Doolittle Raid 70 Years Ago Today

Growing up and watching movies like "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" and "Destination Tokyo", and with my Dad being a former SeaBee, I had nothing but the greatest respect and admiration for our fighting men.
They truly were "The Greatest Generation" of humble men who did what they had to do, didn't seek any fame our fortune from it, and then went back to civilian life.
70 years ago today, a small group of these valiant men took off in their B-25 "Mitchell" bombers from the deck of the USS Hornet, and flew just above the waves to attack Tokyo.
The attack didn't cause much damage, but was tremendous boost to U.S. morale, and scared the Japanese enough to recall a portion of their fleet to guard the home islands.
Today, only five of the original 80 flight crew members are still with us, the rest having passed on to the pages of history.
The Washington Times has a very nice tribute to these brave men. Go over and read it, and learn a bit more about this mission.

Busy with Arduino and RF Vector Impedance Meter Projects....

FINALLY got all the little Arduino boxes built, and moved on to the RF Vector Power Meter I've been building for a year ( ! ) or so. This is the one that I went on a rant about winding the toroids for sometime back. WELL....I finished the toroids, and that meant I could finish the coupler. Last night I mounted the main board in the enclosure, and tonight I'm going to make some preliminary measurements in preparation for calibrating it.
I had to order some Schottky diodes to build an accurate RF voltage probe with. I have dummy loads that are almost exactly 50 Ohms from 1MHz to beyond 1GHz, so I have my "Known Impedance" to work with. Once I build the RF probe, I'll be able to accurately measure the voltage across the load, and calculate the power developed by my Elecraft K2, which will allow me to calibrate the "Power" part of the meter. I also have some 50 Ohm delay lines of known length, so I'll be able to calibrate the "Vector" part of the meter.
Knowing the forward and reflected power, the meter will calculate VSWR, and by knowing the phase angle between the voltage and current on both the forward and reflected ports, it can calculate the complex impedance of the antenna system, or anything else that gets connected to it.
And after I've cleaned up this project, I'll get back to finishing up the Collins 75S-1 receiver I've had torn apart for almost TWO years. I never meant for this one to take so long. I got it for about $75, and it was filthy, and didn't work quite right. I replaced all of the defective tubes, recapped it, and replaced some out-of-tolerance resistors. It was working much better, but before I did the alignment, I decided to "clean" it, and before I knew it, I had it torn down to almost the bare chassis. I replaced all the ceramic insert RCA jacks on the back panel (some had broken inserts; all were rusty), which meant drilling out the rivets, unsoldering/resoldering a whole bunch of connections, and then touching up the solk screened designations on the rear panel where I bumped them with my Dremel tool while I was grinding a dimple into the rivet head so I could drill out the rivets.
This one definitely got out of hand, but it should be really nice when I'm finished. The paint was in excellent condition under all the grunge, the knobs buffed out beautifully and I repainted the indicator lines and put new spun inserts in them. I even took Scotch-Brite and Nev-R-Dull to all the crystal cans for the heterodyne, BFO, and calibrator crystals.
Back to the workbench!

Serenity

OK, the YF and I finally sat down and watched "Serenity".
Kinda made us both regretting we didn't watch my boxed set of "Firefly" FIRST!
And now I finally get all the quotes I've seen floating around The Net these last few years.
I'm definitely going to take "Firefly" with me when I go out on the next launch, along with "Miami Vice", and "Dead Like Me", neither of which I've seen all the episodes of.

Bill Whittle on "The Narrative"

Found this over at USA_Admiral's place, who in turn found it at Adrienne's Corner.

It's stunning commentary, as usual, from Mr. Whittle.
And as he reminds us, The Signal WILL Get Out......

Thoughts For The Day....

Have a good weekend.
Playing radio/computer on Saturday, and watching the Long Beach Grand Prix on Sunday.

Simple, Expedient HF Antennas

Don't worry, I'm still working on the series of articles I promised, oh, a year ago?
I've rewritten it several times, and it's 90% to the point of adding the illustrations to it.
I'll probably take photos of the various types as I build them out in the back yard, as I don't draw things "on the computer" very well, and I don't want to swipe random pix off the Web.
When this is finished, I'll post the sections of it, and if I can find a free place to upload a pdf for free access, I'll do that, too.
So hang in there, it's "In Work" as we used to say at Boeing!

The Origins of "73"

The telegraphy abbreviation "73" has long been used between operators at closing to signal "Best Wishes". It also gets used on radiotelephone, and should never be used as the plural, as in "73's".
I know some Old Timers who insist if you're going to use it for voice, you should say each number separately, as in "Seven Three, Old Man".
I, personally, don't have a problem with hearing someone say "Seventy-Three", but the plural form just grates me.
Since my YF (wife, to non-radio people) edits the club newsletter, and is always looking for articles, one of our members sent in a scan of a page from the April, 1935 edition of "QST", the magazine of the ARRL.
Since the scan wasn't very high quality, I cut-and-pasted the print into a Word document, and then cleaned it up by hand.
Enjoy!

On the Origin of “73”

The December Bulletin from the Navy Department Office of the Chief of Naval Operations contains some extremely interesting information about "73."

The origin of "73" as the telegrapher's conventional signal of greeting has been ascribed to a dinner given to Andrew Carnegie on his 73rd birthday by the Order of Military Telegraphers. The dinner referred to was given on November 27, 1908, and the signal "73" was played upon in connection with his 73rd birthday. However, investigation indicates that the term "73" was used for many years prior to that time.

The following material, believed to be authentic, is quoted from the "Telegraph and Telephone Age," dated 1 June,1934:

"It appears from a research of telegraph histories that in

1859 the telegraph people held a convention, and one of its

features was a discussion as to the saving of 'Iine time.' A

committee was appointed to devise a code to reduce standard

expressions to symbols or figures, This committee

worked out a figure code, from figure 1 to 92. Most of these

figure symbols became obsolescent, but a few remain to this

date, such as 4, which means 'Where shall I go ahead?' Figure

9 means 'wire,' the wire chief being on the wire and that

everyone should close their keys. Symbol 13 means 'I don't

understand'; 22 is 'love and a kiss'; 30 means 'good night'

or 'the end.' The symbol most often used now is 73, which

means 'my compliments,' and 92 is for the word 'deliver.'

The other figures in between the foregoing have fallen into

almost complete disuse."

Mr, J. L. Bishop, Chief Telegrapher of the Navy Department Communication Office, quotes from memory the signals that were in effect in 1905:

1 Wait a minute.

4 Where shall I start in message?

5 Have you anything for me?

9 Attention, or clear the wire (used by wire chiefs and

train dispatchers).

13 I do not understand.

22 Love and kisses.

25 Busy on another circuit.

30 Finished, the end (YA) (Used mostly by press telegraphers

to denote the end of a story or closing out).

73 My compliments, or Best regards.

92 Deliver.

Shack Updates

I put aside the little Arduino project I'm helping my friend with so I could do some "Shack Renovation" this weekend.
Actually, it was more a "Clean-and-Toss" event, where I cleaned up a bunch of stuff, got some stackable storage bins, tossed out several LARGE cardboard boxes that I had "stuff" stored in, and in general neatened things up a bit.
One of the things I did was to get my ICom IC-R7100 and Uniden BC796D receivers set up, and fed them both off the little multicoupler I built sometime back.
The simplest way of looking at a multicoupler is to consider it a "Splitter with Gain", although it does more than that. It also provides 30~40dB of isolation between the receivers, which is good for keeping things like Local Oscillator leakage down to a minimum.
WELL....it's not working the way I intended, and rather than spend HOURS fixing it (trust me...it would take me longer to "fix" it than it did to *build* it), I decided to just leave the Uniden scanner connected to the Discone, and get a little 3-element Yagi that I can point at the airport so I can use the ICom to listen to all the airport stuff.
Yes, I know, it's a terrible waste to use an IC-R7100 to "just" listen to the local airport, but until I get the damn multicoupler working (looks like the amplifier isn't), that's what I'm going to use it for.
Well, me being me, I decided to build an airband Yagi, rather than buy one. I tend to be CHEEP about these things, and I've got piles of 1/8" and 1/4" brass and aluminum rod for the elements, and a ton of PVC pipe to use for a boom.
ANYWAY....snooping around the web for a while, I couldn't find any cookbook dimensions to build a 118~137MHz Yagi, so I figured I'd gin my own up. Gee...there's all these neat antenna design programs for Linux, so I'll just grab a couple and........
BLECH!
NONE of them do what I want! Oh sure, they'll all give me great plots of gain, directivity, and patterns, but that's AFTER I've figured out all the element dimensions!
DUH!
So, it looks like I'll have to start with a dipole cut for 127.5MHz, and then go with the old rule-of-thumb making the reflector and director 10% longer/shorter than the driven element, and then tweak the dimensions of where the elements are spaced on the boom until I get something that looks like it will work.
Maybe I should have just keep going building another one of the Arduino units. I've built three so far, and they all work "As Advertised".

OK....found a website that does *exactly* what I needed to do. It let me design a 2-element Yagi, that has about 3dB gain, and fits on an 18" boom.
You just enter the center frequency, a gain you'd like, a few other specifics,and it generates the element lengths, and spacing.

Sweet!

NOPE 2012

Really great bumper sticker.

You can buy them here.

George Carlin on Environmentalism

I used to be a huge George Carlin fan. Then he seemed to get really bitter, almost "unhinged" toward the end of his life, and it turned me off.

Here's some truly "Classic Carlin" with his take on the Enviro-Nazis.
As per Carlin at his best, he's 100% spot-on.

Thanks to Jeffro for finding it.

1992 L.A. Riots

There's a series of posts over at BonnieGadsden that I encourage you to read.
For those of us who were out here in "LA-LA Land" during the riots, it's a chilling reminder of just how fast society can break down.
I was living in Redondo Beach at the time, right on the beach (Catalina Ave.) with two of my buddies. We were far enough off the freeways that we felt fairly safe, but the sight of all the smoke rising in the distance, and the constant reporting on the TV still gave us pause to wonder just how bad it would really get.
It took Governor Wilson three days to request assistance from the National Guard, and it wasn't until the fourth day that the Humvees started rolling into the city, and a semblance of order was restored.
I have a lot of Korean friends that I've made since then, and they still talk about it. Since the police (at least the LAPD was) were holed up in their stations, you were on your own, and the Korean shop keepers took defense of their property and families into their own hands.