stephbg | Growing up geek

Although I didn't really appreciate it at the time, as youth is indeed wasted on the young, I had a fairly seriously geeky upbringing. My Dad is an amateur radio enthusiast, aka a Ham. So, along with the relatively well documented family cats the family album included more than a shot or two of radio gear.

Dad's a bit security conscious and has requested that I not reveal his call sign online, nor his rather lovely QSL card. Nor do I have comprehensive pictures of his shack, the room in which his radio gear resides, but the wiki entry has some modest examples. However, I can reveal one faded picture from circa 1979 featuring Dad's rack in his shack, full of home-made gear:

Another important feature was the large radio transmitter/receiver in the back yard. It's not really amenable to photography, but I found these two shots circa 1980 showing the top of the tower (as seen from the front of the house) and the base of the tower (as seen from the back of the house):

Both views are considerably different today; there is slightly more house than there used to be, the trees have grown a fair bit, and the folks no longer have an incinerator in the back yard. That's the grey and orange thing to the right in the backyard photo. The top of the tower looks a bit thin too. It's called a christmas tree for fairly obvious reasons if you tilt your head. It sprouted new devices every now and then, like this home-made satellite dish:

Of course installing new bits on the aerial farm usually required that the tower be lowered, so the tower and the backyard were carefully designed to allow the whole thing to telescope and cantilever down. Anchor points made from chunky concrete pilings were installed at critical points, and it was a great privilege to help Dad with the guy wires when he had to bring the tower down. It occasionally came all or part way down for extreme weather or certain types of maintenance. We had a lot of trouble with magpies eating insulators and sundry bits, so Dad devised clever suits of armour from lunchboxes. A perhaps unique use of Tupperware to this day.

One of the transmitters up there was for television signals, where Dad led the way in amateur television broadcasting experiments. The shack became a television studio complete with salvaged equipment from local TV stations, a very early domestic video camera (which I think lacked an actual recording capacity) and some extra lights. That must have been the mid 80's because we got our first home computer in 1984 I think, which he used to generate test patterns for TV broadcast. Rather appropriately it was a BBC Microcomputer.

I enjoyed brief fame of a sort as the provider of program content which apparently distracted a toddler on the other side of suburbia for whole minutes at a time. If memory serves, I used a witch puppet I'd made in drama class in 1985. Jessica the cat also provided content, although with rather less enthusiasm, but we had to stick *something* in front of the camera and her tabby stripes made for a useful test pattern. She was also a great purrer; once we put her up to the microphone and the ham on the receiving end was heard to exclaim "What the hell is that!?"

Neither Jessica nor I thought to study Morse Code, but I liked to play with the hand key (beep beep beeeeeep beeeeep beep beep etc) when the transmitter was most definitely offline. There were a couple of different ones over the years, all wonderful to handle. Learning the radio alphabet was much easier, and I seemed to just naturally absorb most it over the years. I might have needed a bit of extra practice with Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, and Zulu, but it's a surprisingly handy skill to this day. We also named our goldfish using the radio alphabet. Never did make it quite to the end, but Kilo was my favourite fish name. I think Foxtrot may have been one of the ones to leap out of the bowl.

I was also allowed to play with the ocsilloscope, particularly trying to tease out different patterns using just my sweaty little thumbs on the contacts. I remember being fascinated by the complexity of analogue vocal sounds versus the crispness of the artifically-generated square waveforms of pure test tones. Mmmmm. Shiny thing.

It as always hot in the shack; the gear had specialised ventilation long before the days of airconditioning, and the lights just made it worse. The humans had to sweat it out. But, Summer was the best time of year for the kind of experiments that Dad liked to do, and I learned from an early age to read weather maps and sunsets for their broadcast qualities. My best memories of listening in to the world are all accompanied by sweaty heat and the smell of ozone. I can't recall who coined the phrase but it was said that I was raised on the sound of static and the smell of flux. I had a good nose too, and could track down the source of "dirty brown smells" coming from overheating insulation in a small room quite thoroughly crammed with electronics both commercial and home-made.

So, long before the Internet arrived I listened oh so very quietly--because I didn't have a licence and mustn't broadcast my voice--to Radio Moscow (the production in the boot factory really did increase by 400% every year), the BBC World Service, and the chat roulette of random hams around the world. Dad has recordings somewhere of Vietnam war era US Army helicopter radio traffic, and a bit of Space Shuttle chatter. He has hundreds of QSL cards from all around the globe confirming voice contacts. He assisted someone in Texas (possibly?) to bounce a signal off the Moon once, and set many many records. And this was just his *hobby*; he did some pretty interesting geeky things in his professional career too. I feel I should know more, but much of it is too esoteric for me.

From Dad I also learned that space was not silent; I can just imagine myself causing trouble in primary school by announcing that "Silent Night (Holy Night)" was in fact impossible. He teased more theramin-like space sounds out of the various bits of gear, and played a mean vacuum-cleaner-pipe didgeridoo.

So many memories, but I must wrap this up now.

In hindsight it's almost astonishing that I didn't become some kind of engineer, but I didn't get the right formal education at the right time to point me in that direction. I don't even know how to solder properly, although I took plenty of things apart. I just had no particular interest in putting them back together again. I have instead as a technical writer become a dilettante of both the arts and sciences, which isn't so surprising now I think on it. A radio ham cares about the voices in the dark, not just the equipment used to find them. I am proud to be the spawn of an engineer.