While digging around in one of the closets a few days ago I discovered something that I don't even remember buying. It was a Kenwood TH-215A handheld 2 meter ham transceiver with scanning capability up to and including the NOAA weather band. The price tag attached to it was $25, and I'm thinking, I must have picked this up at a ham radio flea market in the late summer or fall of 1998. What is amazing is that this has moved with me with me forgetting that I ever bought the thing.
I went online to see if I could access the owner's manual for this. It would be relatively easy for me to commission this thing if I can find the right adapter, which might be had at Radio Shack (if I can get there before they close) or at Best Buy.
Thing of it is, is that I already have a 2 meter handheld. That one is made by Yaesu, and I bought that in 1986 for about $300. It's not that I needed another handheld when I bought the Kenwood, but for $25 you can't go wrong. Operation in the 2 meter band is largely by use of repeaters which will get you good local coverage, and possibly beyond that if a Tucson repeater or two are linked to repeaters in Phoenix (I'll have to check that out).
Anyway, I'm thinking I need get the base charger commissioned, and set up a little "base" station in my garage. There are a few other accessories I need to locate for the Yaesu, and I've got to learn some more about the local repeaters. But this exercise will be of one benefit for me........it's an excuse to get active again in a ham radio club.
I was last active in the Santa Cruz County Amateur Radio Club, having become a member in 1996. I was a speaker at one of their meetings too, giving a talk on communications satellites and explaining the issues and challenges that we engineers encounter in making them work. The club had an open repeater, and being a paid member gave me phone patch privileges on that repeater. I wouldn't have much use for a phone patch since I use a cellphone now, but what if I'm out on a hunting trip where I can't get a cell signal? A 2 meter handheld would allow me to hit a repeater, and if I have phone patch privileges I can call Sheila, or I can ask another ham to call her and relay a message in case I need help.
I'm not as experienced on the 2 meter band as I am on the HF (high frequency) bands, but there are some fun things I could do. I could chat with some fellow hams, meet up with weekly on the air "net" meetings, and establish a peer network and get some help getting other antennas on the roof (I know "antennae" would be proper English, but in ham English it's "antennas".)
What I hope to do in the next few days is to locate the remote microphone and the whip antenna for my Yaesu. Also the instruction manual. And I need to do a lot of listening to get a sense for the local club scene, even if I have identified a local ham club that I'm interested in joining.
After that, I plan to go online and locate accessories for the Kenwood that I forgot that owned. I'd love to get that one going.
I really want to get back into the HF bands, and into six meters, but for right now I think it will be 2 meters. I want do learn more about what I can do with this.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Sunday, March 12, 2017
Free Electricity! And from the Radio Station at That!
When I was first getting active into ham radio in the summer of 1974, a friend of mine who was also a ham told me a story. It had to have been an old story when he told it to me, and when I told Mark the same story a few years later in California he said he had heard that too. The story goes as follows.
There was this guy who owned a house, and his next door neighbor was a radio station. He got the idea that if he were to set up a bunch of coils in his backyard, he could run his house off of the electricity induced into the coils by the signal of the radio station, so he did just that. He set up a collection of these huge coils in his back yard, and set them up so that he was getting his electric power for his house from those coils. It was all well and good until the radio station figured out what he was doing with those coils, and they didn't like it one bit.
The radio station took him to court. They argued that what this guy was doing was not right. He was stealing electricity from the station, and not paying for it like other people were doing. The court carefully considered the argument, but ruled against the radio station. The court ruling said that the airwaves were part of the public domain, and that the public had the right to capture the airwves.. In other words, it was the radio station paying to put those airwaves out there for public use, and that they could not expect the consumer to be hit with a bill or any other charge for using those airwaves.
Needless to say, the radio station didn't like this ruling. Here they are, broadcasting a signal for people to listen to, and this guy next door to them is using them to power his house. That stuck in their craw, and there was nothing that they could do about it since the court ruled against them. Or was there?
It is said that the radio station then decided to teach this guy a lesson. They turned up their power for a few minutes, and then turned it back down. The result? The guy's house burned down to the ground.
I remembered this story during a lecture about electrical induction into a coil during one of my physics classes, so I asked my instructor if he knew about the story, which I then went on to tell him. He said no, what really happened was the that Navy was transmitting radio signals and beaming them northward. Someone nearby didn't like it, so he set up a bunch of coils to trap that signal. The Navy's receiving station wasn't getting the expected signal strength, so they investigated and found this out.
And then I've heard another explanation. It was the Army doing the transmitting, from a station in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and some guy had a bunch of coils in his attic since he didn't like what the Army was doing. Recollection gets fuzzy here as that the person that told me this might have said that this was when World War II was going on, and the guy with the coils was trying to help the Nazis.
And there's one more explanation. In the early 1980s I asked a longtime ham radio operator that I was talking to about this. He had been active since the mid-1930s, and maybe he would know. He suggested that it may have originated from when WLW of Cincinnati was using a 500 kilowatt transmitter (the maximum allowable stateside has been 50 kW for several years though WLW was grandfathered), and that the WLW signal was overpowering their neighbors and causing some strange things........which did happen by the way.
I also seem to recall reading that the military had an Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) station in northern Michigan, which would be remote enough for the antenna length needed for that kind of frequency band. I'll have to do some research, but I think this transmitter is still active, and sending messages to submerged submarines for low data (short) messages that the subs can receive without having to surface.
No matter where this comes from, it's an urban legend, and the version that I heard can not be true.
One, electric current can be induced in a coil from a radio station. That's what pocket transistors and older tube type superheterodyne receivers have done for years. If you're next door to a radio station, you get a much stronger signal and your receiver might overload, but it won't catch fire.
Two, the current will be miniscule. We're talking microvolts here with a current of microamperes. You can use a transformer to step up the voltage, but the tradeoff here is that you step down the current and you simply will not have enough juice to run your house. Now I'm sure that lights next door to WLW during the 1930s would glow, but again, not to the point of catching the house on fire.
Three. If, and I said "if", the radio station had turned up their power and burned the guy's house down, what do you think would have happened? They would have been sued, and they would have lost.
I haven't heard this story for quite some time, but it is one of those fun urban legends to kick around. I have tried running this down some and found chatter about people setting up coils next to high voltage towers to steal electricity, but nothing conclusive. That may have come from the guy next to the radio station, or maybe the story went in the other direction and morphed into someone doing this while living next door to a radio station.
Whatever, it's fun story, even if it is a contrived work of fiction that may or may not have been generated from a military experiment.
There was this guy who owned a house, and his next door neighbor was a radio station. He got the idea that if he were to set up a bunch of coils in his backyard, he could run his house off of the electricity induced into the coils by the signal of the radio station, so he did just that. He set up a collection of these huge coils in his back yard, and set them up so that he was getting his electric power for his house from those coils. It was all well and good until the radio station figured out what he was doing with those coils, and they didn't like it one bit.
The radio station took him to court. They argued that what this guy was doing was not right. He was stealing electricity from the station, and not paying for it like other people were doing. The court carefully considered the argument, but ruled against the radio station. The court ruling said that the airwaves were part of the public domain, and that the public had the right to capture the airwves.. In other words, it was the radio station paying to put those airwaves out there for public use, and that they could not expect the consumer to be hit with a bill or any other charge for using those airwaves.
Needless to say, the radio station didn't like this ruling. Here they are, broadcasting a signal for people to listen to, and this guy next door to them is using them to power his house. That stuck in their craw, and there was nothing that they could do about it since the court ruled against them. Or was there?
It is said that the radio station then decided to teach this guy a lesson. They turned up their power for a few minutes, and then turned it back down. The result? The guy's house burned down to the ground.
I remembered this story during a lecture about electrical induction into a coil during one of my physics classes, so I asked my instructor if he knew about the story, which I then went on to tell him. He said no, what really happened was the that Navy was transmitting radio signals and beaming them northward. Someone nearby didn't like it, so he set up a bunch of coils to trap that signal. The Navy's receiving station wasn't getting the expected signal strength, so they investigated and found this out.
And then I've heard another explanation. It was the Army doing the transmitting, from a station in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and some guy had a bunch of coils in his attic since he didn't like what the Army was doing. Recollection gets fuzzy here as that the person that told me this might have said that this was when World War II was going on, and the guy with the coils was trying to help the Nazis.
And there's one more explanation. In the early 1980s I asked a longtime ham radio operator that I was talking to about this. He had been active since the mid-1930s, and maybe he would know. He suggested that it may have originated from when WLW of Cincinnati was using a 500 kilowatt transmitter (the maximum allowable stateside has been 50 kW for several years though WLW was grandfathered), and that the WLW signal was overpowering their neighbors and causing some strange things........which did happen by the way.
I also seem to recall reading that the military had an Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) station in northern Michigan, which would be remote enough for the antenna length needed for that kind of frequency band. I'll have to do some research, but I think this transmitter is still active, and sending messages to submerged submarines for low data (short) messages that the subs can receive without having to surface.
No matter where this comes from, it's an urban legend, and the version that I heard can not be true.
One, electric current can be induced in a coil from a radio station. That's what pocket transistors and older tube type superheterodyne receivers have done for years. If you're next door to a radio station, you get a much stronger signal and your receiver might overload, but it won't catch fire.
Two, the current will be miniscule. We're talking microvolts here with a current of microamperes. You can use a transformer to step up the voltage, but the tradeoff here is that you step down the current and you simply will not have enough juice to run your house. Now I'm sure that lights next door to WLW during the 1930s would glow, but again, not to the point of catching the house on fire.
Three. If, and I said "if", the radio station had turned up their power and burned the guy's house down, what do you think would have happened? They would have been sued, and they would have lost.
I haven't heard this story for quite some time, but it is one of those fun urban legends to kick around. I have tried running this down some and found chatter about people setting up coils next to high voltage towers to steal electricity, but nothing conclusive. That may have come from the guy next to the radio station, or maybe the story went in the other direction and morphed into someone doing this while living next door to a radio station.
Whatever, it's fun story, even if it is a contrived work of fiction that may or may not have been generated from a military experiment.
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