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Click for more detail... My dad (a ham at the close of the days of spark) got me into amateur radio in a bit of a roundabout way. And it all came from his exposure to technology growing up on a ranch in Colorado. He was born on the dining room table on a farm in 1910, and had a crystal set by the time he was 9, and was a radio operator by the time he was 10 - he never really admitted if he got a license back then. The oldest boy on the neighboring ranch and my dad set up a spark gap station, and used the barbed wire fencing strands to link the two farmhouses together for a private telephone (one strand to ground) and a remote control of the ham station (the other strands to ground and to each other). He'd tell stories about farm life - collecting eggs from the chickens, milking the cows, repairing the tractor, and more. My dad went to his reward in 1984 convinced that 60-odd years earlier he had helped build one of the first, if not the first remotely controlled station in the USA. When he was young his folks decided to sell the farm and moved into town - but then his dad was offered a job in Toronto Canada, hence they moved a lot further than they had planned. The new place was near what is now Toronto Pearson International Airport, and he used to bicycle or walk to the local airfield and wash airplanes in exchange for flying lessons. They paved the taxiways a year or so before they paved the runways and he used to piss off the tower guys by taking off from the taxiways (he had just washed the airplane, why get it muddy?). He eventually earned Canadian Commercial License #237 with a multi-engine seaplane commercial instrument rating, back in the days when "multi" meant three. Yes, among others, he had ratings in both seaplane and land versions of the Ford Trimotor. As he told the story they only made five of the seaplane version, and all were converted back to land planes because the engines didn't have enough power to get both the airplane and a profitable payload off the water. At that time the laws of New York state made it illegal to print or sell the Racing Form in New York. The tracks got around that by sending the information by a private telegraph wire to Toronto, it was typeset and printed there (the Linotype keyboard operator was in New York, the machine was in Toronto). My dad flew a twin engine plane full of the Form to NY every night, landed, moved the truck out of the hangar, unloaded the airplane into the truck and drove the truck to the track. He slept in a friends house in NY, then stashed the truck in the hangar and flew back. When you paid the the gate fee to enter the track you were handed a "free" racing form. That job was his introduction to horse racing and to New York. A friend of his worked on the Toronto paper as a photographer, taught him how to use a camera, and had him take photos of the more important horse races. My dad quit flying "bush" the day he was flying a supplies run to a fishing camp in the bush in an open cockpit biplane and the radial engine exploded. Several valves, rocker arms, and other parts flew past his ears or bounced off his goggles. He deadsticked the pane down to a nice open grassy field - the only problem he found out after touchdown - it was two to three foot grass and one foot stumps. The bottom of the airplane was ripped open and the airplane totaled. Fortunately he had the camp supplies, and after he rigged a travois he had to hike two days to the next town and send a telegram (collect!) telling his boss what had happened and where he was. He had met the head of Madison Square Garden at the horse racing track one day and called him on the phone, and wangled a job as a photographer at the Garden. He parlayed that job into a position as a photographer with a local NY newspaper. Around 1975-1980 we were cleaning out the garage and he stumbled across a few pieces of history - a Garden press card (press pass) that was handwritten (and he claimed it was only one ever issued where the expiration date says "NONE"), and we also found his home-built strobelight - the first strobelight ever used in the Garden - it used four 2v wet lead acid batteries in series, a 6v car vibrator and two or three 110v-to-6v power transformers with the 6v sides in parallel and the primaries feeding voltage doublers in series to make the 600-900vDC. He got the high voltage capacitors from a friend of a friend - "Doc" Edgerton, yes, THE Doctor Edgerton (google the name, and watch the films) and amazed the other sports photographers at the Garden until he moved to Los Angeles. Each one would burn up several dozen flashbulbs in one basketball game, he'd use the strobe for flash after flash until the vibrator pitch lowered then plug the strobe into an AC outlet to continue shooting (and incidentally, to recharge it). The sports photos he did at the Garden and for the newspaper got him an offer of a photographer job with the Los Angeles Herald Express (now part of the Daily News empire) so he moved west. It wasn't enough to live on, so he went looking and found a position as a photographer with a local studio run by a German family named Luckhaus. Later on the owner died and he bought the studio from the widow (and inherited a large photo collection going back to the late 'teens and early 1920s). One of the arrangements Luckhaus had was with several local movie studios to do still photos on movie sets if the studios were shorthanded on still photographers (and each movie film crew had a still photographer to shoot "continuity" shots). He made a point of getting autographed photos of every male and female lead he worked with. My dad showed me one of Luckhaus's homemade cameras, and a homemade gunpowder (flash powder) tray, complete with a working trigger and flint. WW 2 came along, and my dad enlisted into the Army Air Corps (what is today the Air Force) planning on being a pilot - after all he was multi-engine commercial instrument passenger and cargo rated. As he told the story, he sat down with the gentleman at the recruiting center and before he could even open his mouth the gentleman pointed to an object on his desk and asked what it was. He answered "an Abrams Height Finder". The man said "Continue" and my dad said "It is used to determine how tall something like a smokestack is while looking through it at a set of stereo aerial photos". The man said "You're going to Colorado Springs". My dad said "That's funny, I was born near there". Several weeks after he finished Basic Training he found himself in the 6th Photo Squadron - and found out that the group name was intended to be misleading. What they did was make all the maps for the AIr Corps, and in many cases they started from scratch using aerial photos. A few months before he died he told me that had had helped make General Doolittle's maps for the Tokyo Raid in April of 1942, and described his participation. They started with National Geographic maps of Japan and Tokyo, some tourist maps of Tokyo (which they aquired by running classified ads in DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and NY newspapers), and the help of the Tokyo Fire Chief, who by chance had been on a Hawaii vacation, and by another chance, getting a tour of Pearl Harbor as the raid started. He missed getting killed by seconds and decided that since his Emperor had tried to kill him the Emperor had forfeited all loyalty, so the Chief was a great help in making the maps and planning the raid (I still remember my dad saying, with a fake japanese accent, "Tokyo only have twelve fire brigades, you start twenty big fires, they never put out"). It may have been twelve, it may have been twenty, I forget the exact number of brigades and fires. My dad stayed with 6th Photo during the entire war, however he made several trips to Europe for various reasons, including trouble-shooting various aerial camera problems. His favorite photo plane was the F-4 (the reconnaissance version of the P38, the F-series jet fighters were developed much later), and second was the F-6 (made from the P51). Supposedly there was a photo recon pilot of an F-4 that made ace by sneaking up behind lone German planes and chopping the tails off with one of his props, then taking photos as the plane went down. Supposedly he could always get back to base on one engine if he messed up the other one too badly. His crew chief hated him. If anyone who is reading this has any additional information on 6th Photo I'd be interested in chatting with you. He commented that just after WW2 all a hitchhiker need was a military uniform and a thumb. He hitchhiked across the country twice. He related that he was standing on a corner in New York city, in uniform, with a piece of cardboard reading "Los Angeles", a car pulling over, the driver reaching across, the seat, opening the door, and saying "Buddy, get in, you can consider yourself in Kansas City right now". He also commented that the driver that gave him a lift across Texas commented "The sun has riz, the sun has set, here we iz in Texas yet". One of his 6th Photo friends was highly placed in the National Parks department and got him one of his first jobs after getting out of the service... he was contracted to shoot 20 good 8x10 photos (on 8x10 film) of every national park in the country plus another dozen 4x5 photos. So he ended up with a letter of instruction to the local Park manager describing the photo job, plus a letter authorizing him to free gas and oil from the parks or any federal building motor pool and gas, oil, tires and vehicle repairs at any military base motor pool, plus overnight housing in "any available military or parks housing", plus reimbursement for expenses upon presentation of receipts. He road-tripped all 48 states (and remember this was long before any freeways), went through several clutches, batteries, sets of tires, and sets of brake shoes, and the National Parks got the photos that jump-started their DC public information office. Another few pieces of history we stumbled across in the garage cleaning was the #1 Press Pass for both the 1952 Miss Universe Pageant and the 1952 Miss USA pageant (held simultaneously in Long Beach, run by Pacific Mills/Catalina Swimwear and a Press Club friend was the pageant manager), and the "Head of Public Relations" badge for the 1957 Los Angeles Boat Show (he helped organize and run it for the first few years), and the original authorization letter for his National Parks photo job. As I grew up I spent about 1/3 to 1/2 of my Saturdays in my dad's studio - rocking trays in the darkroom when I was 8, doing copy camera work and studio shots of machinery etc. by the time I was 10. Note - this was late '50s / early 60s... xerox machines hadn't been invented yet - if you needed a copy of a document you had a picture taken of it and prints made, so there was a LOT of copy camera work, most of it on 4x5, some 8x10 inch film. I didn't consider it work, after all, I was having fun with my dad. I was exposed to a lot of technology in the studio, one saturday we'd be shooting photos of diesel fuel injectors, another saturday photos of kitchen appliances, another saturday it would be of a model in a new bathing suit, and the following week we'd be out shooting a building exterior or down in Los Angeles harbor shooting a full-size fiberglass whale. My dad's business cards said "Advertising and Industrial Photography", but as he put it, would shoot "anything but babies and weddings" (and he would do weddings for friends - and Terry or Carol Prutsos, or Barbara Haddick, or her son, if you are reading this please contact me). One of the more interesting memories was a private guided tour of the new Los Angeles Police Administration Building (later renamed Parker Center) when I was about 6 or 7 years old. My dad was doing a photo story for a news magazine on something that was new in the building and took a dozen or so 4x5 photos for the magazine. We ended up in the booking area and the uniformed officer that was escorting us and giving the tour asked if we had any more questions. I asked "just what happens when you arrest someone, like for stealing a candy bar from a market?". He said "let me show you..." as he pulled out his handcuffs. So with me in cuffs he walked us through the process of booking and jailing as my dad was clicking away with a Leica 35mm camera, and somewhere I have a regular LAPD booking photo of me holding a booking card numbered 0000001 (after all, the building wasn't open for business yet, it had to be #1) . The charge on the booking card was shoplifting. My dad got the booking card and photo as a souvenir and that particular photo didn't make it into the magazine ! One of the things my dad did for fun was sailing, and he crewed on a few racing sailboats. If anyone knows what happened to the Soliloquy (spelling?), or sees the name Ralph Morris in an old ship's logbook, I 'd like to know. It doesn't rain that often in southern California - and if the customers were not on a deadline my dad would let the aerial photo jobs pile up until he had several, or until it rained. He had a standing order with a helicopter service at Santa Monica airport to call him on the phone the first clear day after any good rainstorm that would wash down the buildings and clear the air of dust and soot. If he had aerials to do they'd unbolt the side door on the helicopter and he'd do all the outstanding aerial jobs in one day. His standard aerial camera used 7 inch wide roll film and had a safety chain that connected it to an overhead bar in the helicopter - just in case. One of his major clients was Popular Mechanics magazine... he and Tom Stimpson (whom he met while in 6th Photo) covered the west coast from the late 1940s until Tom passed away in the late 1970s. Tom had several "pen names" and had as many as 6 articles in one issue, my dad had several "lens names" and did all the photos for Toms articles plus some shots for other "Popular..." magazines. He never officially wrote any articles, but he once commented to me that he had at least one article a year in PM for over 15 years in a row. A copy of PM magazine arrived every month in the mail, if he had photos in any other "Popular..." magazines (like Popular Science) one of those would show up as well, and my aunt Helen in Chicago bought me Popular Electronics every year as my birthday present. My dad and I would fight over who got to read any of them first. I can still hear my mom saying "The bathroom is not a library, and stop leaving your magazines in there!" Popular Mechanics had a lead time of 3 to 5 months and that meant that the new cars and trucks would be available to PM and other magazines like Motor Trend, for evaluation and photos starting around early March (and frequently earlier), and there were times he'd bring a different new car or truck home every weekend for a couple of months to shoot photos somewhere in southen California... the beach, the mountains, at a horse racing track, at Descanso or the Huntington Gardens, at the Rose Bowl, wherever. I remember riding with my dad and Tom in a new pickup truck up to the Oat Mountain oil field for some photos (the oil field scenes in the movie "Telefon" were shot there). I distinctly remember him dropping me off at high school one Monday morning in '67 Dodge Charger, and another Monday morning in a Boss 351 Mustang - each one 4 to 5 months before the car was even in the showroom. It got to a point that the auto shop instructor would be standing outside on Monday mornings to see what I showed up in... I also remember my dad having a "blue book" catalog from the Ford Modeling Agency (no relation to Ford cars) in his desk drawer, with notes in the margin of when each lady was used (the magazine would not let him use the same lady more often than once every couple of years). My dad and his guys were the staff photographers for the Jonathan Club (a very prestigous business club in downtown Los Angeles), and either he or an associate were at the club 2 or 3 nights a week. After my dad passed away I called up the Club and offered them over 15 years of 4x5 inch negatives of every event at the club... including major political figures in various states of drunkenness... all they would have to do is to send a couple of men and a lift gate truck to get them... they weren't interested. He was also the staff photographer for the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, and with the Los Angeles Press Club. He also served two terms as president of the Press Club, and started the rogues gallery of former presidents, and the tradition of having an embarrasing baby picture in the frame upon it's unveiling. I met a number of the Los Angeles based media people there, and a number of others including Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Katharine Graham (the Publisher of the Washington Post newspaper), and Evelyn Newbranch, widow of Harvey Newbranch, publisher of the Omaha World-Herald, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1920 (the first one ever issued for an editorial). Later I found out that Evelyn was my aunt (my dad's sister)! Interestingly, the Press Club was my first exposure to Teletype - there weas a Model 15 on City News Service in one corner of the bar (and later on it was replaced by a Model 28 on Associated Press). A few years later I had a ex-Southern Pacific Railway Model 15 in my garage on the local 146.10/146.70 RTTY repeater. I ran 30w into a beam pointed at the repeater, and a second beam (and right angles and in the voltage null of the other) was connected to the receiver. Full duplex RTTY.... After over 15 years as a Press Club member my dad knew everyone in the Los Angeles media circles and in Southern California politics, and used those skills and connections as a volunteer with the HOPE Project (aka the HOPE hospital ship - google it and the books - the first was "A Ship Called HOPE"). At one point I was going to spend a year as a ham radio operator on the ship but that fell through. As an example of knowing people, I was in the studio one school-holiday-friday, and the phone rang. I answered it, and the gentleman was the local rep for a mobile crane company, and needed a photo "that demonstrated the reach of the crane". I called my dad (who was in the darkroom) on the intercom and he picked up the phone and he and the rep chatted for a minute. I heard my dad say "Hold on a minute", he came out of the darkroom, flipped through his Rolodex, and dialed a number on line two. A few minutes later he punched up line one and said "How about this - you say it can reach 170 feet? How about we park it on the 50 yard line of the Coliseum, and have the hook hanging at eye level 20 feet into the end zone? And maybe hang a platform with a VW Bug on it off the hook? And that's what they did - only they left off the platform and the Bug. All it cost the crane company rep was replacing the damaged sod on the football field and my dad's invoice. Sometimes it's not what you know, but who you know... Another client was National Geographic. He did a number of jobs and trips for them, but every single negative went to them. He didn't get to keep anything but the memories (but he did ship stuff home). He once commented that the people in various foreign countries are a lot nicer than the local government personnel were. He would tell stories of the magazine writer and him being met at the airport in some countries by a military man in dress uniform, and given a jeep and a combination of driver / bodyguard / translator and free rein to shoot anything, and in other countries being escorted around and allowed to shoot only specific scenes, some of which were obviously pre-scheduled. The communist countries, especially mainland China, were the most blatant at doing that... In some countries he'd be issued both a driver and a translator - in some countries it was (maybe still is) not proper for a male (the driver) to talk to a single female, so the translator lady would do that. The Sha of Iran gave him a driver/pilot, a translator, and a helicopter, and offered a company of soldiers if he needed them. One of the more interesting items he shipped back was a bowlling ball sized chunk of turquoise from what is now Iraq. He brought back some silver jewelry from Indonesia. A year or so later he brought back a case of Mexican beer and a case of Coca-Cola from Mexico City (and Mexican Coke to this day is still made with sugar, not corn syrup, and you can taste the difference). Another trip resulted in a 3 foot by 3 foot by 2 inch slab of polished onyx that became a coffee table. One of the more memorable events at his photo studio was in 1965 or 1966... My dad and I were doing some production printing one saturday (and exposing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sheets of 8x10 photo paper with the same image one at a time through the enlarger, then through the developer, stop bath and hypo, print washer and dryer gets old in a hurry). We had finished all 1500 (or so) prints that needed to be done that day and were running them through the print washer and dryer and cleaning up when the doorbell rang. My dad looked at his watch, and said "Drat, I forgot", and told me told me to quick roll the portrait camera out onto the floor and then let the man in the front door. I did so, and made small talk while my dad finished putting the last hundred prints into the print washer, loaded a few film holders, and came out of the darkroom. He introduced me to Ronald and Nancy Regan, and commented that he had met them at the Press Club, and that "Ron" needed several portrait shots for his Governor of California campaign. I still have an autographed print from that shoot. Later on after he became governor Mr. Regan had a minor battle when he wanted to use my dad for the official state portrait, but the official state photographer won that one. And many years later a really sleazy character showed up a few months after Mr. Regan was elected president wanting to buy a negative to make dart boards from... I told him the Regans had the negatives and he would have to go elsewhere. Then I made very sure that the Regans had the negatives. A few months after I met Mr. Regan I was shooting a bikini catalog at Will Rogers State Beach, near Malibu (remember the beach blanket movies from the 1960s? That's the place). Picture a dozen or so barely legal girls, a dozen bikinis per girl, a Greyhound bus sized motor home used as a changing room, one marketing rep from the company, one chaperone (a office lady from the company), and one 15-year old photographer - me. And my MOTHER was there (well, I wasn't of legal driving age so she was the driver). She said she was there to keep track of the rolls of film, and what bikini and what girl was on each roll (8 shots per roll of 120 sized film), and incidentally to keep all of us out of "trouble". The rep ended up running the list of photos/rolls, and the office lady doing chaperone work. My mom staged the photos and made sure that the girls hair, makeup and bikini were "presentable". My dad was in the Rolodex at several studios and continued to do on-call continuity shots now and then and I remember going out to a golf course once for a filming of a scene in a Disney movie on sailplanes. If you ever get a chance to see the 1960s show "The Boy Who Flew With The Condors", it's worth setting your VCR or TiVo and recording it. Google it and you will discover it's a true story, and Christopher Jury plays himself. When my dad passed away I donated 27 five-drawer file cabinets full of photos to the Los Angeles public library historical section, including construction shots of the Spruce Goose and the Northrop Flying Wing, over fifteen years of every event at the Jonathan Club and of twenty years of the Press Club, plus every roll-out of new airplanes at Edwards Air Force Base (somewhere I have a photo of me sitting in the X15) plus every "normal" photo job my dad did... Torginol Corp, TWA, Globe Electronics, American Air Lines, Bank of America, Caterpillar, Globe Electronics, Roofmaster, Hoffman, Muntz, Pacific Mills (Catalina Swimwear), Motor Rim and Wheel Corp, Firestone, Goodyear, Cincinatti Milacron, Vimorco, Detroit Diesel, Rangefinder Magazine, Tommys Hamburgers, and thousands more. If you go into a Tommys, look on the wall for a photo shot from rooftop level showing the lunchtime crowd. That was shot at about noon on a Saturday in July. I'm in it. Dad also shot every Jay Ober and Howard “Dutch” Darrin car, plus some of the Dean Jeffries and George Barris cars...(think "1966 Batmobile" (a 1955 one-off Lincoln), "the Munster Koach", the "Monkeemobile" (a 1966 Pontiac GTO), the Addams Family car, the "Dukes of Hazzard" (1969 Dodge Charger) and a bunch more customs... (google the names). Most were on site, some were in the Press Club parking lot. My dad commented once that the chopped and channeled Mercury he borrowed from Duch for his honeymoon trip up the coast from Los Angeles to the Hearst Castle and back got more attention from the passersby than the gorgeous lady on his arm. She made him leave the cameras at home (but he snuck a 35mm Leica into his luggage along with a half-dozen rolls of film). My dad's photo collection also included (courtesy of Mr. Luckhaus) some glass plate negatives of Albert Einstein visiting CalTech in the 1930s, and a large number of major intersections of various parts of Los Angeles in the 1910s, 20s and 30s (for a while I made some side money by selling prints of those negatives to building owners on those same corners) . One interesting sub-section of the archives was glass plate negatives of every decent-sized church in Los Angeles in the 1910-1930 era. Apparently there was only one heating company in the Los Angeles area that would do churches, and Mr. Luckhaus had the contract from them to shoot one photo of the exterior, one of the interior, and one or two of the new heating plant (some were wood, some used coal and a screw-drive auger). The external photos are so clear that you can read the signboard on the front of the building and see what the sermon topic for sunday was (and they haven't changed much in over 70 years). Not many of those churches are left... but the photos are, and the pros at the lIbrary are caring for them. My dad met my mom in the military hospital in Chicago - he had been shot down over Europe. I never got the details on that, and his military records show that he officially never left the States, but I have photos of him in England and France. Those same records have him as a Corporal (two stripes), but the photos have him as a Sargeant's (three stripes), Staff Sargeant (three up, one down), and Master Sargeant (three up and three down). Who knows what went on... (and I may have the rank names wrong) My mom was a real character - despite the fact that she was an senior ER nurse in the military (with Majors stripes) she'd frequently joke that she didn't know which end of the screwdriver was the handle. Note that this is the same woman that, according to her, did major triage and "simple" surgery (such as appendectomies) when the military hospital was shorthanded on doctors. After my dad married her in 1948 she and my dad had my older brother - he passed away as an infant (this is long before SIDS was figured out) and then me. There are no photos of my brother, I do not even know his name, and a few months of weekends visiting every cemetery in Los Angeles county has revealed nothing. She ran the studio, and kept the books, and played driver for the junior shutterbug. When the recession hit in the 1970s she went back to work. She had to take a few classes to get her RN back, and went from candy-striper to nurse to charge nurse to head nurse of the pediatric ward at the local hospital in less than two years. After she diagnosed a case of scarlet fever that three doctors had missed more than one doctor would consult her on diagnosis. She proudly wore her 1930s class pin right up to the day she retired - and even then there were several doctors that called her up and asked her to quietly visit patients and report back her ideas on a diagnosis. And two years after she retired they passed the "you can't force them to retire at 65" law. By that time she already had her real estate salespersons license, and had been salesperson of the quarter - twice. My mom once told me that she knew one of my dad's relatives as he had given talks at her nursing school. I never know what the relation was, but Ralph Edwin Morris was one of the inventors of the EEG system. He graduated from the University Of Minnesota in 1902 and his PHd work (completed in 1916) was "The Graphic Recording Of Reflexes, Clonus and Tremors". It's available as an eBook if you look hard enough. Later on he'd stop by the house once in a while for dinner. I remember one night my mom was discussing the differences between the pediatric apendectomy that she had assisted on that day and the one that she had assisted on back in nursing school and he commented that she had it easy. Apparently at some point he had spent some time as a country doctor in the area of the California-Oregon border and took care of five logging camps - and all he had in the way of drugs and surgical tools was what fit into his saddle bags. He told how one night a rider had come in from a camp to tell him that he was "needed right now" for a sick logger. He saddled up, and rode to the camp. He ended up doing an emergenty appendectomy... as the story went, "I had the poor slob on his back on a mess hall table, one logger sitting on each arm, two more sitting on the legs, a fifth doing the cloroform drip to knock him out, and then I went in and grabbed the appendix and sewed him up before he bled to death". I've been around technology since I "helped" my dad rebuild the carburetor (at age 6 and 7) and do other maintenance on the 1949 Jeep station wagon, the 1957 Ford, the 1964 Corvair van and 1965 Dodge Van he had as I grew up (the Dodge had a diamond-plate camera platform on the rear roof). He taught me how to check the oil in an engine when I was 8, and I've had my own hand tools since he showed me how to fix my own (and the neighbor kids) bicycles and decided he didn't want me using his good tools. He always bought Craftsman (or better) and commented "Buying quality only hurts once". I still have some of his 50-year old tools. My dad got me interested in electronics accidentally - he had built a Heathkit home Hi-Fi system piece by piece on the kitchen table...an A7E amplifier, a FM-3 tuner and a BC-1 AM receiver. The FM-3 had a drift problem (fixed with the FM-3A, it added AFC) and my dad was apparently independently duplicating the AFC circuit that the Heathkit designers used only he used a hand-picked thermistor to counteract the drift. For a while he had the unit running with the cover off, and (as my mom told the story) I stuck my finger into it one day when I was about 7 years old and got shocked by the +150vDC. I asked my dad "why did that hurt?" and he proceeded to explain voltage and current. For my next birthday I received an American Beauty soldering iron and a Heathkit CR-1 Crystal Set (and I still have the crystal set). That birthday gift had a big effect on my life. One of the photo contracts that my dad had was with Globe Electronics - we got to play with all their new CB radios back in the days when they ran on vibrators, crystals and 12AQ5s... my dad got an 11W callsign, then later it was changed to KQX7660 (and he joined the local REACT - KOX8987). Another contract pair was with Hoffman and Muntz - both were big manufacturers of TV sets for a while. We had one of every model that Hoffman and Muntz made in the studio at one time or another. My mom fell in love with the Hoffman that had planters in the side of the cabinet - don't forget, at that time TVs were considered to be furniture first, and entertainment second. I remember my dad commenting that the Muntz ones needed a better antenna than the Hoffmans did. The first TV we actually owned was purchased in 1956 or 1957. It was a 15 or 17 inch GE "portable" (it had handles) - but my dad joked that it needed two men and a crane to lift it. But I remember watching Ed Sullivan, Engineer Bill, Sheriff John, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Mighty Mouse, Felix the Cat, Disney, Mitch Miller, Whillybirds, Rescue 8, Highway Patrol, and more on it, and seeing the first TV pictures taken from a camera in a helicopter (a fireworks show) - google Klaus Landsberg, W6XYZ, and KTLA sometime (yes, Klaus was a ham, but I do not know the callsign). My dad and I modified that GE TV for a remote speaker mute switch (for commercials) and an external speaker jack - we had an extra 12 inch University mid-range in it's own wooden cabinet, and that speaker alone made a big difference. Years later I met Fess Parker (Daniel Boone on Disney) at his winery in central California and he told a few stories about internal politics at Disney, including some interesting stories about the Mickey Mouse Club and the Mouseketeers, and the off-screen antics. He also told me about Walt's private bar deep inside Disneyland (hint: It's near the Carnation ice cream building). To this day Disneyland is a "dry" venue, but not for the family and invited guests... The first TV that I actually had in my bedroom was a black and white DuMont with a Miller continuous tuner (no detents) that I salvaged from curbside down the street on trash day - in my little red wagon - all the DuMont needed was a new coupling capacitor and two new tubes. Like the living room GE, I added a switch on a piece of zip cord to mute the speaker. My parents bedroom got a Magnavox set the same way, complete with 3-way mute switches on each side of the bed (on three-wire zip cord). Once a week on trash day evening I'd ride my bicycle around the neighborhood, and if I spotted something interesting I'd go back with my little red wagon and haul it home. Later on I added a homebrew trailer hitch to the bicycle and the wagon so I would not have to go back. Over a period of several years I hauled home several tabletop and console radios from curbside, all of which got repaired (some of the wooden cabinets were refinished) and sold on consignment through the local antique store. I gave a one year warranty on everything but tubes and cabinet dings, and never had one come back. Then one evening a Grundig console radio came home that had shortwave in it. My dad and I had taken apart a deflection coil once and he explained electromagnetism using the wire, a car battery and either a carriage bolt or a thick piece of rebar, I forget which. I still had the fist-sized electromagnet so we unwound it and strung a long run of the enameled wire from the front of the house to the back of the garage, with a insulator in the middle, 300 ohm twinlead into my bedroom, and the shortwave section came alive. That night my dad had to explain what VOA and WWV was and I remember listening to an AM traffic net, probably on 80 meters. I remember my first DX - a BBC news programme. That shortwave radio got me in trouble later... during the Viet Nam war I took tape recordings (the Wollensak recorder was another curbside salvage) of VOA, Radio Hanoi, Radio Moscow (relayed by a station in Cuba), and the BBC into class and played them for the civics and history teacher. She didn't like hearing points of view that she didn't agree with, and gave me a "D-". My mom and dad fought it, pointed out that I was the only person in the class that cared enough to do extra credit work (the audio tapes), and wanted me to be given an "A" grade. The principal overrode the low grade and compromised with my folks with a "B+". That teacher wasn't at the school the following semester. Back to technology... My fascination with it extends to cars and motorcycles - my first car was a 1957 Buick that was purchased for $75 and towed home, then my dad and I fixed it. I had to rebuild the carburetor (a Stromberg model WW), fix the transmission linkage, replace the rear transmission seal and install a new battery to get it on the road, I eventually rodded out the radiator, replaced the front and rear crank seals, brake shoes, rubber brake lines, the master cylinder, and new generator brushes. It had a vibrator powered CB (Globe, naturally) and a 6m AM Gonset and two rear deck ball mounts on it before it hit the pavement (shades of the 1957 Buick that Broderick Crawford drove in Highway Patrol). My second car (a Rambler) ended up getting an engine swap within a year after I got it (when it's burning 70wt oil it's time for a bore-and-rings, or an engine swap). It ended up with the Gonset and a Motorola 2m 2-frequency all-tube radio in the back. It had a vibrator to power the receiver, and dynamotor for the transmitter. The local channels at that time were 146.82 and 146.76 simplex, because CB crystals plugged into the Moto radios landed on those channels. Once my dad got exposed to amateur FM he saw how much fun it was and got his ham license back - he couldn't prove the 1920s license (several boxes got lost during the moves from Toronto to New York, and then from New York to Los Angeles) so he had to take the test and got a new callsign. My mom also got hers at the same time - I remember a general class friend coming over and giving them the code and theory tests, then I stapled the two form 610s and a check together and put them in the envelope. A few weeks later she was WA6SOX and he was WB6SOX, or as they put it, "the unmached pair of sox". My next car was a 71 Ford Falcon station wagon that had been originally built with a 200 cubic inch six and drum brakes, and by the time I was done it had the V8 engine, trans and front disc brakes from a wrecked Mustang in it - plus two ball mounts (10m and 6m) on the rear fenders and the roof had five VHF / UHF antennas on NMO mounts. A Motorola U64MHT Motrac was my first full duplex mobile radio and until you've used a full duplex radio on a UHF repeater you don't know what you've been missing - especially on the autopatch. All it took to duplex the MHT was a second antenna, cutting one jumper and adding another jumper. A 4-freq 6m Motrac and a 2m Motrac (that I added the parts to for 8-freqs) joined it. Later on a 150Mhz Motran got converted to 220MHz.... picture 4 Motrac control heads and a Heathkit PA-Siren under the dashboard, (and later in a vertical rack bolted to the tranny hump), 2 speakers under the front seats and 2 under the dash, and one microphone on a rotary switch. The Falcon also got the footlong brass dual air horn and the 5-man-raft air tank. One afternoon I was driving home and the Falcon was broadsided right through the passenger door by a Chrysler New Yorker at 45 MPH. It ended up in the junkyard, but I was able to strip it of everything including the radios and rear air shocks. My next car didn't get any radios - it was an Opel Kadette station wagon that was totaled the third week I had it. The engine ended up in the passenger seat when a car nailed the left fromt fender. My next car was a Volvo station wagon which got 5 NMO mounts the first weekend I had it plus the Motracs and everything but the air horn. Later on the UHF Motrac was replaced with an ex-Arizona highway patrol 12-freq wide-spaced Micor which was duplexed a few weeks after installation. My dad's first mobile was a 12-channel 2M Standard 826 in his Datsum 1200 and my mom got a 3-freq Motrac in her Pontiac Bonneville (she wanted something that was, as she put it, mom-proof). The base station was a 4-frequency Motrac tabletop base. I've worked at Dressen-Barnes (aerospace grade power supplies), Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and a number of other companies including Conrac (studio TV monitors), American Telecom (PBXs), Vega (land mobile radio accessories and wireless microphones), First Interstate Bank (helped develop the software system that tracked the CDs and Bonds) , Digital Equipment Corporation (custom digital interfaces), Terminal Systems (a bit of everything), and a few more. One of the more memorable events was sitting in the auditorium at JPL and watching the Viking photos come in from Mars, one video line at a time. Another was helping start a company from scratch, and in three years seeing it go to to $100,000 in sales per year (and then getting shoved aside and forced to watch it die from bad management and I suspect, some embezzlement). While I was working at JPL I got my dad a tour of the place and he was amazed at the quality of the satelite photos that were on the wall of the visitor center. He joked "We thought we were hot stuff when we were able to count railroad ties from 38,000 feet and here you guys can determine the size of the gravel in the railroad roadbed from orbit!". The guy that was giving the tour (note this is about 1978) said "These public photos are deliberately not showing what we can do, our goal is to be able to read the serial number on a dollar bill on the sidewalk". My first homemade repeater was on 2m, and listened to 146.955 (an off frequency 94 driftal) with a 6 inch spike antenna on a deliberately mistuned 1uv receiver, and repeated it to 146.22 (with a few watts on a homemade beam at 15 feet up) so that I could use the local 22/82 repeater from my handheld (the house was in an area where handhelds heard just fine but couldn't get into the repeater. So my handheld triggered a 20wERP transmitter and that combination worked just fine). The transmitter was a Motorola "A" series with a capacitor in place of the final tube (between the grid and plate pins). The "controller" was an old photographic enlarger timer that I set to 45 seconds. When it tripped it shut off the AC power to the transmitter, and you had to reset the timer manually. It really didn't need remote control as I was never more than 500 feet from it when it was turned on, but it had it - all I had to do was time it out and it went off the air. A homebrew DTMF decoder came soon after. My handheld at that time as a HT200 that I had rebuilt from 1 freq to 6 freq plus PL encode (a twin-T oscillator) plus DTMF. I used an 8 frequency switch and position 7 listened to 82 and talked on 955. My first "real" repeater controller was a bunch of 24vDC relays and Agstat pneumatic timers that I got from C & H Surplus and from "Pappy Dow" at Dow Radio. The first touchtone decoder was a Western Electric 247B that got completely rewired and modified to 16 button mode. My second controller was an outgrowth of that design but with reed relays (a neighbor was a production line inspector for the company and got me a 1 gallon paint can full of multipole 5v and 12v relays, each with one bad pole) and the timers were based on unijunction transistors. My last non-microprocessor controller used a touchtone decoder based on a stack of 88mh toroids, was about 40 TTL chips on hombrew PC boards in a 4.5 inch card cage and sucked several amps at and +5vDC and a little more at +12vDC. Somewhere in there I did one based on latches and a PROM - look up "state machine" and picture the DTMF decoder 4-bit binary data as the low order bits of the state machine address buss. It worked but it was a major pain to program. I mapped out a Fortran program to generate the binary PROM image, but never keyboarded it or debugged it. When I was at JPL part of my job was to keep equipment running as long as possible. That led to my picking up PC board repair skills, machine shop skills, sheet metal skills and more. Sometimes that required redesigning circuitry when parts were no longer available, which led to hand layout of PC boards, then etching replacement circuit boards using photo trays and ferric chloride. Other skills I picked up as the need arose - our department at JPL was responsible for the chip-level support of a network of 7 Data General Nova minicomputers. This gave me some serious knowledge of the internals of the Nova (and the follow-on product, the Eclipse). At that time the diagnostic package for the Nova consisted of several trays of paper tapes and a high speed tape reader. I disassembled and rewrote (from scratch) the entire diagnostic package and put it on a bootable digital cassette tape. The local DG field engineer was so impressed that he called me first when he was called to a site where lightning had struck a building and toasted the whole computer rack. The insurance company bought a new computer and tossed the old one into the dumpster - cabinet and all. My Field Engineer friend called me - and loaned me his truck. There were six boards in the computer, each had 16 rows of 16 chips (14 or 16 pins each), plus 4 core memory boards, each with 80 more chips. Plus the power supply diodes and regulator transistors. Each chip was soldered in, no sockets. The replacement process was to cut each of the pins off the chip body, then toss the body in the wastebasket, then unsolder each pin from the board, and to suck the solder out, then to solder the new chip in. Several months and 1,856 chips later I had four working core memory boards, a working CPU board, working teletype and paper tape reader/punch I/O boards, and everything passed diagnostics. Next was the electronics inside the hard drive and the tape drive - about 200-250 more chips including the read amps, write amps, and servomotor controls in the drives. From start to finish that rack of gear took about 6 months to rebuild - but I did it. My mom named it "Lazarus", and only got a little pissed when it took up residence in the dining room - after all, I had to run the power cord into the kitchen and unplug the stove to plug it in. She had me cut a piece of masonite the size of the dining room table and then put two layers of quilted table pads under it before I could put the Datamedia CRT terminal on the dining room table. This was my first "real" home computer - a Data General Nova with 16k of core (later 48k) with a 2.5 megabyte 14" diameter disk drive and a 2400 foot tape drive, the second was a PDP-11 with a "mushroom" hard drive, and both computer racks lived in the dining room. The PDP and the Nova were traded for a single DG Eclipse series with 64KB of chip RAM and a 10+10 MB hard drive, but I moved the Kennedy 2400' tape drive and Datum formatter over to the Eclipse before the Nova left. Later on I worked for Mobilfone Systems (a local RCC in Los Angeles) and helped write the software (in assembly code) and integrate a 32-phone-line 3-RF-channel radio paging system that was Nova based. We were running a home-grown real time operating system (heavily stripped down and modified version of DG RTOS) , 44 simultaneous software tasks, all written in assembly code, and doing it in 64KB of RAM. Note - that's not Megabytes of RAM, but kilobytes. The first "small" machine I owned was a single board 8008 toy (doing re-entrant subroutines was very difficult), later replaced with an 8080 based Altair (serial #121). Bill Pasternak and I did a book on repeaters for TAB Books (#1212) and the Altair was used to write two chapters of it using the program "Electric Pencil", and printed on a early Diablo daisywheel printer. Later an IMSAI replaced the Altair and was my main Z80 development system for several projects, including a multiport repeater controller that I helped out on. It ended up with two 2-megabyte RAM drive boards (which made up a 4mb of RAM disk) which sped up the assembiles of the repeater controller software from 27 minutes to under 45 seconds. The controller software was almost 30,000 lines of assembly code. I sold the Imsai, complete with two 8" floppies (1.7mb each), two 3.5" floppies (2mb each), a 10MB hard drive, and the two RAM drive boards, plus two spare 8" drives and over 100 8" floppies, in 2007. As a friend of mine joked (in 2005 or so), "Mike is crazy - he's got a computer with 64K of RAM and PROM (the IMSAI), the printer has 80 times that (a LaserJet III with 5mb of RAM) and the "terminal" is a 512mb Pentium 2 computer running Windows 2000 and a dumb terminal program". Some of the later fun was creating some early web sites for Miss Makita and a few Playboy Bunnies. Imagine the quality of the photos you get when the camera files are 27 MB per TIFF image... and you are shooting Barbara Moore, Elke Jeinsen or Victoria Silvstedt from less than six feet away as they pose in progressively less and less and less (google the names). I became very proficient with Photoshop and Photo Mechanic, and taught myself Perl as I wrote an auction page for Victoria's prototype web site. One of my current activities is serving as a co-webmaster for www.repeater-builder.com and we are always looking for articles on repeaters, controllers, point-to-point link systems, remote bases, interlinked systems, emergency communiations and more. If you have expertise on a topic we don't have any articles on (or if you see somthing that needs elaboration), or if you have information in your file cabinet that would be of use to others, please contact W3KKC or myself. There is a yahoogroup called repeater-builder (with over 4,600 members) that complements the web site. More when I think of it... Mike WA6ILQ
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