits out of the fraternity.

But after a year or so of constant practice, on the air, in contests, and off the air with a CPO, I couldn’t get comfortable above about 18 words per minute. I was blocked and becoming obsessed with a growing desperation to break through that barrier.

And it was at about that time that I attended a hamfest in Texas and happened to bump into old “LG” from the 75 meter net while I was there. We sat down with a few frosty 807s and he spoke at length about the milk caps and the way they were facilitating chatter among the spies that had infiltrated the USA…

Wanting to change the subject, I confided in LG the challenge I had laid out for myself – to become a world-class CW operator – and I admitted that I was falling seriously short of that goal. That’s when he looked at me for a long moment, leaned a little closer and said, “follow me and don’t say a word”.

Not wanting to be rude, and admittedly a little curious as to what he might be up to, I followed him to the RV lot where his motorhome was parked and we went inside. The unit was clean, though very small with a rack of radio equipment on one side. He said that he was now living full-time in this rig and was enjoying his retirement by traveling all over the country “wherever he wanted to go”.

We sat down in the only two seats available and after looking out all the windows, I guess to make certain we had some privacy, he began to speak in a hushed voice.

“I spent thirty-years in the military. Special ops. At the end of WWII we spent a lot of time critiquing the war effort – what worked, what didn’t. Truman was impressed with what the Brits had done at Bletchley and he wanted us to do the same. One of the weaknesses of that time was that most of the radio communication being passed by spooks was coded messages sent by humans using Morse.”

“Teaching agents the code wasn’t difficult – but like you, most of them would top out at about 20 words a minute. Since shorter transmissions were less likely to be traced, high value was placed on field ops who could send and receive Morse at much higher rates…”

“And so the nation’s top scientists were given a challenge – give us a way to take an average ‘Joe’ and make him a high speed CW operator in a month or less – Project Celeritas became one of the first top-secret, high-tech projects of the Cold War era.”

“What they came up with was a drug. First, you learn the code at a rudimentary level, then you take one of these pills and your ability to send and receive Morse grows exponentially. It’s a miracle – though not without a few side effects. I have a small supply and would share them with you for – $500 – which would be enough to get this gas guzzling rig back home – you interested?”

It sounds crazy, I know, but I was desperate. And it just so happened that I was flush with cash having planned to blow a small fortune at the hamfest. I pulled out my wallet and had $550. It must have been fate. LG took my money then told me to turn around and close my eyes while he collected the pills from a secret stash.

He handed me a bottle with 100 tiny pills inside. “Don’t take more than one a week and don’t show off your new found skills too openly. Uncle Sam thinks that these are long gone and if you draw much attention to yourself it will be trouble. You understand?”

I told him that I did and wandered off anxious to see if I had just wasted $500 or not…

Back in my own shack I took one of the pills and began to tune the bands. I didn’t notice an immediate improvement and was beginning to think that I had been ripped off by a nut with a milk bottle cap obsession but then, wait … what was that? I was reading the mail on the lower end of 20 – in my head. I listened carefully and decided these guys were running about 35wpm. Eureka!

Over the next month I faithfully took a pill once each week and found myself easily copying high speed code in my head while cleaning the house, working on a crossword puzzle, and once I even answered the door to talk to some disciple inviting me to his church – and I never missed a single bit of the conversation that was whirring along in the background from my receiver on 20 meters.

I could detect no side effects. In fact, the biggest problem with the drug was that I could find no one fast enough to really challenge me. I retrofitted paddles with high speed bearings but was beginning to run up on the physical limits of sending because the hardware couldn’t keep up with my burgeoning ability. A fact I found horribly frustrating.

Six months later I heard about an annual high-speed Morse code contest in North Carolina and decided to enter the fray. Before long I was seated at a table with a dozen other ops all with cans clamped to our heads copying code messages limping along at just 60wpm. When the speed reached 90 words per minute there was just me and one other guy left and he bowed out at 100wpm.

Amazed, they kept cranking the code speed up – it was being sent by a machine capable of sending at 160wpm and I easily copied paragraph after paragraph of random text, right up to the limit of the machine and was all the while taunting them to “go faster”.

I took home the trophy and $1000 prize without realizing that the results of the event would be published in the local newspaper. That story was picked up a day later by the wire services and within 48 hours there was a knock on my door. Two G-men escorted me to a local office where they asked me a lot of questions about how I was able to copy code at such speeds.

I hadn’t heeded LG’s warning not to show off the results of the drug and now there would be hell to pay.

After being transported to a dank office in Langley, Virginia I was interrogated but there was no need for them to go to extremes. I coughed up the details in a heartbeat figuring that now wasn’t the time to be coy. I had 43 pills left and told the Feds exactly where to find them in my home. And I told them everything I knew about LG … and the milk bottle caps. After two days of incarceration and hours of high-speed Morse tests they took me home.

The remaining pills were gone – taken by the government I assume.

Withdrawal from the drug began driving me crazy. I heard Morse when there was none to hear. Every sound in the house, from rain dripping off the roof to the popping of the water heater sounded like code to me and it only became worse. When I heard people talking my brain was trying to convert their words into code and that distracted me from having even a brief conversation with anyone. It kept getting worse until I could no longer work for a living or enjoy ham radio.

I sold my house and all my gear and moved to a solitary cabin in Michigan’s UP where even the chirping of birds sounds like a message that my brain strains to decode, but there’s nothing there to be decoded. I think I may be going completely mad.

I’m telling you this story because the Feds contacted me a year after all this went down for some additional information. It seems they never found “LG” and for all I know, he’s still out there dealing that magic drug to some unsuspecting radio ham who just wants to improve his code speed a little. After all, what ham doesn’t want that?

You’ve been warned…

There was a time when developments in the realm of amateur radio were relevant in relation to the rest of the world. In those days, a young man might become interested in the technology of radio and his first steps in that venture may have been as a radio amateur. Through building and experimentation this neophyte might eventually make a living as a radio and TV repairman, or find work as an electronics technician. He might even follow a path to becoming an electronics engineer developing new methods and hardware for commercial or military communication.

There was a thread of commonality between his hobby and his vocation. Radio amateurs were on the leading edge of discovery and experimentation and these developments were closely mirrored in the non-amateur world. In fact, what this fellow was doing on the workbench in his ham shack was often a step or two ahead of what he did for his employer.

But at some point in the flow of space and time, amateur radio reached a critical crossroad. It could proceed one direction into the future or choose the other direction – a long, and circuitous route back to the past.

For good or for bad, we chose to jettison the future and return to the past.

Consider carefully the position of amateur radio just prior to this crossroad. We had pioneered FM radio at VHF and UHF and had blanketed the countryside with repeaters such that an operator with a handheld radio could make contact with others far outside his line of site. We had already worked out the protocols and network topology necessary for passing data through the ether at rates comparable to landline methods of the age. And we had our own fleet of satellites that pioneered new methods in space communication as well as low-cost spacecraft construction and launch.

Future developments in the non-amateur world of radio from that point included cellular technology and the transmission of higher speed data over the air. Commercial applications for broadcast radio and television have changed radically and now include the imposition of digital methods. Military applications for secure battlefield communication use satellite and terrestrial means like mesh networking for voice and data transmission. Our homes, restaurants and coffee shops are bathed in RF transmitted data that keep our mobile devices connected to the Internet.

None of these “new” technologies would have been even the least bit foreign to the radio amateur had we taken the path to the future. Youngsters would have been encouraged to become involved in our hobby as it could very well lead to a rewarding career in one of many growing and lucrative technical fields – just like in the earlier days.

The most important point I want to make is this: technology didn’t pass amateur radio by because we weren’t intelligent enough to have adapted to the rapid changes it produced, we could have lead that revolution, ham radio enthusiasts were the proto-geeks on this planet.

No, technology didn’t abandon us, rather, we voluntarily chose a path that led back to the past and in so doing, watched the future march ahead without us.

My guess is that we chose this path because the future involved changes that seriously challenged the old dogmas. The old guy who could pound brass would be dimininshed in the new world while the young kid with the computer connected to his radio would be raised up and this was deemed unacceptable.

Of course there remain some facets of our hobby where higher tech methods are required. For instance, it would be difficult to argue that bouncing a radio signal off the moon and then receiving the echo from it isn’t one of the more challenging things that hams do. But consider how many amateurs are active in that pursuit and you must conclude that it’s a small fraction of even one percent of all licensees. Why? Probably because of the degree of technical difficulty required for success. It’s much easier, trivial in fact, to toss a wire over a tree limb and make a 40 meter CW contact; so more choose to do that instead.

Low-power enthusiasts, (QRP) have spent decades trying to make the point that HF communication is possible with practically nothing at all. That you or I could whip up a two-transistor transceiver in a single evening and make radio contacts with it is widely seen as the magic of radio among those in this camp, however, it really only serves to make the point that they have embraced the simplest, lowest elements of RF technology and have no intention of moving beyond it.

In selecting the path to the past, we also decided that the entertainment value of amateur radio was more important than the rapidly expanding field of communication technology.

Consider the many ways that we have made two-way radio a game. We chase DX until all of the countries of the world have been worked and then we invent new ones. Weekends are dedicated to non-stop operation with the goal being to earn the most points. We make radio contact with others and then trade post cards to prove that we actually did it. Certificates (wallpaper) of all kinds are offered for contact with specific stations or during specific events, etc.

The lingua franca of amateur radio is the Morse code and those who are proficient in CW are more valued than those who are not. Like Latin, it’s a dead language that is non-essential yet it serves as a powerful totem for an entire belief system internal to amateur radio and nothing else under the sun.

In selecting the path to the past, the hobby has determined that nostalgia is more important than innovation and therefore we must now depend upon nostalgia to drive future growth; this is a critical point.

The United States has a population with a soon coming glut (baby boomers) of new retirees. Folks like me who enjoy looking at the past as much or more than looking ahead. This is a ready-built market for nostalgic growth and we should anticipate that those who enjoy reading about the radio distress call from the Titanic, restoring old radios or building new equipment with vacuum tubes, etc. will swell our numbers for a season. It’s completely unsustainable over the longer-term, but it is here and now and it will contribute to some additional growth for the hobby.

Though ham radio is a delightful and enjoyable hobby, we are forced to own up to the consequences of the decision that was made not so long ago. Ham radio has become like an old trading post on a lonely stretch of Route 66 somewhere in the desert. You stop to admire the wooden Indian, the old time gas pumps and the soda machines. You snap a few pictures, buy a few trinkets for your niece and nephew and spend a moment warmly remembering what the Old West was like long ago.

And then you get into your car and return to the real world.

None of this will diminish the enjoyment that enthusiasts can derive from this unique hobby. There are people in the world who enjoy building old steam engines, restoring antique cars, and making butter by hand. Technology doesn’t always improve the quality of life and it has many unintended consequences. But reality demands that we acknowledge our proper place in the grand scheme of things, and when it comes to amateur radio, we are no longer of the same ilk as those who innovate and invent. It’s been decades since we last put a dent in the universe and it probably best we live out our days quietly playing with our radios.