WARC bands

In Meadville, PA, on the campus of Allegheny College there lies a 400 watt college radio station, 90.3 WARC-FM. There are are non-commercial station, operating on the south side of the FM band. There are probably wholly unaware of a segment of the Amateur Radio band that happens to bear their name: The WARC Bands.

The WARC bands are 30 meters, 17 meters and 12 meters. This was established in 1979 at the World Administrative Radio Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, which is how they got their name. But this conference no longer exists. It was the main technical conference of the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). The ITU was a advisory group that gathered delegates from member nations to amend/revise international Radio Regulations. It ceased to exist in 1992 when a Plenipotentiary  conference "restructured" the WARC into the World Radiocommunication Conference or WRC. More pics here.


That 1979 conference took 10 weeks, and that doesn't even counting the preparatory conference that preceded it in Panama.They started on September 24th and finally broke on December 6th. There were a total of 147 delegations and about 2,000 individual delegates. They considered 15,000 different proposals in that time and most of those were about the allocation of specific frequency bands for particular uses. I cannot imagine what it takes to get 2,000 people to agree on anything. Somehow the result was that these frequency bands to the Amateur Radio band:

30 meters (10.100–10.150 MHz)
17 meters (18.068–18.168 MHz)
12 meters (24.890–24.990 MHz)

There were caveats attached of course dividing individual slivers for certain services: CW, narrow band digital, beacons, wide band digital etc. Also there remains a "gentleman's agreement" that the WARC bands may not be used for amateur radio contesting, a sport in which hams try to rack up two-way communications competitively for both distance and quantity.

How Vinyl Records Are Made

I've posted before on how records are made but this is a nice modern production line. This baffling revival of vinyl has led to the re-activation and even new construction of record production facilities in America. So far this year total record sales are down almost 9% but sales of LPs, those 12-inch vinyl discs are up 33%. that meteoric rise is just s capstone on the 250% increase since 2002.

Amazing no?  I still believe that it's the last gasp of a doomed format. But in the mean time I will enjoy picking up high-quality re-pressings of Jazz sides I'd never otherwise own in mint condition. Thank you sentimental hipsters. As Claire Suddath quipped..."These people probably also eat kale."

PART 1

PART 2

Half A Song or Half A Radio Station?

So let's start with the tagline of this story. It's run in a few magazines and newspapers but the gist is always the same. "This Calgary radio station has started cutting songs in half so listeners don’t get bored." First of all CHR/Pop is a pretty boring format. Canadian content requirements can't possibly improve upon that monotonous disaster of a playlist. More here. The original Billboard article praised it like the real deal

"The concept of QuickHitz was born in 2005. That’s when Sean Demery launched a feature called “The 60 Song Music Hour”—where songs were cut down to one minute each—on CBS alternative KITS (Live 105) San Francisco, where he was PD at the time."

The new format is called "Quickhitz." the station is 90.3 CKMP Calgary, Alberta in Canada. Just earlier this month they debuted the format. It ran for 3 weeks and then they quietly reverted to a normal, safe CHR playlist on August 20th. The station's ratings trail behind its CHR rivals in Calgary: Virgin Radio 98.5 CIBK and Kiss 95.9 CHFM. It was probably just a stunt. But the idea has merit. Lets us explore that idea.

First of all they didn't cut the songs in half. They didn't do a hatched job. they spent the time to do decent edits and shave the song down to about 2 minutes each, a reduction of about 30%. It was aimed this increased their number of spins per hour from 12 to 24. It was hyperbole. A hour is comprised of 60 minutes. During morning zoo 8-10 is more likely with the chatter. But in an afternoon slot sure 12 songs is totally plausible with the balance being filled by ads, liners, station ID and mic breaks, etc. 12 song sat an average of 3 minutes each is 32 minutes. An actually sustainable format would not reduce their spot load. If the songs were two minutes long the new hourly playlist would be about 16 songs.

But a modern CHR playlist is only about 120 songs deep. That's pretty shallow if you play 16 songs an hour. That's 364 spins a day. In other words, even if every song was played an equal number of times, each would be spun about 3 times daily. Now all of you in radio know that's not accurate. Some songs are already being played 20 or more times a day on CHR stations. So clearly Quickhitz would either need a deeper playlist or substantially fewer songs in heavy rotation to reduce burn out. But as a stunt it at least made good satire.

Sparknet Communications in Vancouver developed the brand and format. Previously they developed and rolled out the now ubiquitous Jack format, lending creedence to the story. Different parts of their website retain information on the brand but the original site is gone.. but thankfully still cached.

Transcription Mystery Disc #228

This is a 78 rpm metal-core, 8-Inch Recordisc. it's actually the B-side of the unlabeled idsc from last week that caught my attention. The physical connection made me suspect Ted Daffan but the song sounds nothing like his pop repertoire. I have my doubts in other words.

 It's So Hard to Walk the Straight and Narrow Way


This is a christian country tune presumably called "It's So Hard to Walk the Straight and Narrow Way." The  lyric is a reference to Matthew 7:13-14. The lyrics and arrangement appear to be originals. It's a shame the disc is unlabeled. The song consists of voice accordion, guitar and piano. The harmonies are quite competent. They are not local hacks, this was an experienced, road-worn band. The recording ends with an eruption of applause making me suspect this is another live radio recording.

SK

These are practices specific to every culture and subculture that help define them from other groups. These are the nuances that define them from those outside the group. In anthropology it's sometimes called exclusivity. This is about one specific to ham radio. The abbreviation SK stands for Silent Key meaning that a person is deceased. The etymology alone is fascinating, and today there are whole websites dedicated to canonizing dead hams. [Link and Link] They even have memorial Silent Key scholarships. Here is a usage from an article by L. B. Cebik on the ZL Special antenna for context:

"ZL3MH (later ZL2OQ and recently a silent key) brought the antenna to ham attention in 1949, giving credit to W5LHI and W0GZR for basic information on the design."

The key in this context of "SK" refers to a telegraph key. It is the primary tool and human-to-machine interface for hams. The telegraph key is the the ham as the paintbrush to the painter, the pen to the writer. Clearly the term must antedate the Morse key. The term could predate wireless, but could not predate land-line telegraph systems. Straight lever keys date back to the 1850s but large scale production was uncommon until around 1880.

But at the other end of the time line I see the term escaping the ham culture and appearing in contemporary books... both fiction and non-fiction. I'll list off a few more recent publications.

• 2011 - Survivors - James Rawles 
• 2009 - Full Circle - Theodore Cohen
• 2009 - Is Anyone There? Communication? by Karim Buksh
• 2004 - Talk the Talk - Luc Reid
• 2004 - The Queen Off Broadway - Alexis Greene
• 2003 - Hello World - Danny Gregory
• 1987 - Unsinkable - Daniel Butler

But as we go backward into the 1970s the references disappear from pulp fiction and reappear in trade magazines and publications dedicated to amateur radio. It appears in the ARRL handbook of 1979. The of June 1975 issue of QST magazine lists W3NRE as a silent Key. They had been using the term since at least 1967. A 1969 issue of CQ magazine lists WA2QCQ as a silent key and multiple 1966 issues use the term as well.

The uses of the term I find before that only refer to an inactive or otherwise unused telegraph key. such as in this line from The Great Iron Ship by James Dugan.  "In the beach hut the electricians sat by a dark index and a silent key. French telegraph shares slumped acutely on the Bourse and Exchange." But there is one lone use from the 1940s that clearly is in the same sense that CQ and QST use it. A 1943 issue of MSG Journal, the trade magazine of the Marine Department of the American Communications Assoc. The line reads   "...don't flirt with high Voltages, that is, unless you want to get your name into MSG, under the sad notation "Silent Key". 

The use in quotes is common in formal writing with new terminology making the jump from slang to common usage.  So that's my best guess. It was likely new in the late 1930s, and popularized by QST and CQ magazine who used the term to precede obituaries. It's worth noting that by 1985 the term was fully entrenched. In 1985, Alan Tavor succeeded in establishing Israel's Silent Key Forest, a memorial to deceased hams.

Maybe the Memristor

The memristor was first imagined by Leon O. Chua in 1971. [link] He considered it a "missing" circuit component that would be non-linear, passive, two-terminal, electrical component. The name is a portmanteau of memory and resistor. The component if ever invented, would  not provide constant electrical resistance. It's resistance would be "remembered" and vary depending on the history of current that previously passed through it. This could vary depending on how much current or by direction. It's symbol is above.  More here.

Years later Leon backed off that definition and generalized that the memristor was a general and not specific component. He re-imagined his original idea to include all forms of two-terminal non-volatile memory circuit components. In it's new vagueness he now envisioned it as predating the resistor, capacitor and inductor. Whatever. His original idea was at least a highly useful device even if it didn't yet exist.

In the last several years a number of companies have claimed to have at last invented the memristor. These components use anything from titanium dioxide films to CMOS, hafnium oxide, MRAM, RRAM... etc. These are not cranks and dot coms. HP is working on the technology. Critics of the original requirements point out that they are impossible under the known laws of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Other more cynical critics pointed out that skin and blood meet the criteria. More here. Still no such product is commercially available.

But trolling geeks have pointed out that you can kind of cheat to meet the requirements...

Uda

In America no one remember Roebuck. Sears got all the credit. But Alvah Roebuck was a real person and after Richard Sears bought him out he went on to be the president of the Emerson Typewriter company. Being forgotten has nothing to do with success... it's about who gets to write the history. So it is in this other radio-related case.

The Yagi is a very common very useful high gain antenna. I've installed many myself. It's a directional antenna with one driven element and a number of parasitic elements. The driven element (usually a dipole) is connected to the receiver by a feed line. The parasitic elements are not electrically connected. They act as passive resonators receiving and re-radiating radio waves. These are out of phase with the original wave. This interferes with waves that are also out of phase with the original wave, such as those coming from directions perpendicular to the direction the antenna is pointed. A Yagi may also have a reflector at one end. Which will also cancel out those coming form the opposite direction. A Yagi is more properly known as a Yagi-Uda. More on that in a moment.

A side note on how a Yagi-Uda and Log-Periodic antennas differ. They do look very similar. ALog Periodic antenna consists of many dipole elements along an axis which decrease length. In their case all the elements are driven. However because they are different each is only resonant at a given frequency. And while a Yagi can have wide or narrow beam width a Log Periodic by design is always narrow. They are common in both UHF and VHF bands,and have been since they were in vented in 1955 by  Dwight E. Isbell, Raymond DuHamel  at the University of Illnois. The Yagi-Uda predates it by about three decades. Despite that the names are used interchangeably by some.


The name Yagi comes not from it's inventor Shintaro Uda, but from his collegue Hidetsugu Yagi. Both were employees of Tohoku University. But while Shintaro Uda was a professor and Lab Engineer, Yagi was a professor and the Lab Director. Uda invented the design in 1926. (patent 61195)  Yagi got the credit for a few reasons firstly though that he wrote about it in English. (There is some evidence Uda also wrote an English paper for the IRE) But they had previously published an article together in japan in 1926. But it was Yagi who traveled to America in 1926 and 1928  for talks on the new technology. Yagi also filed the patent in Japan and the US without Uda's name attached. Then the colossal prick sold the US patent to RCA. In 1952 he founded Yagi Antenna Inc which further associated his name with the invention. The IEEE article on the topic kind of smooths over that problem. More here.

Uda wrote some other fundamentally ignored but strong papers in the 1920s "High Angle Radiation of Short Electric Waves" and "On the Wireless Beam of Short Electric Waves" in 1927 then in 1929 "The Practical Short Wave Limit of Triode Vacuum Tube Oscillators."  A collection of his papers was printed in 1928 titled
"On the wireless beam of short electric waves."   In 1954, Uda and Yasuto Mushiake wrote a book on the topic titled The Yagi-Uda Antenna.  Thsi probably mounted the first reclamation of his antenna. Then in 1974 he published "Short wave projector: Historical records of my studies in early days" which was even printed in an English edition. I'd love to read that but it's long out of print. He died in 1976... just a few months after Yagi.

Suppertime Frolic

In 1940 they advertised 1130 WJJD-AM as "The Largest Independent radio Station in the Nation."It was probably even true at 20,000 watts over Chicago. Some announcers left WLW for slots at WJJD. They claimed the radio station was founded by the Loyal Order of Moose.. that might have been true as well. They did a lot of public service programming which was important to their image.. Unsurprisingly their sports programming was wildly more popular. But what has proved the most enduring was the Suppertime Frolic.

Billboard dismissed the program as "...a popular program for rural consumption, patched up to sell a number of products, most of them patent medicines." Ouch. It had been founded by A&R man Ken Nelson later famously of Capitol records. Early on it was hosted by announcer and emcee Uncle Ervin Viktor, the program was panned by city press.
The program aired Monday through Saturday from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM.

In 1935 DJ Randy Blake (aka Harold Weinstein) joined the program as a sacred singer. He had previously been at WBBM and felt the pull of hillbilly music. By 1941 he was officially it's host. The program went on to have the Kasapar Sisters, Patsy Montana, Red Foley, Lonnie Glosson, the Cumberland Ridge Runners, Jimmy Dale, Les Paul (as Rhubarb Red), The Kentucky Mountaineers, Bob Atcher and Bonnie Blue Eyes and others as entertainers.  Randy didn't leave the program until 1957, when he moved to WLW. excepting a short stretch in 1948 when he served in WWII, he hosted the program for 22 years.

But after WWII most of the live talent was gone. Randy just play3ed Country Western Disc Jockey. So it was no surprise when Blake took the program with him to WLW and moved it's time slot to 8:00 PM to 9:30 PM, Tuesday through Sunday. The days changed, but the program got shorter. The name quickly changed to "The Randy Blake Show." I get the impression it didn't last long.

Transcription Mystery Disc #227

This disc is damaged. It has a chip missing from the outer edge of the acetate coating. It's on both sides indicating it may have been dropped. Thankfully it falls just short of the start of the grooves. The audio is good and clear on this 78 rpm metal-core, 8-Inch Recordisc. The rhythm guitar is tuned a bit flat and the DJ stumbles over his words. This recording appears to be of a live radio broadcast.

Ted Daffan's Texans - Two of a Kind

While unlabeled, the recording is introduced by an unnamed DJ who names the artist as Ted Daffan's Texans. The song is "Two of a Kind" which is described as one off his "latest." It was released in August of 1948, which dates the disc with some accuracy. You can read the rest of Ted's discography here. Daffan is often credited with inventing that strange sub-genre of country music... Trucker music. There are a surprising number of songs about trucking; numerous LPs came out in the 1960s alone. Strange claim to fame.

He wasn't much of a radio man as a country singer. But he had a quiet phase of his career in his early 20s. He was a big fan of Hawaiian music and led a Hawaiian guitar band, the Blue Islanders on KRTH-AM in Houston.  He didn't even go country until 1934. Daffan stopped performing in the 1960s and went into music publishing. Ray Charles covered some of his tunes producing a late-career boost. Daffan died in 1996; he was 84.

Pneumatic Tube Audio

You may have used one of these systems on an airplane as recently as the late 1980s. (Does that count as recent?)   This was not radio so to speak, as it contained no RF but it often included prerecorded radio programming. So file this under extinct radio obscurities...

Most sourced attributed the technology to AVID Airline Products who began marketing Airline pneumatic tube audio in 1963. The company had been founded as a division of AVID in 1951. AVID cites their first year marketing IFE headphones as 1961 and names TWA as their first customer. It's interesting that AVID picks that year as it was the same year Keith Larkin and Courtney Graham invented a similar pneumatic headset for pilots US3184556. They went on to found Plantronics. But the AVID patent I found actually gates to 1965, and there it gets interesting. It appears that the "Sound Tube Head Set" patent US3217831 was invented by Charles Scanlon Edward.  It was one of 4 patents he held, most of which relate to hearing devices. On the document he describes it's function simply

"In operation, in an airplane carrying a stereophonic tape, which may be a musical tape or a motion picture sound track, the tape is electrically connected to two separate transducers. The two transducers emit pressurized sound waves which will pass into acoustical passageway 63 and sound passageway 67 when acoustical socket 61 and sound socket 66 are, respectively, attached to a transducer. The pressurized sound waves from acoustical passageway 63 pass into and through inlet port 20, acoustical chamber 15 and ear port 23 to a human ear"

The legal problem with the patent is that the device had no new technology of any kind. It was effectively a stethoscope held against a speaker cabinet. In citing his patent he went way out of his way to mention no existing stethoscopes; instead citing awkward and disused stethoscope-like devices. They were all pneumatic headphones that conduct sound. In an act of patent attorney comedy, two other inventors cited him as a source for their own dubious stethoscope patents. 

Probably in an effort to defend the patent AVID went out and bought some more stethoscope patents including US3623571, US3539032, US3730290. Sometimes it's just cost effective you know? In fairness they did pad that first dubious patent with two more interesting ones. A self retractable sound plug US3721313 in 1973, and a passenger audio control box US3860139 in 1975. That later patent is actually the most original.

What made this whole system worth pursuing was not it's high fidelity. It was that the headphones were cheap to produce. AVID continued to make the units until at least 1979. By the early 1980s imported electronics so lowered the cost of traditional headphones that there was no remaining advantage in the pneumatic headsets. AVID and Plantronics continue to exist today. Sadly TWA does not.

Paper Tape!

 "Electronic Computers Improve Management Control" UCLA 1957

These readers were mechanically very similar to the reel-to-reel decks that read and recorded to magnetic tape. But their history os so different. While punch cards and paper tape date back arguably to the work of Basile Bouchon 1725 the actual use of  paper tape is more recent. While Herman Hollerith was experimenting with the godfather of machine-read punch cards in 1889 he briefly experimented with paper tape before settling on punched cards. He described both media in his patent US395781, but there was prior art.. I'll get back to that in a moment.

It's hard to imagine now, but punched cards were used into the 1980 not because they were good, but because they were cheap. The UNITYPER, an input device for the UNIVAC I computer introduced magnetic tape for data entry way back in 1953.  During the 1960s, the punched card diminished in popularity but wasn't really extinguished until the advent of the floppy disc.

Paper tape had a  parallel history to punch cards. Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated in 1801 a chain of punched cards used to control a loom. While this was clearly is derived from the work of Bouchon, it was his assistant Jean Baptiste Falcon who (apocryphally) steered his work toward punched cards. Jacques Vaucanson had experimented with them as well, with working models as early as 1745, but for his trouble he was only pelted with stones.

Paper Tape Processing

For the most part paper tape is just one long continuous punched card.We are familiar with punched tape being fed to teletypes, and seeing it as the archaic output media of stock tickers and even telegrams. Binary transmitted data to paper tape dates to at least 1846 when it was used by Alexander Bain.  the first real commercial paper tape probably dates to 1937 with the The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), also called the Harvard Mark I , which was used in WWII. The Mark I read its instructions from a 24-row punched paper tape. Later standardized tapes had 6, 7 and 8 rows. While most telegraph hardware of the day read Baudot, the ASCC did not.

You Can't Do Business with Hitler

Sometimes I read about radio history and feel like some cranky mischievous character like Joe Bussard has planted some false information as a prank. Much to my surprise I was able to corroborate this information through multiple reputable sources. There was once a radio program called "You Can't Do Business with Hitler."  Seriously, there were at least 56 episodes run between 1942 and 1943.

• Heads They Win - Tails We Lose
• Broken Promises
• No American Goods Wanted
• Two for Me One for You
• Mass Murder
• Spoils of Europe
• 1000 Year Reich
• Living Dead
• Anti-Christ
• Pagan Gods
• Swastikas over the Equator
• Money Talks with a German Accent

The program was written and produced by the radio section of the Office of War Information (OWI) the propaganda office of the U.S. military in that era. John Flynn and Virginia Moore starred in the program which aired on at least 790 radio stations. The scriptwriter was Elwood Hoffman and the director was Frank Telford. Elwood script wrote for other propaganda programs in that era including  six episodes of  "This Is Our Enemy", and three episodes of "American Portrait." He wrote some more mundane material for Cavalcade of America and of all things... The Columbia Workshop. More here.

It as based on an autobiographical book by Douglas Miller published in 1941. MIller was a Rhodes Scholar from Denver. His book ended up sixth on the nonfiction best-seller list for 1941. Miller was an attache with the American Embassy in Berlin from 1924 to1939. (some sources say 1925-1929) By the time he resigned he was staunchly opposed to the Nazi regime and in the mood to write some anti-Nazi propaganda. More here.

The title was actually a repudiation of statements by Charles Lindbergh. Yes, that same Lindbergh. It wasn't terribly quotable "I believe this nation is well able to take care of itself economically."  But Lindbergh was advocating for isolationism... and Miller wanted into WWI.  So they found themselves very much at odds. But we already know who won that argument with the public.

Post Mortem Broadcasts

 

There is a small but growing number of dead DJs who have ongoing programs in radioland. It's a strange convention, but one that was inevitable after the re-run was invented. Early radio, like later early television, was all live and re-runs were impossible without re-performance. The first re-runs probably began immediately after the advent of pre-recorded syndicated programs distributed by mail. Eventually this process would have led either knowingly or unknowingly to the airing of programming by people now deceased. I assume just based on raw actuarial tables that this must have happened by 1940. But strangely today this has evolved to a very deliberate practice.

I'm not aiming for a canonical list here. Essentially any rerun of any golden era program at least somewhat meets this description. What I'm looking at here are hosted monologue programs. To listen to these programs is to listen to a dead Disc Jockey talk to you. This something much more morbid than listening to re-runs of Lum and Abner.  Here are a few particularly eerie examples.

91.3 KVLU - Best of Bax
This one is particularly weird. It's not a series of re-run whole contiguous programs. KVLU staff spent years digitizing tapes and acetates. For years now, on Sunday nights, KVLU has broadcast the Best of Bax a two-hour program made of excerpts and "related materials"  that are pieced together from tapes spanning his 50 year radio career.  More here.

WWCR - Gene Scott
OK, so this is a shortwave station but it's so weird I can't skip it. Gene Scott was preacher who used to lease a frequency on WWCR's transmitters. he is now deceased but still is aired on the station. How can that be?  Scott was diagnosed with prostate cancer and refused conventional treatment and relied on God to heal him. That is as effective as homeopathic medicine. His widow pastor Melissa Scott, took over the franchise and used what was left if his ministry to keep his zombie voice on the air. More here.

89.7 WGBH - Ray Smith on Jazz Decades
The program debuted back in 1972 on WGBH, but Ray died in 2010. Over those 38 years he produced over 1900 shows. The Station manager apparently thought that Ray should live on like a ghost haunting evenings at the NPR affiliate.  More here.

820 WNYC–AM- Danny Stiles' Music Museum
Danny Stiles died in 2011. His oldies program, the Music Museum still airs on Saturday nights at WNYC-AM. Stiles was a long time NY disc jockey having also been at WRCA, WEVD, WNSW, WHBI, WNJR, WJDM and WPAT in his 55 year career. His WNYC program played pre-1950s pop and his playlists dipped all the way into the 1920s. So not only is the host deceased... but so are almost all of the recorded musicians. More here.

For the record that is nowhere near a complete list. The most I think about it the more I realize there must be. It's endemic. Marian McPartland of Piano Jazz died last year. She stopped recording programs in 2010 and she is still in reruns on NPR. Jay Harris on WMNR was in post mortem reruns until recently I believe. Karl Haas on WCLV in Cleveland died in 2005, but the station continued to run tapes of Adventures in Good Music until 2007.  And by all reports NPR intends to put Car Talk into reruns like a Charles Shultz 'Peanuts' comic strip.  That will get extra funny as all the cars they discussed slowly become antiques.

Transcription Mystery Disc #226

This is yet another 8-Inch, metal-core Duodisc that spins at 78 RPM. This one in particular has a nice sound, good levels and low noise. It's an instrumental, and unlabeled so for me there is no hope of identification. But like the others I assume it's from 560 WFIL-AM in Philadelphia. I've seen dates on this type of acetate blank from 1948 to 1954. It's a broad range.

Lap Steel Instrumental


It's got some serious lap steel playing, some more competent accordion and some acoustic guitar. This is clearly a practiced trio.. possibly even an accomplished one.The steel player isn't Curly Chalker, but he's very good.  You can hear voices intermittently shout, even clap but nothing clear, no station ID nothing Googleable. But the song sticks with me, there are a couple guitar licks that sound familiar... so maybe there is hope among my audiophile readers.

Milton William Cooper

 

By most measures (including mine) Milton William Cooper was a bit crazy. As a conspiracy theorist he crossed that community's version of the Maginot line into Ufology, the occult, Illuminati, numerology, Freemasons, AIDs denialism, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the whole wacky enchilada. But radioland has a lot of eccentrics worth discussing. So yes, he was a conspiracy nut. But more importantly, he was a shortwave radio broadcaster.

On the bad side, I have to admit that Bill Cooper had a bad side. But he is hardly as memorable as the cranks that listened to him.  Reportedly Timothy J. McVeigh was a fan. The only loose confirmation of that fact is a statement by a Southern Poverty Law Center spokesman  that Cooper was well known within the militia movement.Without a corroborating statement I can only class that as a rumor. But his connection to militia movements is undisputed.

His program aired on 7.415 MHz WWCR , a shortwave radio station broadcasting our of Nashville, TN.  It's programming is very similar to that of WBCQ in Maine. The call letters stand for "World Wide Christian Radio" but listeners often call it World Wide Conspiracy Radio. Cooper's show was aired on weeknights from 1993 to 2001 and always began with air raid sirens. The program provided 8 solid years of programming that makes Alex Jones sound like a puff ball. Cooper read letters from listeners, and often broadcast live taking live callers. His show also streamed online, which was a real novelty back in the 1990s. You can listen here if you feel you must. (more here)

His undoing was his IRS denialism. There is a special sub-group of conspiracy nuts who believe the IRS has no right to levy taxes. This is a special kind of crazy because it's in such plain language in our most important founding document.. Article I of the Constitution "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises...etc."  Bill's reading comprehension aside, the real problem was that Bill took the step of not paying income taxes. In July 1998 he was charged with tax evasion and an arrest warrant was issued. But the Feds didn't try very hard to arrest him. Two years later the US Marshals Service got around to naming him a major fugitive. By all reports, they still hadn't tried looking for him at his home. In November of 2001 Apache County sheriff's deputies finally knocked on the door of his trailer home.

According to the police Cooper fired on the deputies and they returned fire. In the exchange Cooper was killed. Interestingly the Apache County police hadn't come to serve a warrant on tax evasion. One version of the story holds that they were there only on an unrelated complaint. Bill was allegedly accused of threatening someone with a firearm. He died November 5th 2001 at the age of 58. More here.

YAGI Attack on GFCI

GFCI stands for Ground-Fault Circuit Interrupter. This problem is relegated to the non-threatening urban legend category. Let me tell you this is very real. GFCIs are designed, to serve as a safety measure. The modules work like a circuit breaker. s, cutting the power to devices if they detect that a gadget’s current is flowing through an unintended path.. like a body of water or a human body. It does this by measuring the current leaving the hot side of the power source and comparing it to the current returning to the neutral side. This device has a critical weakness. The ARRL describes it here in the following soft but accurate language:

 "Ground-Fault Circuit Interrupters (GFCI) circuit breakers are occasionally reported to “trip” (open the circuit) when a strong RF signal is present, usually a ham’s HF transmissions. GFCI circuit-breakers operate by sensing unbalanced currents in the hot and neutral conductors of an ac circuit. In the absence of RF interference such an imbalance indicates the presence of a fault somewhere in the circuit, creating a shock hazard. The breaker then trips (opens) to remove the shock hazard."

But point of failure is the tiny transformer most of these devices contain. A tiny transformer isn't much more than a ferrite doughnut wound with copper wire.. in other words.. a toroid. That wire can be induced by the right frequency of radio waves to carry a current. If the attacker can find the right frequency, and the amplitude of that current is strong enough, it can fry the device instead of just tripping the GFCI. Below you can see the results of a two YAGI attacks on household appliances.

Semiconductors are also Semiresistors

By definition, a semiconductor is any material with a mediocre electrical conductivity. In other words, more conductive than glass but say less conductive than copper. So, everything that's not so great at insulating or conducting could be considered a semiconductor. This vagueness is not helpful to understanding Semiconductors. The broad dictionary definition includes half the periodic table.  The most common today are: silicon, germanium, and compounds of gallium, usually in the form of slices of artificially grown crystals. Diodes, LEDs, transistors and integrated circuits are all made from semiconductor material.

This is really important to understand because you are reading this on a device (mobile or otherwise) that contains a number of semiconductors it relies upon to function. But they are not quite so new or complicated. The Nobel prize was bestowed upon Marconi and Karl Braun in 1909 for the discovery of semiconductor rectification. [source] But yes, that was a semiconductor.

In 1874, Braun had discovered that current only passed freely in one direction through lead sulfide (galena). Sadly he didn't find much use for that until radio was invented two decades later. But all this led directly to the invention of the transistor. Greenleaf Pickard got his patent in 1906 on a silicon-based rectifier.
 In 1907, Physicist George W. Pierce demonstrated the rectification properties of carborundum diodes after experimenting with metals and semiconductors. This rectifier required the application of current to function but was more mechanically stable. In 19276 Julius Lilienfeld proposed a metal–semiconductor triode rectifier using copper-sulfide semiconductors. These were actually early semiconductor field effect transistors.there is some debate as to whether any of  his devices worked.. but that's not actually required for a US patent.

Bell labs and other groups were looking for a solid-state equivalent to the vacuum tube. When they found one, it was probably an accident, examining the diode point-contact. The first transistors were of that type. But strangely they didn't invent the point-contact transistor first. William Shockley produced a field-effect theory in 1939 and Bell Labs announced the invention of the junction field-effect transistor in 1951 and began licensing it. What happened to that point contact transistor, that simple semiconductor?

Pickar's point-contact rectifier was awfully close back in 1906. In other more patentable words, it had a lot of prior art. But lacking the vocabulary, crystal oscillation wasn't referred to as a semiconductor. But by 1920 related works with crystals had already been made by Oleg V. Lossev, William H. Eccles, Frank W. Jordan,Eugen Nesper, Julius Lilienfeld, Robert G. Adams, William T. Ditcham and many others. Hugo Gernsback predicted that crystals would someday replace valves in circuits. Lilienfeld actually patented it in 1923. But the semiconductor was "invented" 3 decades later. More here

Semiconductors have low resistance in one direction and high resistance in the other, the inverse of their conductive properties. the same is true of their insulation properties. Braun's rectifier was a diode, the simplest possible semiconductor device. The transistor is just two diodes back to back, and the integrated circuit is made of hundreds of these etched onto a silicon chip.

The Patron Saint of Amateur Radio Operators

Saints are different from patron saints. While various popes have named patron saints in the past, patrons can be chosen by other individuals or groups as well. This has led to a proliferation of patron saints.The studious may already know that the Archangel Gabriel is also the patron saint of communications workers. That includes all kinds of communications workers...postal workers, radio dispatchers, bike messengers, and virtually every stripe of radio and television worker. But that's a big bucket, there is also one more patron saint in radio.

Unlike Gabriel, a mythological character, our other patron a real person: Maksymiliana Marii Kolbego. his name is sometimes anglicized to Maximilian Kolbe. He was born Raymond Kolbe in 1894. He was a priest in Poland during the German occupation. He was also an amateur radio hobbyist with the callsign SP3RN. Ham radio was banned in WWII after the occupation, and it was suspected Kolbe may have continued broadcasting. The Germans believed Kolbe was involved in espionage. This isn't shocking... ham radio was suspended in the US in the same period.

But Poland had an active ham radio community before the war. The Polski Związek Krotkofalowcow (Polish Amateur Radio Union) was 9 years old when the war broke out. Kolbe was certainly not the only broadcaster on the watch list. But he was probably the only one who was both a priest and a ham. His brother was also a radical who had fought the Russians for Polish independence and was hanged for his troubles. Yes, Kolbe was a man whose name was on a list. More here.

He was transferred to Auschwitz in May of 1941. After a prisoner break that year the Germans ordered that 10 prisoners be killed in retribution. Kolbe volunteered to take the place of one of the condemned men. While many other radio men did many brave things in WWII, the martyrdom thing is big with the Catholics. In 1982 he was canonized by Pope John Paul II as St. Maximilian Kolbe. John Paul noted him specifically for chastity of all things. The ham radio title seemed to show up several years later.  (Previously the title had been bestowed upon Bill Gavin by Billboard magazine.)

Transcription Mystery Disc #225

This is an 8-inch, metal-core duo disc. It spins at 78 rpm and has the common, outer-edge start. It's totally unlabeled as its par for the course. But this was a gem of a recording, high levels, low noise and a nice arrangement: accordion, guitar, and two vocalists in harmony.. very similar to the original version. Original version?  Yes. On to the audio!

Sweeter than the Flowers


The song is a public domain classic "Sweeter than the Flowers." You can read all the lyrics here. This version isn't quite verbatim, but very similar. If you ever had any debate about the relation of British folk music to American country music.. dispel that now. Jean Thomas was right [source].

The song was recorded by Kitty Wells, George Jones, Gene Pitney, the Stanley Brothers, Johnny Cash, Roy Acuff and even Moon Mullican who first cut the track in 1948. The tune was originally penned by Ervin Thomas Rouse just a few years earlier. Note: Rouse also wrote the Orange Blossom Special. More here. If that interests you I'd recommend his biography, Orange Blossom Boys: The Untold Story of Ervin T. Rouse by Randy Noles. There are a scant few recordings of Rouse from 1939... I doubt this is him.. but I'd still like to ID it.

ARPSC

The term "ham radio" was originally an insult, like ham-fisted. Around two million people worldwide are "hams" with 700,000 of those being in the U.S.  Technically, all early radio experimenters were in fact amateurs. What makes today's amateurs into Hams was WWI. Their radio broadcasting was suspended in 1917, and restored in 1919. This process was re-played in WWI. But in some ways it was that cessation and rebooting that codified what was ham and what was commercial by separating the services into casts.

In other ways it was its limited wartime use that let to it's modern function in emergency services. The first edition of the ARRL's (American Radio Relay League) Emergency Communications manual came out in 1940. But this was preceded slightly and less formally by a 1938 article in QST  titled 'When emergency Strikes." These ideas coalesced into formal policy and eventually a body of law. Hence the start of the ARPSC (Amateur Radio Public Service Corps). Their function is as follows:

"[To] maintain and continue to train and educate Amateur radio personnel interested in the advancement of communications and safety of citizenry in whatever systems may be available and in use within the Local, State and Federal Structure of ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) and RACES (Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Services."

But what are they. the 1969 ARRL book describes them as a voluntary organization of licensed amateur radio operators sponsored by the ARRL.  Back then RACES was specifically for "civil defense communications." Some early documents give a dotted line to the Red Cross with reference to a memorandum. But modern versions of that document omit the ARPSC. It appears that in the early 1980s the ARRL quietly subsumed the ARPSC into ARES services. But the nomenclature lived on. There was already 5 decades of inertia behind that acronym.

There are a number of ARPSC groups still left across the country.Most have updated their paperwork to describe a continued connection to ARES, GEMO (Governmental Emergency Management Organization)  EMHSD (Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division) and any other vaguely federal sounding acronyms. they are still all volunteer amateur radio operator organizations committed to providing supplemental emergency communications as they always have.

Children in Radio Postcards

In the 1930s there was a mercifully brief and inexplicably faddish number of children-with-radio post cards. All the children are cherubic and toe headed.  All of them are European that I've seen and most of them are German in origin. This is just a sampling of the many dozen I have seen. The phrase "Der ist drollig!" translates roughly to "That's great!"  I guess those are good headphones.

There is much written about the dangers and evils of advertising to children, but very little of adverting with children. It's perfectly common now, and any browse of old magazines will show you this is nothing new. they are used both symbolically to connote newness, purity, youth or innocence. But also more literally in the sales of good that acre actually intended for children. In these context I fail to see why they were so often paired with radio technology.  Thankfully these dark days have passed.