A Ham Again after 40 Years
When I moved to Paris, Texas an old friend from another part of Texas asked me about a HAM radio shop in my town. Main Trading Company is a whole story by itself. A story of a couple facing a bad economy and finding a way to succeed in spite of it. I had heard of it before retiring out here, but since my arrival had not taken the time to investigate. I walked in and the Richard Lenoir, the owner, set me up with some study materials, advice and encouragement.
I got online and did some checking and the web page for the store mentioned an amateur radio club here in town. Going to their website, I found that the annual field day event was the following weekend.
A bit of a digression is called for here. I recall fondly, going to a field day with my father and the Fort Worth Kilocycle Club. It was in 1969 if I recall correctly. A field day is a contest event for HAMS all over the world. The object is for your local club to make confirmed contacts with as many other amateur radio operators as possible over a 24 hour period.
Contacts are made all over the world during these events. The chatter in the old days was a constant din.
While Dad and I set up camp in the middle of a treeless knoll, all the others were erecting tents and setting up gear around the perimeter of the field in the low ground beneath the shade of some trees. The tent Dad had brought was rather unique for the time, just a roof with mosquito netting on all four sides. I could taste the sun with every breath it was so hot that summer day. The smell of the oiled canvas was so heavy, I wondered why the resins didn’t catch fire.
Dad just chuckled and assured me he wasn’t insane putting our tent in the middle of the sunny top of the hill where the sun seemed to be concentrating exclusively. I asked Dad why we didn’t set up down in the trees where we could find some shade, he just winked at me and assured me that I would understand later.
We spent the day going from tent to tent around the perimeter of the field. Sometimes we just watched and listened and other times we were invited to speak to someone in Australia or other far off places. The equipment back then was built for specific frequency bands, so to cover more than one band, you generally needed more than one radio. The Kilocycle Club divided things up so that each frequency range, also known as a band, was operating in its own tent.
Contest rules provided extra points if the power is brought to the event, so there were noisy Army surplus generators on trailers set up all over the place and crazy high voltage cables wherever you walked many of which were twisted together bare wires. These were the days before solar cells and batteries were too primitive to provide the massive power requirements for these vacuum tube radios.
The heat from some of these old radios could keep your ham shack warm in the winter. In the summer, it was like standing next to an oven. As if that wasn’t enough, the air was full of antennas. Some were just vertical whips, some were shaped like aluminum sculptures and many were just wires strung from trees or hastily erected towers. The antennas connected to the most powerful transmitters could burn you if you touched them.
Plastics were not generally available at prices amateurs could afford, so poles were all steel with ceramic insulators. Such antenna systems required steel guy wires anchored to heavy T-poles driven deep in the rocky ground by a mixture of sledge hammers and coarse language.
Before we started our tour, Dad gave me a safety briefing. Try not to touch anything and at all times keep one hand in your pocket. That way if you do touch the wrong thing, the current will be less likely to travel from one hand to the other via your heart. He also said if I ever had to reach inside an operating radio, I should press my elbow or forearm against the edge of the opening. This was both to steady my hand and to ensure that if I did touch the wrong thing, the current would be grounded out through the chassis where my arm touched it, thus preventing the electrocution which he described in great detail.
To a nine year old boy it seemed like complete chaos and I was immediately hooked. Needless to say, I was reminded several times that my Mother wouldn't be interested, so I may as well not describe too much about the event to her.
The noise of radio talkers, diesel generators and Morse code beeps was a constant din that went on throughout the night without pause.
I was determined to stay awake for the entire event, so I probably managed to hold out until eight or nine before heading to our little solar cooker of a campsite at the top of the hill.
Something had changed though. As the sun set, there was no more heat being added. Feeling a cool breeze, I realized that the trees providing shade to all the radio operators were screening them from any air movement. Dad wasn’t so crazy after all, because he had anticipated that the coolest place to sleep would be way up there.
I don’t recall acknowledging that to him at the time and I wish I had. He really was smarter than I ever gave him credit for. While he was in a care facility a couple of months before we lost him, I realized it was close to that camping spot and so we drove by one day and I told him how much I admired his choice for a camping spot.
Back to the present day, I made a note of the location where the local club was setting up and on the morning of the event, I headed over there to see how the hobby has progressed. There was a man mowing the church lawn when I arrived, and I almost kept going, but he waved so enthusiastically I felt compelled to stop.
Kelly Collins is a pastor at the church hosting the event and was just taking advantage of the slightly cooler morning to get some yard work done before the field day started. The entire event (locally) consisted of Kelly and Jeremy Johnson sitting at a table in the church yard beneath a canvas awning making contacts on a mobile radio. I think they were working 20 meters. Both men were friendly and full of information about how I could get back into the hobby.
I kept in touch and attended the next monthly club meeting. The meeting revolved around a bicycle race the following weekend where HAM radio operators were providing communications for rest-stops, sag wagons (to pick up broken bicycles and worn out riders). The communications were all about logistics this year because thankfully there weren’t any medical emergencies.
I made a stop at the local ham store and purchased a radio that would allow me to listen to the traffic on both bands to be used during the upcoming event. The price on these small handheld radios runs from under thirty dollars to over five hundred dollars. I chose one in the middle and ended up spending a bit over a hundred dollars for the radio and a better antenna than the one provided with the radio.
During the “Tour de Paris” event, I was working at a rest stop on a rural farm to market road with Ed Olague of the HAM club from nearby Sulphur Springs. After the event, I followed this new friend down to his club’s monthly meeting and took the qualifying tests. I was able to skip over pass the Technician and also the General license tests. All that was left was to wait for the Federal Communications Commission to assign me a call-sign (license number). Later, I applied for and received permission to use my Father's call sign.
I am now a member of both the Paris and Sulphur Springs, Texas clubs and having the time of my life. After being retired over a year, I got word through our local club that the folks at Main Trading Company were looking for part time help around the shop. Having spent a good deal of increasingly less disposable income with them, I went by and applied for a job for the first time in twenty years. Richard and his wife Christine Lenoir were kind enough to take a chance on me and my learning curve went from the flat-line of retirement to one steep enough to have me struggling. Although the job didn't work out partly because I was really enjoying being retired, they have continued to educate and encourage me and I hope the relationship lasts a long time.
I am finding in ham radio, a new birth of my quest for knowledge and there is so much to learn that I will never run out of new things to experiment with.
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