THE RADIO HAM
The two huts pictured above were erected next to the school playing field some 20 years ago. Due to some oversight, they were put up without planning permission having been sought & their presence has been something of an embarrassment each time a planning officer has put in an appearance at the school. Blind eyes were turned year after year, but now that their decrepitude is actually compromising health & safety, it has been decided to remove them.
This presents me with something of a problem. For 12 years a small office space in the middle of the left-hand one has housed my sanctum sanctorum, my bolt-hole – the headquarters of the St Christopher Amateur Radio Club. In it I have my transceiver (two-way) radio, its power supply unit, the rotator controls that cause the huge three-element antenna on its mast to turn 360 degrees & a vast collection of radio ephemera. Now I have to remove the whole lot by August 14th or have it go under the bulldozer that will be dissembling the buildings. This task is relatively straightforward. More challenging is the removal of the telescopic mast & the antenna on top of it because its base is cemented into the ground. Some careful planning will be required over the next week or so if my peculiar hobby is to be preserved.
In February 2003 I posted an article about my terminally uncool preoccupation with ham radio. There follows a slightly adapted version of it followed by a poem, which happens to be one of my favourites.
Well, I guess I’ve been around Salon long enough to let slip the odd true confession. You guys out there seem like a broad-minded & sanguine crew, able to deal with a few quirks & tics. I simply can’t keep my secret vice
I am a radio ham. Yes, that’s right – one of those socially-challenged individuals in the pebble-lens specs, with their woolly hats & terminal dandruff who spend long hours hunched over a desk mic bawling gibberish across the ether to similarly inclined saddoes in Japan, Sierra Leone, Malaysia, the Cayman Islands & beyond. Above a shed in the school grounds there revolves an industrial strength aerial capable of sending & receiving hundreds of watts-worth of largely puerile conversation whilst wiping out the neighbours’ TVs over an area of several acres. Crouched at a desk beneath it I have spent those long hours babbling about ‘QRM’, ‘your 5 & 9 signal’, ‘my QTH, Letchworth, I spell lima,echo, tango, hotel…’
As tools of the trade I have an old pre-digital age transceiver built when the abacus was high tech, a pre-Soviet collapse Times World Atlas so large scale it’s got your house on it, & my very own callsign – G0 EUV. With aid of these accoutrements I can select a radio frequency &, when I have located another similarly inclined (& licensed) hobbyist, I can engage him or her in lively intercourse about the strength of their radio signal, the make & model of our radio equipment & the weather outside. Then, with all conversational gambits exhausted, we would bid each other farewell & repeat the procedure all over again with someone else. Such would be the workaday experience during two or three hours of scanning the frequencies. But every once in a while the unexpected (but constantly hoped for) would occur: a call from a fellow operator either in unusual circumstances or in a highly unusual location. The pursuit of ‘rare DX’ is what keeps the radio ham going, much in the same way as the committed angler is forever in search of the mighty trout rumoured to inhabit the pool…
I don’t do radio much nowadays. The old dark passions that would have me winding the aerial up its 40’ mast in a force 9 gale so that I could catch the Australians between 5.00 & 7.00 AM have stilled. No more chasing the fluctuating ionospheric conditions to bag a 5-second contact with that lone operator on some lump of rock in the Indian Ocean. No more regular ‘skeds’ with the guy in San Antonio who sounds just like Jack Nicholson or the Russian doctor in a desolate oil pipeline outpost in Northern Siberia who wanted to learn English. It was always the romance of contact with beleaguered or self-exiled individuals in exotic locations, the two of us fighting against fading signals or interference from all the other stations out there in the world wanting to touch base with the rare DX station. Now it’s laziness, the lure of the touch-sensitive keyboard, boredom with the standard in-out link-up – signal strength/ weather/ cheerio - but principally babies that have had me on radio silence for over a year now.
But sometimes I do miss the peculiar solitary excitement of the thin, oscillating, alien voice that picks up your CQ (contact sought) call. It’s a UN observer watching a Palestinian/Israeli firefight from the Golan Heights, a panicky weekend sailor whose yacht is shipping water fast off Mauritius, an Australian fence-mender 50 k. from the nearest shop & bar. Those few minutes of shared alternative culture across thousands of miles of earth & sky are worth all the hours of static crackle & atmospheric hiss.
Maybe tomorrow morning I’ll fire up the rig, wind up the antenna & check out those early Aussies for one last time from my doomed enclave…
There aren’t very many poems about people talking into two-way radios. In fact, anyone who can locate another one has my daughter’s hand in marriage & half of my kingdom as reward. So for the time being this is it. Doctor Johnson, when considering the subject of women preachers, said the following: ‘Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all’. So whether this poem is a work of quality is hardly the issue. That anyone should want to produce a piece about people talking into a radio microphone should be enough to turn our heads…
WAVELENGTHS
#1. Bonsai 1005 1 GHz Pentium III Processor
I paddle the keys and pixels break surface
like bubbles. The blue window shivers into a spray
of letters, uniform, a lingua franca. The world and his wife
are talking hard, a promiscuity of speech that melts
into the pool, unvoiced. This is language out of light,
words squeezed and shredded out of shape and form,
electronic runes and glyphs squirted into bits
and bytes down filaments. These digits, these encryptions,
they’re mouthless, lost in space. No tongues or lips
articulate the cries and whispers of the slave electrons
working the binary roads. Behind the brilliant lexicon,
just the insect voices and the hum of spinning disks.
#
#2. Icom 756 Pro Mk II HF transceiver
Still dark outside. 0500 zulu and a cold wind
rocks the antenna tower. I’m beaming west
on 20 meters, listening through the chuckle
of morse, the whooping heterodyne. I’m looking
for Australia on the long path, vaulting scraps
of landscape and the great bare, muscled back
of ocean; skidding in across the eastern shores,
magnet-voiced and listening hard. A VK3,
a loner by two hundred miles of fence-line;
a little wooden house, a splinter in the prairie skin.
Just him, his wife and daughters, fixing the broken wire
that separates the cowboys and the kangaroos
from dreamtime. Now the aerial image shimmers,
breaks. I lose his voice as the skywave shifts;
lose his tale of full moons, crowding stars
and voices in the wind. I drift with the tidal ebb
and flow of distant storms, spikes of wireless sound
and silence. But I’ve spoken; he has spoken.
Breath has shaped and joined our words.
We have thrown a line across the earth
and tugged it once or twice.
11:49:52 PM 
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