The locals kept telling me about missing the great
sunspot cycle which had peaked in 1958. I NEVER believed the local hams about
talking with Africa on six meters until I actually saw their confirming QSL
cards. Imagine doing this with 50 watts and a 5 element yagi.
True Duplex Operation
One of the local hams said "let's try duplex." I
said, ok, but what is duplex? I was told if we got above 52 MHz, we could turn
our transmitters on the same time we were receiving, thus we could carry on a
QSO just like a telephone. The only trick was to reduce your power and find a
frequency that didn't completely overload the front-end of your receiver while
transmitting. It was a bit complicated to coordinate our transmit/receive
frequencies, but we did it a number of times. Looking back, I don't know if
that mode was legal or not.
Light Bulb Dummy Load
A
discovered that a 50 watt light bulb made quite a nice dummy load for my
transmitter. The transmitter would light it up quite well, except I needed to
watch what I was saying because the light bulb also radiated quite well to the
local hams!
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First Six meter Es openings
The band would suddenly "pop open" to the East
coast from Illinois. I could work stations in New England as easily as local
hams. The pattern of the sporadic E openings from the Midwest oftentimes
followed the pattern: first hearing New England then we would hear stations
further south, down the coast to Florida. Sometimes we would then hear the
deep south and then Texas. Infrequently we would then hear to the west: Kansas
and Colorado and then sometimes it would move on around to the Dakotas. Very
infrequently we would get double hop (Es I assume) to Utah, Montana and
California. This was all during the end of the Solar Cycle (which had peaked
in 1958), around 1960-1964. This was very exciting with the band open for as
long as 24 hours straight. I was able to confirm all states except for
Montana, Alaska and Hawaii with just 25 watts to a 5 element beam, all
"carrier control" (grid modulated) Amplitude Modulation.
Gold Nickel Silver
A ninth district call with a suffix "GNS" (gold
nickel silver) qso'd with me regularly until I built a DSB (double side band)
transmitter. This guy vowed (and swore) that sideband would NEVER replace AM
on any band, particularly six meters, and that he personally would never go to
another mode! The DSB transmitter I built had a pair of 5763 tubes in a
balanced modulator final that suppressed the carrier. I could not afford a
filter to remove the lower sideband, but eight of us who built these rigs had
a lot of fun with our five watts to the antenna.
TVI
Six meters and a weak signal area channel 2 TV are
not very compatible. I got a phone call that went like this. Ring-Ring
Hello. "Are you radio station K9FMR?" Yes I am. "Well, you are messing up
my TV and I want it stopped RIGHT NOW! I'm a city cop, and a ham on the
police force told me who you were, and you've got to do something about my
TV!" Well...Mr. Policeman lived four blocks away from my house, but I was
really messing up his TV. I went to his house, installed a 1/4
wavelength (54 inch) twin-lead trap, parallel to his TV line coming into
the house. He (and I) never thought it would work, but I never heard from him
again. I was only 15, and was scared to death when I went to his house.
Years later, neighbors told me that I had interfered with their televisions
for years, but simply adjusting the fine tuning control often got rid of my
interference.
