Internet versus Reality - pen forums versus pen shows

[calamus]

I used to be a ham radio enthusiast.

Howdy howdy! Kilo Six Delta Kilo Alpha here. Does your screen name derive from your preference in keys for CW?

Hello, OM!
No, the handle comes from my indulgence in the canoe and kayak sports. I never made the change over to a keyer like the Vibroplex; afraid it would ruin my fist. HI. I still have my old telegraph key. The rest of the equipment ended up on the curb, one trash day. Problem was, I wanted to homebrew and talk about it. Nearly all the other hams bought their equipment ready-made and could only talk about twiddling with their antennas. Boring factorial. The only radio I do now is with a crystal set. I listen to KMOX in St Louis on weekend nights and hear radio shows made in the '40s and '50s featuring Sam Spade or the Green Hornet.

It is a lot like the fountain pen hobby with me. I spent a few years restoring pens from the end of the heyday and then, suddenly, the challenge was gone. Homebrewing pens didn't look like fun, so I gave most of my pens away and began to use the survivors for writing instead of using the dip pens I had been journaling with. If you can tell a story, you can homebrew to your heart's content if you are a writer.

So I liked the canoe sports and finally bought a couple of good ones. We use them every summer. Do I go to boat shows and look at the newest 60-foot Hatteras cruiser? Hell no! Give me a canoe and a fly rod and a lake where the fish are big and stupid.

K

Used to love to go canoeing with my wife when we lived near a couple of very nice lakes in Trinity County in Northern California. Bald eagles flying overhead, bears and deer everywhere, mountain lions and raccoons, and of course rattlers and lots of raccoons and lizards.

Wanted to get on the air back when I was in high school, but my parents thought it was a "truck driver's hobby" (they were pretty snobby, and not very well informed about some things) and discouraged it, plus you needed to know CW back then, which just made it all harder, plus money was a big roadblock. Flash-forward 50-some years, and CW is no longer a requirement and I can now afford a used older rig (an early solid state ICOM) and I'm homebrewing my antenna, a 5-band "Cobweb." Hope to get on the air by summer. Only got my general license fairly recently. When I was in high school I had a friend who built his own image orthocon video camera from scratch, hand-wound his own coils and deflection yoke and everything. He's a ham in Upstate New York; I suspect you'd enjoy talking with him. Back then we both lived in Pittsburgh. I rigged up an external long wire antenna and made a little induction coil with the feed line on the back of my tube AM radio, where the coled internal antenna was, and pulled in KMOX and WWL and WLS and a bunch of stations. Even got a QSL card from CFOR, Orellia, Ontario. Also had a crystal set back then.

Do you still play Celtic music? I love the stuff. I fool around with a tin whistle once in a while, but I'm not very good at it. Also play blues harp, and that I'm not too bad on.