Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Pearl Harbor Day on the Iowa

Had a great time today playing radio on the Iowa, and also the somber experience of the ceremonies held in commemoration of 7 December, 1941.

The press was everywhere for the noon time ceremonies, and if you live in the L.A. area I'm sure you'll see it on the news.

We made well over 300 contacts using the "regular" Amateur Radio equipment, but the guys running the 1980's era "legacy" Navy equipment had problems. Seems one of the R-1051 receivers we've been using has developed a problem with the frequency changing mechanism, a complex arrangement of gears, chains, and rotary switches.

It looks to be a simple problem, as these things go, just requiring a bit of jiggling one of the switches to wake the receiver up again, so I'm guessing dirty or slightly misaligned contacts. A bit of DeoxIT should clear it up, but getting the receiver apart enough to actually get at the contacts is a bit of a PITA. Fortunately we have a person who has restored several of these, so we're going to go through the required paperwork to get it off the ship and let him go through it. We have the complete service manuals for it, and a good supply of spares he can use. We really don't have the facilities on the ship anymore to drag it to the Electronic Repair Shop and do it there, as all the test equipment was removed before the ship went into the Reserve Fleet.

The legacy transmitters we've been using have been working 100%, and we now have a "new" antenna, with an autocoupler, for use with the legacy transmitters, and just having the autocoupler makes using them much easier, as we don't have to manually adjust an antenna coupler for lowest reflected power when we change frequencies.

8 comments:

  1. Still not able to work you but did copy the cw yesterday morning on14041 449 and SSB yesterday afternoon on 14335 about a 45. As I recall the op was Ron. One of these days...
    Terry
    Fla.

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  2. Ron is our mostly digital guy. He's on 20 Meter PSK31 at least once a week, usually more.
    Great guy, and a good operator. He also works W6RO on the Queen Mary about once a month.

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    Replies
    1. Haven't watched for the Iowa on PSK. Will start - I figure 20 M would be best.

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    2. He'll be on 14.070, along with everybody else. We use FLDIGI, and it's a great program!

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  3. A BB would be an excellent place to spend the 7th of December.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, it was a wonderful day. The two Pearl Harbor Survivors I got to meet were amazing gentlemen. We had about 12 people working the radios, loggong the contacts, and doing other things. One of the guys had taken up a collection the week before, and brought in a cooler full of sub sandwiches, bags of chips, cookies, water, soda, and a huge pan of home-made brownies his wife made.

      And there was plenty to take home!

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  4. Glad you were able to help out! Good luck with the tuner!

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    Replies
    1. The guy we're taking the receiver to is one of the best. He repairs/rebuilds/fixes obsolete stuff that the Navy still uses for certain things. He's rebuilt things that would have kept a ship from deploying, and we're lucky to have him.

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Keep it civil, please....

Annnnd.....We Got Zip.....

 Total snow was about 6~8", but half o0f it melted as soon as it hit, and we never had more than 3" on the ground at any one time....