Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club Meetings _ Upcoming May Meeting Friday, May 19, 2000 7:30 PM (Doors open at 6:45!) Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club Special Location!!! St. Andrews Presbyterian Fellowship Hall 4575 Auhay Drive (off Hollister between Turnpike and Modoc) Visitors are cordially invited! Talk in is available on K6TZ 146.79/19(131.8). and 147.000 +600 MHz pl 131.8 . Old Timers' Night with Wayne Green, W2NSD Wayne Green, W2NSD Special Guest Speaker: Wayne Green, W2NSD Bio: Every time someone asks me for a brief bio I start out innocently enough born in Littleton, New Hampshire in 1922. Father: aviator; mother: artist, it says on my birth certificate. Kinda an artist and engineer start for me. The problem is that the next thing I know Im up to volume five of my bio, so lets cut to the ham radio chase. I was bitten by the radio bug when I was 14. It happened in church! Some guy came in with a big carton of radio parts and gave em to my friend Alfie. Having no interest in em, he gave the carton to me. That was part one of a two-part disaster in my life. The second part was when I found an article in Popular Mechanics that used the parts to make a cigar box radioand the damned radio worked! I was hooked. No, Im not complaining. Amateur radio has provided me with a lifetime of fun and adventure. Ive visited hams in over 130 countries and operated from sixty some including places such as Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, Swaziland, Lesotho, the Korean DMZ, Fiji, Wake Island, and so on. And what could be more fun to do for a living than publishing a ham magazine? Talk about nirvana! Ive traveled around the world with hams. Twice. I ski with em. I go scuba diving with em. Ive taken hams on tours of Europe and Asia. I even organized an all-ham African hunting safari. My father got into aviation right in the beginning, so I guess its no wonder that Ive been attracted to new technologies. The first time I heard ham teletype signals I had to know more. So I built a terminal unit, bought an old Model 12 machine, and had so much fun hat I started a small magazine on the subject. I loved building ham gear and wanted to share the fun I was having. This lead to my starting 73 magazine in 1960. Well, I have this genetic problem of wanting to share anything I particularly enjoy with as many people as I can. W Jack Babkes W2GDG invented narrow-band FM in 1946, I was one of the first on the air with it. Then came RTTY in 1948. Wow, was that fun! John Williams W2BFD and I set up a repeater atop the New York City Municipal building in 1949, making it so RTTYers all around greater New York could be in contact. A little over a year later I started publishing my RTTY Journal. When sideband arrived in 1955 I had a ball, o I published everything I could about it. In 1959 I flew around the world, working tens of thousands of stations on 20 m SSB from the plane, and visiting hams in 26 countries. That was also the year I represented amateur radio for the U.S. at the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva. This was the conference when Kruschev saved amateur radio. But that story would take an hour to tell. In 1963 we had the worst disaster in the history of the hobby, but that, too, is a long and fascinating story. Thats when, in less than two years over 85% of the ham dealers were forced out of business, 90% of the ham clubs folded, and over 90% of the ham manufacturers folded. 1966 I almost got the ITU to officially endorse amateur radio. Thats a several chapter story in itself. In 1970 I heard that His Majesty King Husseins wife had given him a ham rig for Christmas, so I cabled him, asking if hed like me to come over and show him how to use it. A few days later I was in Amman, where I operated from the palace for two weeks with His Majesty. And thats another long and fantastic story. A few years ago, when I visited Jord n, Prince Raad held a special meeting of the Royal Jordanian Amateur Radio Society and introduced me as the man who had had more of an effect on Jordan than anyone other than the King imself. Exciting moments for me? Working my home station on 20m from VK3ATN in Birchip, Australia. And then going down to 75m and hearing my home station coming through S-9+! Wow! My two DXpeditions to Navassa Island. Working several states on 10.5 GHz. My Oscar contact with Moscow, where there was a 20-second window. Round tables on 75m with me relaying DX stations from Africa and the Indian Ocean via 20m on 75m. Yes, I had two kilowatt rigs. Then there was that Finnish Sauna with OH2SS, where we went from a half hour in a 250� room and jumped into a lake, where the ice had just melted a few days earlier. I got excited about repeaters, setting up WR1AAB on nearby Pack Monadnock Mountain. The results were spectacular, so I published hundreds of articles on 2m FM and repeaters in 73, plus I published a separate repeater magazine. I organized repeater conferences around the country to standardize channels. We went from about a hundred repeaters to thousands, and all this with no help whatever from any of e other ham magazines. I have my 60-year ARRL plaque. Ive come from the 1930s, when amateur radio was crystal controlled and 90% was on CW, to todays synthesized solid-state transceivers. Ive worked 100 countries in a weekend, 200 in a month, and 300 in a year. All states in one night. Rag chewed, pioneered NBFM, SSB, slow scan, repeaters, and satellites. Ive worked moonbounce from the big dish at Arecibo. And, you know, there hasnt been anything Ive done that anyone else couldnt have, if theyd taken advanage of the opportunities. Yes, I know, thats all me-me me. Well, its a bio, so what did you expect. My controversial editorials in 73 are more about you than me. I write about anything I think should interest you. I review books Ive discovered which youre crazy if you dont read. I talk about how you can make more money, how you can be healthier, how you can raise your babys IQ by 40 to 50 points, and how we can enormously improve our schools, our government, and so on. We have the best country in the world, but if we work at it, we can make it a whole lot better. So, lets get busy. The Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club holds its General Meetings on the third Friday of the month (except for the months of June, July, August) at either the County Schools Auditorium or the Goleta Union School Dist. Admin. Center Board Room. The meeting starts at 7:30pm, but come early for the "Free-to-Good-Home" Table, SBARC Bookstore, and socializing. Topics and speakers have ranged from DXing with the Pope, Gordon West, JPL Demonstration, Old Timers' Night, and Come Fly With Us! (hang gliding and Amateur Radio. This year's topics will include Transmitter Hunting and Fiber Optics. _________________________________________________________________ ***** Remember, an out of tune piano makes noise, not music! ***** call, (805) 966-7060 . E-MAIL: dennis@rain.org . *** Bye from the Paradise Playground of the Pacific Beaches. *** Dennis Schwendtner *** WB6OBB *** *** http://www.rain.org/~dennis *** *** Schwendtner Piano and Service *** WB6OBB repeater web-site ***