The Zombie Satillite

This has the makings of a fine Sci-fi novel. Between 1965 and 1976 the USAF sponsored the design, construction and launch of a series of satellites built by Lincoln Laboratory at MIT.  The Lincoln Laboratory was not new. IT was founded in 1951 as a federally funded research lab focused on improving America's air defense system. It was only later they moved into space surveillance.

They built a series of satellites all named "Lincoln Experimental Satellite" and numbered sequentially, LES1 through LES9. Not all of them ended well. LES-7 ran out of funding and was cancelled. LES1 and LES2 both had booster failures and ended up accidentally in circular orbits. LES3 and LES4 also had launch problems and failed to end up in geostationary orbit.  But LES5, 6, 8 and 9 all ended up in the correct orbits. LES8 and LES9 actually operated until 1992 in the 36–38 GHz part of the K band. The Lincoln Lab had moved onto other projects.. that seemed to be the end until 2013.

LES1 was launched in 1965, and abandoned in 1967, assumed to simply be space junk. In February of 2013, Amateur Radio enthusiast, Phil Williams G3YPQ, from North Cornwall, UK, detected signals from LES1. The signal had a cyclical fading that was determined to be caused by it's rotating (tumbling) every 4 seconds.  It causes the voltage from the solar panels to fluctuate.

The theory is that the batteries onboard LES1 have failed in a manner that allows them to carry charge directly through to the single X-band transponder and an 8-horn electronically switched antenna on on 237 MHz.  But after 46 years the batteries have almost certainly disintegrated... so is the current flowing directly from the solar panels to the transponder? More here.

AMTOR and SITOR

AMTOR (Amateur Teleprinting Over Radio) is a type of telecommunications system consisting of two or more teleprinters. It's is a specialized form of RTTY protocol known commercially as SITOR (Simplex Telex Over radio.) AMTOR utilizes FSK, with a frequency shift of 170 Hz, and a symbol rate of 100 Baud.. The ARRL called it an improved "errror-free" RTTY system. [LINK]. AMTOR is derived from CCIR recommendation 476-1 and was developed primarily for maritime use in the 1970s.

AMTOR was developed by single person, Peter Martinez G3PLX. His first successful AMTOR contact was with David Wicks G3YYD on the 2 meter band in 1978. It's unclear what contributions to the code base Wicks may have made, but he later wrote his own AX25 software to run on the same machine used in the AMTOR test, a home brew Motorola 6800. In 1980 the FCC granted an STA to four hams to use AMTOR: William Meyn K4PA, Charles Roettcher K3FLS, Marvin Leibowitz W3KET, and Walter Kaelin KB6BT.

Peter Martinez was a genius in his own right. (In print appearances prior to 1987 he went by J. Peter Martinez.) His hobbies are so complicated I honestly don't understand what he's doing; such as using pulse generators as ionospheric sounding transmitter to build ionograms of frequency reflection height. By comparison AMTOR was a small undertaking. He also developed PSK31 in 1998, another teletype communications protocol. And in 2010 he wrote part of a book on Cave radiolocation. His name appears in a number of IEEE texts. Martinez states in one of his many papers that he had been involved in RTTY in the 1960s but his pre-AMTOR resume is not well known. He has kept busy since then.

There are 32 characters in the RTTY teleprinter system. These are rendered by 32 combinations of 5 data bits. the problem is that the total number of combinations of 5 bits (in binary) is 32 [2^5]. So any bit error can transform a character into some other character. This error would be undetectable, a huge problem. AMTOR uses 7 data bits which renders 128 combinations. In a random data set only 25% of those would be recognizable as the 32 characters.  But AMTOR uses only combinations made of three zeros and four ones. So as a result errors are easily detected. There are 35 of these combinations leaving three extra to be used as controls. The result is so rugged that random noises generates a character less than 2% of the time.

The Benton Harbor Lunchbox

The Heath Company was founded in 1926, initially making aircraft and then more famously making radio and electronic kits from 1947 to 1992.  The company didn't close as some sources reported, but did file for  bankruptcy in 2012. The company was restructured, and continues to operate on a small scale, selling parts and kits on eBay.

The first Heath kit was a do-it-yourself oscilloscope that cost $50. Even in 1947 that was a good price for an oscilloscope and it was a big seller. They marketed kits for audiophiles, hacks, hams, amateurs and engineers, even one kit for a full size Thomas electric organ. It was a phenomena that tapped into an early vein of technical geekery. Their instructions were thorough on a level that would embarrass IKEA today.  Other electronics companies like Radio Shack, Lafayette and Allied,  all also marketed kits. but Heath kits were top notch. They remained on top until they were bought by Zenith in 1979 mostly for their then nascent computer kits. More here and here.

The Heath kit lunch box was a phenomena inside a phenomena. For many years Heath was based in Benton Harbor Michigan. So when they began making squarish radios in the 1950s, about the size of a lunch box, with a handle on top... they got nicknamed "Lunch boxes" or Benton Harbor Lunch Boxes. These are beloved by collectors.purists might argue that the "real" lunch boxes were 2, 6 and 10-meter band radio kits
 marketed from 1961 to 1967. They were affectionately called the "twoer", "sixer", and "tener". But the lunch box chassis goes back almost to the very beginning.

In truth that first Heathkit in 1947 had a handle on top. But it was taller than it was wide. It wasn't very lunchbox-like. But in 1948 they debuted some test equipment: a RF signal generator model G-1, the Condenser Checker model C-1, and that Signal Tracer, model T-1. [SOURCE] These definitely had the right shape. But it was only those early 1960s transceivers were actually marketed by Heathkit as 'lunch boxes."

Ham Radio Now Podcast

What is the difference between a podcast, a vidcast and a webcast?  No really. Whichever of those three things this is, the Ham Radio Now program is great. Hosted by Gary Pearce (KN4AQ) the show focuses on news and technology in the Ham Radio arena. Their slogan is "Television programs all about Amateur Radio... on the web" Gary has a great radio voice, clearly a pro. Below is episode 41, of the over 200 shows so far. It's my favorite so far focusing on high speed communications in the 420 MHz band

Ham Radio Vs. Marijuana Growers

According to AARL, the average age of a ham radio operator is over 50. They don't say how much over 50 and some nations have admitted their median ham age is almost 80. You would think that mature demographic would have some non-recreational interest in medical marijuana. But that has not been the way things have gone. Marijuana growers and ham radio operators have actually become mortal enemies. The AARL even posted an article on identifying these growers, and how to deal with the problem from both a legal and technical point of view here.

the conflict stems from a simple fact about grow lights. Like many forms of fluorescent light, they produce RF interference (RFI).  In the last decade, digital high-intensity discharge (HID) ballasts have largely replaced traditional coil magnetic ballasts. The HID ballasts typically operate on 110-270V circuits. The target target output frequency from the ballast is 50-120Hz. But your household electricity typically operates on 60Hz.  not the obvious problem. Fluorescent tubes are non-linear devices, and generate harmonic currents in the power supply. The arc within the lamp can generate RFI as well, which can be conducted through power wiring!  More here, here and here.

The RFI is usually in bands between 1.8 MHz and 30 MHz and it's strong enough you don't need special gear to detect it. You can find a bad grow light with a handheld AM radio. These aren't 40 watt bulbs either. Grow lights are usually High pressure sodium (HPS) or metal Halide (MH) and easily 1000w per lamp. Lab tests at the AARL have revealed that many grow light makes and models violate FCC part 15 and/or part 18. The units often operate on a timer making it even more obvious what the source of the RFI is. Even for marijuana growers in Colorado, this presents an unexpected legal problem with the FCC instead of the FBI. I found an article on policeone.com that details the ease at which police can now find indoor growers.

"One narcotics officer from the San Francisco Bay Area turns his car radio to 560 AM when he checks out potential indoor grows. He’s checked out seven indoor marijuana grows since learning about the RFI issue. All seven times, the car’s radio showed significant interference from the ballasts inside of the grow location. "

This unnamed police officer is finding marijuana growers, not with helicopters, thermal cameras, NSA stingray transcripts, automatic number plate recognition, video surveillance, or phone taps but with the stock AM radio in his cruiser. Notably, the AARL, still primarily focused on ending RFI, listed in that same article how a grower might reduce the RFI affordably with simple AC line filters and toroids.

SK

These are practices specific to every culture and subculture that help define them from other groups. These are the nuances that define them from those outside the group. In anthropology it's sometimes called exclusivity. This is about one specific to ham radio. The abbreviation SK stands for Silent Key meaning that a person is deceased. The etymology alone is fascinating, and today there are whole websites dedicated to canonizing dead hams. [Link and Link] They even have memorial Silent Key scholarships. Here is a usage from an article by L. B. Cebik on the ZL Special antenna for context:

"ZL3MH (later ZL2OQ and recently a silent key) brought the antenna to ham attention in 1949, giving credit to W5LHI and W0GZR for basic information on the design."

The key in this context of "SK" refers to a telegraph key. It is the primary tool and human-to-machine interface for hams. The telegraph key is the the ham as the paintbrush to the painter, the pen to the writer. Clearly the term must antedate the Morse key. The term could predate wireless, but could not predate land-line telegraph systems. Straight lever keys date back to the 1850s but large scale production was uncommon until around 1880.

But at the other end of the time line I see the term escaping the ham culture and appearing in contemporary books... both fiction and non-fiction. I'll list off a few more recent publications.

• 2011 - Survivors - James Rawles 
• 2009 - Full Circle - Theodore Cohen
• 2009 - Is Anyone There? Communication? by Karim Buksh
• 2004 - Talk the Talk - Luc Reid
• 2004 - The Queen Off Broadway - Alexis Greene
• 2003 - Hello World - Danny Gregory
• 1987 - Unsinkable - Daniel Butler

But as we go backward into the 1970s the references disappear from pulp fiction and reappear in trade magazines and publications dedicated to amateur radio. It appears in the ARRL handbook of 1979. The of June 1975 issue of QST magazine lists W3NRE as a silent Key. They had been using the term since at least 1967. A 1969 issue of CQ magazine lists WA2QCQ as a silent key and multiple 1966 issues use the term as well.

The uses of the term I find before that only refer to an inactive or otherwise unused telegraph key. such as in this line from The Great Iron Ship by James Dugan.  "In the beach hut the electricians sat by a dark index and a silent key. French telegraph shares slumped acutely on the Bourse and Exchange." But there is one lone use from the 1940s that clearly is in the same sense that CQ and QST use it. A 1943 issue of MSG Journal, the trade magazine of the Marine Department of the American Communications Assoc. The line reads   "...don't flirt with high Voltages, that is, unless you want to get your name into MSG, under the sad notation "Silent Key". 

The use in quotes is common in formal writing with new terminology making the jump from slang to common usage.  So that's my best guess. It was likely new in the late 1930s, and popularized by QST and CQ magazine who used the term to precede obituaries. It's worth noting that by 1985 the term was fully entrenched. In 1985, Alan Tavor succeeded in establishing Israel's Silent Key Forest, a memorial to deceased hams.

ARPSC

The term "ham radio" was originally an insult, like ham-fisted. Around two million people worldwide are "hams" with 700,000 of those being in the U.S.  Technically, all early radio experimenters were in fact amateurs. What makes today's amateurs into Hams was WWI. Their radio broadcasting was suspended in 1917, and restored in 1919. This process was re-played in WWI. But in some ways it was that cessation and rebooting that codified what was ham and what was commercial by separating the services into casts.

In other ways it was its limited wartime use that let to it's modern function in emergency services. The first edition of the ARRL's (American Radio Relay League) Emergency Communications manual came out in 1940. But this was preceded slightly and less formally by a 1938 article in QST  titled 'When emergency Strikes." These ideas coalesced into formal policy and eventually a body of law. Hence the start of the ARPSC (Amateur Radio Public Service Corps). Their function is as follows:

"[To] maintain and continue to train and educate Amateur radio personnel interested in the advancement of communications and safety of citizenry in whatever systems may be available and in use within the Local, State and Federal Structure of ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) and RACES (Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Services."

But what are they. the 1969 ARRL book describes them as a voluntary organization of licensed amateur radio operators sponsored by the ARRL.  Back then RACES was specifically for "civil defense communications." Some early documents give a dotted line to the Red Cross with reference to a memorandum. But modern versions of that document omit the ARPSC. It appears that in the early 1980s the ARRL quietly subsumed the ARPSC into ARES services. But the nomenclature lived on. There was already 5 decades of inertia behind that acronym.

There are a number of ARPSC groups still left across the country.Most have updated their paperwork to describe a continued connection to ARES, GEMO (Governmental Emergency Management Organization)  EMHSD (Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division) and any other vaguely federal sounding acronyms. they are still all volunteer amateur radio operator organizations committed to providing supplemental emergency communications as they always have.

The Glory of the CW Keyboard

They just don't make these anymore.  A CW Keyboard was a device which could produce Morse code from a typewriter-like keyboard. Today we have Raspberry Pi and Arduino board kits that can convert the output from a PC or keyer or both. In short, these have long been obsolete... and are rapidly becoming arcane.

The Codetyper above is from the March 1952 issue of CW Amateur Radio Magazine. It was a very early  CW keyboard, it actually predates the term.  For the record, CW stands for "Continious Wave," a term that hearkens back to the very beginnings of radio. The Codetyper was designed by Nathaniel Dorfman and it was written up in CW, Radio and Television News, QST, Radio-Electronics. Even MARS the Army signal Corps Bulletin wrote it up. The Codetyper went for $500 which when corrected for inflation is over $4,000 in today's dollars.

The device broke down the 43 different sequences of dots and dashes into units of time. The dash for example is three units long, and the dot is one. Units were strung in sequence the longest unit of time is the number "0" which is made of 5 dashes in Morse code. Five dashes, at 3 units each is 15 units plus the 4 spaces between them makes 19 units. Everything by definition has to be a subset of that sequence. To accomplish this, the Codetyper had 40 tubes... yes it was tube driven.

But the Codetyper vanished into obscurity by 1953. Hams, even the industrious bunch, were making their own. Catalogs carried kits that subtracted labor costs from complete units like the Codetyper. By the 1960s solid state electronics were widely available and Hams attached pin switches to manual typewriters to bridge the gap. By the 1970s they had integrated circuits, memory and buffers to play with.

With cheaper components in the 70s complete units began appearing on the market again: the Info-Tech M-300, the Picking Keyboard, the HAL MKB-1 and the MFJ-494 Super Keyboard (pictured above.)  The Heathkit HD-8999 came out in the early 1980s, and may have been the last one. MFJ actually still makes a CW Keyboard today: the MFJ-452, but the keyboard is external and connected by a PS/2 port.  There are few if any models on the market today with an integrated keyboard. More here and here.

Altoid Tin Radio

That image above is actually from qrpme.com, a delightful hobbyist site. Even Make, Lifehacker and Instructables have gotten in on the act. There are literaly hundreds of radio designs most build it from scratch but some of the more usable ones merely stuff the relevant parts from a transistor unit into the tin. Like this one.

 As Sverre Holm  (LA3ZA), a  Norwegian ham radio man once wrote "These tins are inexpensive, well shielded, easy to work with, and least but not least they enable you to make experimental circuits that are sturdy enough that they can be reused later."  His blog is here. I found a fellow who made a QRP kit in an Altoids tin the series of 5 videos is on Youtube. I've embedded the whole series below.

Waxed Fruit

Maybe the rest of you love snow-birding it, but I'm allergic to palm trees. I'm in town for work. Hialeah was once a town but now with the growth of the surrounding urban areas it's just another part of the Miami metro. But back in 1923, when radio was still local, Hialeah stood on it's own.

"Arrangements have just been made by the Tropical Radio Company for the purchase of land and the erection of a powerful radiotelegraph station at Hialeah, near Miami, Florida. Within about 18 months, Mr. G. M. Davis, of the radio company promises the public the use of one of the largest radio stations in this country, the estimated cost of which is approximately $200,000. Later on Hialeah will also be equipped with radiophone apparatus."

On a 90-acre lot in Hialeah they constructed a set of 437-foot towers broadcasting with a GE transmitter outfitted with shiny new Langmuir 200 kW tubes. More here. The station was licensed by the U.S. Navy  since this predates even the establishment of the FRC let alone the FCC. It operated at 3 Kilowatts on 488 kHz under the call sign WAX-AM. When Wireless Age magazine covered the news, they made a big deal that they were broadcasting not just Morse code, but voice.

It's intended listeners were in the Caribbean and Central America, notably Radiophone to the United Fruit stations which would relay the signals.This is no shocker since United Fruit owned The Tropical Radio Company. Starting in 1908 they built stations in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica, Columbia, Mexico and all the way north north to Louisiana as early as 1914. their motto was "The Voice of the Americas."  They were an enormous conglomerate with strong government ties, even selling their station in Mexico to the US Navy. It's no surprise though. There's a strategic Military advantage to communications. With favorable contracts the Navy steered them, Westinghouse, General Electric, American Telegraph, and RCA into greater and greater network expansion to compete with the Marconi network. In 1919 they even held a summit with the Navy patting themselves on the back for their "unassailable" radio dominance. The Foreign relations of the United States Volume IV wrote:

"These essential facilities, in friendly American hands, constitute a strategic interest in time of war which, if lost the United States through withdrawal of this American enterprise, could not be counted on with the same security as in the direct control of American citizens... Increased nationalization of U.S. proper- ties would not only deprive the United States and U.S. nationals of a  degree of control of strategic resources, but would be contrary to the  policy declared in NSC 144,2 of encouraging Latin American countries  to take measures to attract private investment."

That's a direct quote. It was never directly assailed by the Marconi Co., but it crumbled anyway. A large radio network is an expensive thing to maintain against the vagaries of the elements, technological progress, malfeasance, changes in business and political upheaval.  Popular Science magazine in 1928 notes the station took some damage and lost 2 aerials in a hurricane but continued to operate and maintain contact with WBF in Boston. Similarly their station in Managua survived an earthquake in 1931 to report on news of the devastation. In 1945 the rise of synthetic rubber chased Ford out of Brazil reducing their customer base. In the 1950s union troubles in Panama and Guatemala with the samfistas— members of the SAMF (Sindicato de Acción y Mejoramiento de los Ferrocarrileros) In the 1950s Latin American nations began nationalizing United Fruit  Company properties to the tune of about 5 billion dollars of value.

but way up north, inside the US, a 1965 radio listing placed WAX in Ojus, FL an unincorporated area near Hialeah, possibly indicating some zoning changes but the station still operating. But by then they were just doing relays for hams. They still appeared in amateur directories as late as 1979. There is still a Ham radio club in town but that's all that's left I think.

Movie Night with W6OJ

This is the story of cameraman Clyde DeVinna. DeVinna was a bit of an adventurer. He retired in 1952 finally deciding he was more interested in travel than Hollywood. In 1933 DeVinna was in Alaska filming scenes for the movie Eskimo where he "camped out" in a hut. The gasoline heater was malfunctioning and carbon monoxide fumes began to fill the hut. In this MGM short, the actor Alonzo Price portrays plays the role of real-life cameraman. He makes a distress call on his ham radio W6OJ. A series of radio hams relay the message until help is called.

This is non-fiction. The 1932 Volume 16 issue of QST magazine even covered this in brief. Long Island Podcast also did not one but two episodes dedicated to the tale.

A side of Ham

Amateur radio operators are called "hams." The etymology is convoluted, starting in the early 1900s. The term for the original pork product dates to 1637 the Germanic "hamm" meaning bend of the knee, it's straight from the pre-germanic "kham" and dutch "hamme" both meaning shinbone. Around 1928 pilots who were hard on the controls were called "ham-fisted." It comes from the the derogatory word "hammy." At the time it only meant "over-acting" which is still it's primary meaning. More here.The amateurish, "hammy" comes from theater. Actors weren't "hammy" until around 1880 when the derogatory "hamfatter" was shortened. Hamfatter was a reference to an older minstrel show the "ham fat man." But the actual "amateurish" meaning comes from radio. It was used first in print in this sense around 1919. More here.Amateur radio like any other highly technical microcosm had it's own jargon. The jargon of telegraph operators was called "hog-morse." That probably eased the transition of the word ham across it's various meanings. As today an impish newcomer to HTML might be called a "newbie"less-than-capable radio operators were called hams. An article in earlyradiohistory.us was very informative: "McClure's Magazine, author L. C. Hall noted "It is an every-day thing to hear senders characterized as Miss Nancys, rattle-brains, swell-heads, or cranks, or 'jays,' simply because the sound of their dots and dashes suggests the epithets."

In 1915 the article "Floods and Wireless" by Hanby Carver in Technical World Magazine the author used the word ham in the modern sense. You can actually read the article here, courstesy of earlyradiohistory.us What happened after 1919 is gradually the term lost it's negative connotation. It became just general slang for all amateurs... no insult intended.