Category Archives: Ham Radio

Special event stations celebrating anniversaries of famous European pirate stations

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Harald Kuhl (DL1AX), who writes:

At the beginning of August there will be two special event amateur radio stations active on shortwave, celebrating anniversaries of famous European pirate stations Radio North Sea International and Radio Caroline:

Radio Northsea International PA45RNI

from 01-08-2019 to 31-08-2019

http://www.radio-northsea.org

email: [email protected]

[source: https://www.qrz.com/db/pa45rni]

and

GB55RC will be active from the Ross Revenge:

Celebrating fifty five years of Radio Caroline

Thursday 1st – Monday 5th August 2019

2019 is the fifty fifth anniversary of Radio Caroline and the Martello Tower Group are pleased to be able to activate the world famous MV Ross Revenge again in August. This year we have been granted the ‘special’ special callsign of GB55RC. […]

[source: https://www.qrz.com/db/gb55rc]

Special QSLs will be available.

[The QSLs above are] from previous GB5RC activities.

Thank you for the tip, Harald! I’d love to grab one of those QSLs!

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A photo tour of the 2019 WCARS hamfest

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Yesterday, I attended the WCARS hamfest in Waynesville, North Carolina, with my friend Sébastien (VA2SLW) who is currently on vacation in the area.

The WCARS hamfest is a smaller regional hamfest, but it attracts a lot of folks from the mountain regions of north Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, and beyond.

The WCARS hamfest flea market always has quite a variety of radios, including a number of great vintage models. I’ve been very lucky in the past finding excellent deals, too. This year, I (reluctantly) passed up a few deals knowing I’m also attending the Huntsville Hamfest in August and the Shelby Hamfest in September.

Below, you’ll find a selection of photos from the hamfest. Note that you can click on the image to enlarge it and I attempted to include price tags when possible:

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TX Factor Episode 23

Atlas Obscura: Time to update the Spelling Alphabet?

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Photo by Annie Spratt

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors, Paul Evans and Eric McFadden, who share this article from Atlas Obscura where author Dan Nosowitz asks if it’s time to update the spelling (a.k.a. phonetic) alphabet:

WHEN SOMEONE ON THE PHONE—THE doctor’s office, the bank, the credit card company—asks for my name, I always offer to spell it out—it’s a pretty uncommon surname. So far as I know, there are somewhere between 10 and 20 Nosowitzes in the world, and they’re all closely related to me. Because it’s uncommon, and because it would be a problem if my bank writes my name down as “Moskowitz,” I err on the side of caution. “N as in Nancy, O, S as in Samuel, O, W, I, T as in Thomas, Z as in Zebra,” I chant.

This uses what is what’s called a “spelling alphabet,” or, confusingly, a “phonetic alphabet.” (The latter is confusing because it has little to do with phonemes, or a unit of sound in a language. Plus there’s the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is something else entirely.) The history of spelling alphabets is fascinating and winding, but it’s notable that there hasn’t been an official update to the most commonly used English version in about half a century. We might be in need of one. As mobile phones have replaced landlines, call quality has, strangely, gone down. The general connectivity of the world—including the ease of international video calls and the use of foreign call centers—means that spelling out a name or word is an increasingly common practice. A modern, updated, globally friendly English spelling alphabet would be pretty useful right now, but getting people to use one might be harder than you’d think.

[…]For about 80 years, governments and corporations futzed with these spelling alphabets, and learned that some stuff didn’t work—it turns out, for example, that “Lima” is also the Malay word for the number five. A tremendous amount of research, time, and money was invested into figuring out the optimal spelling alphabet—at least for the three languages that the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, the United Nations agency that handles air transportation) felt significant enough to have one (English, French, and Spanish). The ICAO scrambled, using researchers across the globe on the problem, and by 1959 had finalized what is today probably the best-known spelling alphabet: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, and so on. (As a side note: “Alfa” is not a typo. The whole “ph equals f” thing is confusing, and reasonably so, for non-English speakers. The same goes for the alphabet’s J—Juliett with a doubled final letter so the French won’t say “Juliay.”)

That is the now the standard alphabet for organizations including NATO (which often lends its name to the alphabet), the Federal Aviation Administration of the United States, the International Amateur Radio Union, and pretty much any international group that wants or needs a standard. It’s certainly the most commonly used spelling alphabet in the world, but it is, as most of these alphabets are, exceedingly Anglocentric.[…]

Click here to continue reading the full article at Atlas Obscura.

Thanks for sharing this, Eric and Paul!

Funny story: Last week, I visited my parents and started cooking a nice dinner. Ten minutes into baking a roasted vegetable dish, the oven’s temperature started rising unexpectedly because the oven’s control board (turns out) could no longer receive the temperature probe data. Its fail safe was to shut down the oven completely.

After a little online research, I found the parts that had most likely failed, so I pulled the oven away from the wall, disassembled the back panel, evaluated the parts, gathered the model number, and called a local appliance parts store.

When the associate answered the phone I described the problem and the parts I might need. He agreed with my diagnosis, so asked for the oven’s 16 character model number :

Me: LWZTF700…

Him: LWCDF700…???

Me: Sorry, let me try again. Lima Whiskey Zulu Tango Foxtrot…

Him: Excellent! I copy that. Say, were you in the military?

Me: Ha ha… No, I’m a ham radio operator.

Him: I am too! My call sign is….

He then proceeded to give me their best price on the parts.

I’m sure he hears variations of the spelling/phonetic alphabet multiple times a day and appreciates it when his customers use the one most widely accepted!

For your reference, here’s the standard spelling alphabet currently accepted by NATO, the FAA, and the IARU:

(Source: Wikimedia)

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David Warren: Radio enthusiast who invented the “Black Box” flight recorder

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As a schoolboy, David was fascinated by electronics and learned to build his own radio sets (Source: BBC and the Warren Family Collection)

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Paul W4/VP9KFPaul W4/VP9KF, who notes that David Warren, inventor of ‘Black Box’ recorders was a ham radio operator and radio enthusiast.

The following short biography comes from this memorial website:

David Warren (full name David Ronald de Mey Warren) was an Australian inventor. He is most famous for his invention of the Flight data recorder (invented in 1956), or more commonly known as the “black box”

The “Black Box” is a device that records in-flight conversations and data. Warren came up with the idea of recording the flight crew’s conversation on a device that could be protected to increase its chances of surviving the crash. Although it has the name “Black Box”, it is coated with heat-resistant bright orange paint for high visibility in a wreckage, and the Black Box is usually mounted in the aircraft’s tail section, where it is more likely to survive a severe crash.

David Warren was born on the 20th of March, 1925, on Groote Eylandt, an island off the coast of the Northern Territory. He was the first child of European descent born on the island. When he was at the age of four, he was sent to Tasmania and Sydney to spend most of the next 12 years in boarding schools (Launceston Grammar School in Tasmania and Trinity Grammar School in Sydney).

Australia’s first major air crash in 1934 claimed the life of David’s father.

Warren had received a crystal set from his father just before the disaster that started his interest in amateur radio and electronics. Almost 20 years later, when the age of commercial jet aircraft was just beginning, Warren worked as a chemist, specialising in aircraft fuels at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories.

Dr Warren was working as a scientist at Melbourne’s Aeronautical Research Laboratory, where he was helping to investigate the 1953 mystery crash of a Comet jetliner. New fuels being used in Jets in the early 50’s were more likely to become explosive at altitude than conventional aircraft fuels and this was identified as a possible cause of the Comet crash. While listening to the arguments over possible causes of the Crash, Warren realised that the solution could be at hand if someone on the plane had been carrying a device similar to the then newly released “Protona Minifon” portable recorder that he saw at a trade fair.

The device would be fire proof (using steel wire as the recording medium like the “Pocket Recorder”) and erase itself so that the last hours of the flight were always recorded. The device consisted of a single steel wire as the recording medium and provided four hours of recording and automatically switched itself on and off with the aircraft. It was during this period that Dr Warren incorporated the idea of recording instruments on a separate channel – his interest in electronics as a schoolboy was brilliantly applied to turn instrument readings into recordable dots and bleeps.

The recorder was well received in England (where the name “Black Box” was made up by a journalist at a briefing) and also in Canada where the idea was seen as a potential addition to beacons being developed there.

Warren continued to lead the project, developing the Flight Memory device to record more instruments with greater accuracy. This led to the first commercially produced flight recorder-the Red Egg.

A further disaster at Wintoon in 1967 saw Australia become the first country to make both flight data and cockpit voice mandatory on all jets.

While a student at the University of Sydney, David met Ruth Meadows, who became his wife and lifetime supporter. Together, they raised a family and shared an interest in science and education. When he retired, David and Ruth lived in Caulfield South, Victoria, in regular contact with their four children and seven grandchildren.

David died at the age of 85 in 2010, 19 July, Melbourne, Australia. After his death, He was buried in a casket bearing the label “Flight Recorder Inventor; Do Not Open”.

Then in June 2012, the ACT Government named a road, David Warren Road, in the suburb of Hume in recognition of Warren. On 25 March 2014, the Defence Science and Technology Organisation renamed their Canberra headquarters to the David Warren Building.

Thanks for sharing this, Paul! Fascinating…

Note that the BBC recently published an amazing piece about Dr. Warren on the 9th anniversary of his passing–click here to read.

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Apollo 11 ham radio special event stations

Waffle House Tee: “Proudly Serving Ham Radio Operators”

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Robert Yowell, who writes:

Thomas – while I was in Dayton last month (after Hamvention), I stopped in a Waffle House and noticed all the workers were wearing the same T-Shirt which had emblazoned on the back “Proudly Serving Ham Radio Operators”!

I asked if the shirts were for sale and was told I needed to contact the regional office in Huber Heights which handles all Dayton area Waffle Houses. It turns out that for the past decade or so, every year in June the Waffle Houses in the Dayton area would have their employees wear shirts to honor Hamvention.

I was told the designs and colors are different every year, but this is what this year’s shirt looks like. They sold it to me do $18 including shipping!

Thank you, Robert. The connection between the Waffle House and Ham Radio has been a mystery to me and you’ve solved it! Each year at Hamvention, like you, I see Waffle House shirts floating around everywhere. Thanks for sharing!

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