AmateurRadio.com

I was meandering around the web this morning and stumbled on to a page where famous key collector and curator Tom Perera W1TP had re-created the morse key setup used by Walter Winchell to introduce and punctuate his radio and later TV broadcasts. They were a pair of Vibroplex bugs.

I grew up in Sydney in the 1950s and remember how radio station 2UE would start their news bulletins with a brisk CQ CQ. They were probably inspired by Winchell. Another memory is watching ‘The Untouchables‘ on TV with narration by Walter Winchell.

It’s worthwhile reading Walter Winchell’s Wikipedia entry while you listen to and occasionally watch an archived TV show of his from December 1953.

Ironically in his early years as a gossip journalist he was close to prominent criminal identities and later became friends with J. Edgar Hoover. He was Jewish and in the lead up to the second world war was one of the first Americans to criticise Hitler and those in the US who supported him. Another of his targets was isolationist Charles Lindbergh. His fame followed his reporting the famous kidnapping and subsequent trial.

From the clip you can hear the rapid-fire delivery. In many ways it’s like a precursor to much of what we consume today.

He attacked the Klan and its supporters. After the war he aligned himself with the Senator Joe McCarthy’s hunt for communists. But within this short clip there are a couple of places where he briefly questions a couple of issues that were to haunt the US for the next couple of decades – Vietnam and cigarettes and cancer.

Complex and probably unattractive, what I want to know is if he actually knew how to handle those Vibroplex keys.

I spent the pleasant sunny part of the final day of autumn testing a vertical antenna for 80 metres using Buddipole parts for home.

The back garden space here is barely 4 metres by 4 metres and for the moment the chimney is out of reach. While I have dreams of a magnetic loop for 80m, the vertical is more in reach now.

I installed a counterpoise wire a few feet shy of 66 feet length hidden on a timber fence that runs down the side of the property. The idea is to connect a short fly lead to connect the hidden counterpoise when the antenna is deployed and then disconnect when it’s all packed away. Buddipole components don’t lend themselves to permanent installations. The counterpoise doesn’t follow the recommended dog leg arrangement and is higher off the ground than the 2 feet suggested.

The purpose yesterday was to establish how speedily the antenna could be assembled and adjusted for a frequency of interest such as a net.

Here’s a list of the items used along with the counterpoise:

9′ telescopic whip
2 x 22 inch antenna arms
low band coil + clip
VersaTee
Buddipole short mast
Buddipole tripod
Balun

I was surprised how easily it all went together. The adjustment wasn’t as fiddly as I expected such a short antenna for this band would be, and it appeared to give a usable bandwidth.

Assembly was straightforward. Set up the tripod and mast with only bottom two sections telescoped out. Attach the Versatee horizontally to the top of the mast. Connect the Low Band coil. Leave the red fly lead loose for the moment. Attach two 22 inch antenna arms to a long whip antenna fully extended. Then carefully attach that assembly to the top of the Versatee. I also connected a 1:1 balun between the Versatee and the iP30 SWR Analyser.

The next step is to simply drag the fly lead across the coil turns to identify the best spot to tap the coil. Background noise level rises as you get in the zone. I used the iP30 SWR analyser to narrow it down to a spot 16 turns up from the base of the coil.

This means I was shorting out the bottom 16 turns of the coil. The adjustment is too coarse on a turn by turn basis. You appreciate the value of being able to tap at 1/8 of a turn increments. (The coil is on an octagonal former.)

It took me a few measurements to realise that as I progressed left (from my point of view) I was decreasing the amount shorted out and hence increasing the loading inductance and so lowering the resonant frequency. It’s actually more confusing reading that sentence than understanding it in practice!

My target frequency was 3535kHz and this is a chart of the SWR readings I had when the coil tap was set at what I calculate to be 15 3/4 turns up from the base of the coil.

The 1.0:1 bandwidth was 10 kHz while at 1.5:1 it was in excess of 65 kHz.

From readings at the other possible coil tap points my guess is that at this frequency range each face of the coil moves the resonant frequency by about 4 kHz. One thing to be aware of with the Buddipole hardware is not to accidentally short out adjacent turns of the coil with the coil clip. It’s hard to do but I managed and it will throw your readings.

Next step of course is to make some contacts or at least activate the antenna on WSPR or JT65 to get an idea of whether the signal gets over the fence.

From checking the chart on page 146 of the ‘Buddipole in the Field’ book by B. Scott Andersen, NE1RD, I estimate that my shorting tap at about 16 turns from the base means I’m using about 39-40 uH of loading to achieve resonance at 80m. So that’s a starting point if I wanted to build a more permanent and cheaper vertical installation.

A few weeks back – in the post about wartime crystal production – I made a tangential reference to my all time favourite YouTube video – Claude Paillard F2FO distilling down to less than 20 minutes his meticulous work making a triode valve, effectively by hand. Watching it again, this time I spent a bit more time looking over the many pages of background information he had posted on his website detailing his research into triodes of the 1920s, the techniques he used and the equipment he used or made to complete this project and create a very cute looking valve wearing blue shorts.

This prompted me to start a more methodical reading of the documents, and to work through the translations to ensure I understood what he had done. (Google translate is great, but it missed a significant amount.) If you’re vaguely interested in the technology of the earliest days of radio, and have ever wondered how these valves were made, the documents take you on a special journey through the eyes of an explorer with a brilliant workshop and skills to match. His research is comprehensive. By way of exploring how early valves were made he produces a full detailed and illustrated life story of the evolution of valve types and introduces important valve families like the 6L6 and its descendants like the 6V6 and the 807 of the late 1930s. He also takes you on an excursion to discover the history of creating an effective vacuum, critical in the creation of the valve aka the vacuum tube.

It’s also an enjoyable way to build up a French vocab for the terminology of valve radio gear. Along the way I stumbled across the Electropedia, a brilliant resource for translating technical terms from French to English with a number of other languages included. But some of the terms Claude Paillard uses reflect an earlier era and vocabulary. He talks about the plaque (plate) of a valve rather than l’anode. I’d love to find online versions of the French radio engineering references he cites from the 1920s.

Another plus of this experience is reading the history of radio from the perspective of a country other than Britain or the US. The French version of radio history introduces interesting characters and stories to the familiar names and places. An inspiration behind the work of F2FO is the history of the triode TM (Télégraphie Militaire). A good outline is at Michel Siméon’s website.

Paul Berché was another prolific author of French radio texts.

I’m a great fan of the Prelinger Archives which is home to so many items like this video I’ve heard about recently from various ham radio email lists.

I like how the components of the earliest electronics and wireless were so basic and ‘natural’. Think of hand made capacitors and resistors using traces of graphite on paper. Valves (or tubes) of course were another story but still capable of being ‘homemade‘.

I love the idea that an accurate, literally rock solid frequency could be achieved using a piece of a very common rock – admittedly a pure piece of quartz cut just so.

This video details the elaborate and meticulous manufacture of quartz crystals during World War 2 by Reeves Sound Laboratories in 1943.

The 41’24” video can also be viewed and downloaded via the Prelinger Archives.

Most of the ‘radio quality’ quartz was mined in Brazil which ceased its neutrality in 1942 and joined the Allies.

The story of quartz crystals during WWII is told in ‘Crystal Clear‘ by Richard J. Thompson Jr. (Wiley) 2011.

“In Crystal Clear, Richard Thompson relates the story of the quartz crystal in World War II, from its early days as a curiosity for amateur radio enthusiasts, to its use by the United States Armed Forces. It follows the intrepid group of scientists and engineers from the Office of the Chief Signal Officer of the U.S. Army as they raced to create an effective quartz crystal unit. They had to find a reliable supply of radio-quality quartz; devise methods to reach, mine, and transport the quartz; find a way to manufacture quartz crystal oscillators rapidly; and then solve the puzzling “ageing problem” that plagued the early units. Ultimately, the development of quartz oscillators became the second largest scientific undertaking in World War II after the Manhattan Project.” (from the book’s blurb)