Radiating against the odds

My wife’s eyes narrow or close entirely when I talk about what I call my ham radio hobby, though she thinks it’s an obsession. Her reaction tells me that excessive conversation about radio bores most people. But I can’t help myself. There were times when, as a Detroit Free Press reporter, I found things about the hobby so fascinating that I wrote newspaper stories about it. Over the course of 30 years, I guess I wrote a dozen or so newspaper articles about ham radio. I also wrote more specialized articles for the ham magazines like QST, CQ and Electric Radio. This is all by way of warning you that another ham radio yarn is on its way. If the subject doesn’t resonate, you might want to wait for my upcoming features on how I got my first boat, or the Ann Arbor News’ latest invention, a “police vaccine.”

Right now, though, I’m stuck on this amazing thing that happened yesterday in my ham radio station. The thing that has me in awe is not the fact that I logged my first contact from my home station since Jan. 6, 2004, though I was pretty surprised I’d been off the air four years.

I thought I’d lost interest in the hobby. I’d piled boxes of files from my recently terminated newspaper career so high they blocked me from operating the radios. Adding to the clutter, there’s a box with bottles of homebrew beer my son, Abe, and I are aging. There’s even a 5-gallon carboy of our latest Pilsner sitting in that room, whose temperature is somewhere in the 40s, just right for a German-style lager.

But something happened Friday, Jan. 4, that revved my engines. I talked to an auctioneer who agreed to drive a truck to my house and cart away dozens and dozens of old radios — inventory I amassed as The Radio Finder during the Great Newspaper Strike when I created a job as a dealer in old radios to eke out a living. After returning to the Free Press in 1997 following more than two years on strike, I gradually wound down the radio business, and when my radiofinder.com website accidentally went down in 2004, I decided it was good riddance and devoted my time to journalism or writing novels and other non-technical pursuits. I have the radios stored in my half of the garage. The agreement in this household is that my wife must be able to park her car inside. It is thus barely possible to squeeze a Windstar into her half of the garage if any passengers disembark before the big minivan enters the building.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to empty my side of the garage, not to mention our new shed, also crammed with radios, the loft over the garage, repository of boxes and boxes of vacuum tubes, plus the old ramshackle shed, supposed to have been dismantled long ago, but still intact because it houses additional radios, and all the basement space consumed by boxes and boxes of radio books, magazines and equipment manuals. The thought of unloading all that stuff in one fell swoop and collecting some money made me giddy. Now, admittedly, I don’t covet the garage space to house my little Honda Civic. No, no, no. I want room to restore a wooden boat, don’t you know.

So excited was I, in fact, by my talk with the radio auctioneer, that I ventured out with the temperature in the 20s and began listing my current inventory on a legal pad. As I did so, my enthusiasm for off-loading this collection started to, well, not fade, no, I’m still committed to a one-time riddance with, hopefully, a sizable check to replace the goods. But I also started another list: “Radios To Keep.”

This list was a mistake. First, it was a mistake to leave it on the kitchen counter where my wife spotted it and wondered how committed I really was to dumping all that junk — I mean, inventory. Second, it was a mistake because it keeps getting longer. At this rate, the list of “Radios To Keep” could equal the list of ones to jettison, nulling out the whole effort.

No chance of that. Getting rid of all those radios spells a sort of freedom. As I basked in the thought of how much space I’ll have to work on boats, it occurred to me that I might dig out some room to enter my radio room and play with two of my favorite radios. For the radio aficianados who might tune in, the transmitter is a 1961 Central Electronics 200-V and the receiver, same vintage, is a Central Electronics 100-R. The 100-R is a prototype, the only one of this line ever built, and it’s about as rare a radio as you’ll come across. I’ve written beaucoup about it in the ham mags. (Suffice it to say, this is on my list of Radios To Keep) It also works extremely well. Right now. It wasn’t working for a long time. All it would do was emit a lout hiss. But on Friday, in addition to my exciting talk with the aucitoneer, I had another breakthrough — I actually fixed a computer problem all by myself. Yes, without recourse to calling Abe, our computer guru son, I managed to make a computer work that had been on the blink. (Actually, it wasn’t on the blink at all; the original problem was due to operator error — mine — but since I figured out and solved the problem, I feel I deserve credit for “fixing” the computer even though it wasn’t broken. Hey, we have to pump our morale any way we can!)

Getting a screwed-up computer to work is, to me, worth many moments of self-congratulation and inner feelings of triumph. Empowered with this recent record of success, I cleared access to my favorite radios, turned on the receiver that had not worked in years and voila! I heard voices, and it wasn’t because I’m off my meds! Wowee!

One reason why I didn’t mess with my radios, I now realize, was the increasing sense of busy-ness with work I felt over the years. I was aware of the increasing pressure to produce that has been mounting at the Free Press simultaneous with the scramble to survive as an industry, but I’m certain that the energy level I needed to maintain to keep pumping out five stories a week undermined my will to take on radio or boat projects in my spare time. And too, there was that book — actually several books — but one in particular, the Rouge canoe story which I’ll be writing about on and off starting soon — that took up loads of time and still does.

So finally, on Friday, after five weeks of retirement and winding down, having cleared a path to my radios, I very slowly and systematically thought through the connections I needed to make between antenna, peak-reading-wattmeter, transmitter-antenna tuner, receiver and transmitter. I did this with the full knowledge that at the end I would not have an antenna able to radiate my transmitter’s 100-watt signal or any signal at any power level. My antenna is a mess, having been hit by several windstorms. One leg of the dipole was knocked down a year or two ago and I coiled the copper wire at the foot of a big maple tree, trying to avoid ripping into it with the lawnmower during successive summers. The other leg of the dipole also had fallen down and lies on the roof of our house under a thick layer of snow and ice.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk to anybody, but at least my receiver could hear stations sufficiently for me to know that I had an integrated station ready for the time — come spring — when I could fix my antenna.

But just for fun, I tried to transmit. What’s this? Forward power, that is, watts radiated from antenna, very high. Reflected power, watts pointed back to the sender, extremely low? These are the kind of readings you might dream for with some expensive commercially-built antenna. I ran out of time Friday, but on Saturday, after a pleasant lunch at the Waltz Inn (about which more later) and an afternoon spent perusing the wares at the astounding outdoor gear emporium in Dundee, Mich. known as Cabela’s, I came home and fired up the radios. The receiver gave me some trouble. Initial hissing, but I jiggled it and that made it work. Seriously. Then I called my friend Ken Sands, a ham in Plymouth who lives, oh, maybe at most three miles away, and asked him to listen around 3,920 kilohertz. He heard my signal, and it was very strong!

For the better part of an hour, Ken and I chatted, and I wondered at the fact that my antenna wire runs down the side of a maple tree to a coil of wire lying on the ground atop snow, while another part of it lies under snow on the roof.

It’s a snowtenna!

But now it’s thawing. Will my antenna work without snow?

Okay, enough radio. What about this “police vaccine”?

Contact me at joelthurtell(a)gmail.com