The AM Forum

One nice thing about an AM QSO is that we often get to know a little bit about the person, such as what other hobbies they may have. It’s even nicer when you share their other interests, which opens up new topics for the next contact. Thought it might be interesting to share some our other hobbies with each other. Mine, definitely digital photography (I also work with it) and stained glass. So aside from amateur radio, what other ways to you de-stress?

Hunting! Turkey, deer, squirrel, rabbit....Bow, shotgun, muzzleloader......

My brothers and I have a few 10 acres in central Ohio with a "cabin" literally in the woods. Just spending time around the campfire with brothers,brats n beer is a precious thing.

I've got dipoles for 75 and 40M up and do work PW AM when I'm down there.
The IC746 does OK!

Even spotted Bigfoot spying on us!

Aviation and animal rescue. As a General Aviation pilot, these two interests are tightly related (www.animalrescueflights.org). Adding amateur radio for aeronautical mobile work ties all three together!

I make some side $$ building a 40s style guitar amp. 3 tubes & 8 watts. Has a mode rotary switch with 6 different sounds. Jewelry designing & casting. RC anything, look up the "College Station UFO" on youtube, that was me! Since brushless motors & the LiPo battery chemistry has come along, the hobby has really taken off literally.

That and Grandkids and I would add reloading for many calibers.

Phil - AC0OB

Raising kids.

And work.   Work seems like both an employment and a hobby it's consuming so much time lately.

--Shane
KD6VXI

1950 GMC 3/4 Ton pickup
1961 Lyman 16.5 ft wood runabout

this post will self destruct shortly


klc

Professional Recording Engineer.  Note the 70's vintage Teac analog board.  It's about 90% restored.  Quad Panning even!

Fishing, mountain bike riding, Arduino, wood working and astronomy.

Antique tractors, cars, and other old junk.

restoring 74 dodge dart w/ slant 6 & a/c (have all the items to complete it but I may have to give it up).

ATV trail riding - something else going by the wayside due to my back.

animals - mainly cats. pets, and also feed and fix the semi-ferals. A plump cat loves to hunt and kill pest mice for sport but birds are a lot of work and mostly left alone.. but carefully watched as God intended. I like outdoor birds and am pleased to feed the stray cats for two reasons. Both kinds of animal are pleasing to the eye.

target shooting w/ handgun.

dabbling in amateur radiology, nuclear science, and laser technology. nothing dangerous or requiring a license but if I get the little x ray machine working it may need one.

reading and more reading. TV sucks the brain out. Books puts it back in.

  I have a love of history, the beginnings of radio is an interest, next month Electric Radio is supposed to publish at short story I wrote about the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center on Cape Cod, I've gone to a number of historic radio sites around New England including the New England Museum of Wireless and Steam. I've been to four Yankee Steam Ups at this Museum, they run some of their old steam engines one weekend a year around the first weekend in October.

http://chathammarconi.org/

 I've been to KSM at Point Reyes here in CA and also the Nike Base in Marin County that is a museum now

 I follow current events and national politics like some follow sports, I have two years towards a degree in history but decided the academic BS was not worth it.

I like to have my picture taken while being surrounded by beautiful women. This was a couple weekends ago at Tilted Kilt.

Jon

Nice Oilpulls, what models are they?

Antique tractors and trucks (semi trucks, not pickups) here. Go to several local tractor shows each year, just showed for the first time in one this fall with my 1950 Oliver 77, and then try to make it to Cortland, NY for the Brockway truck show they have there every year in August, Brockway trucks were built there up until the late 70s and a group of collectors which I am part of (even though I don't own my own truck yet) hold a show there every year and over 100 trucks show up. Helps having a wife that is into this stuff too, even the radio stuff she gets involved with (not like she's new to it though, her dad was a ham).

The first picture is my Oliver 77, the truck pictures are from a truck show in Harford, PA that is held every Labor Day weekend, all of those trucks are Brockways, the one in the second picture is owned by a friend of ours, every time we see him my wife keeps telling him that she wants that truck.

Hmmm.

I love "audio" as in hi-fi/stereo, and do probably more DIY in that area than ham radio.
Pic is of my basement "Listening Room", that's what I call my "Zen Minimalist" system.
It's a pair of Quad 57 ESL loudspeakers, powered by my own design BEAR Labs DC coupled SE MOSFET amps (35wrms).
This is just the set up at the /2 QTH. Elsewhere at the "main" QTH there are a variety of different systems.
You can visit my website, now antique, if you want to see more of what I used to do. http://www.bearlabs.com (http://www.bearlabs.com)

I also mess around with Guitar...

Besides this stuff, I also play the ancient Asian strategic board game called "Go" in Japanese, Baduk in Korean, and Wei Qi in Chinese.
It's a very abstract game, very very simple rules from which a fantastic variety flows on a board made up of a grid of 19 x 19 and it is played
with simply black and white stones. These days you can play with players from around the globe. The best players are professional, and
the best are from those three Asian countries. Online servers permit one to play 24hrs a day, and the best players, both professional and amateur are online playing, even right now!

Just recently, for the first time in history a computer system done by Google called AlphaGo was able to defeat Lee Sedol, arguably the top player in the world right now in a multi game match. Until just this year, computers were no match for top humans. Many thought that computers would never be able to reach this point.

Attached are some pix of Go, for your reference.

A few more pix...

A local Go group that meets up in Cairo NY over the summer...
And a professional match for a championship underway...

The one in the foreground is a 20-40 G and the one in the background is an 16-30 H. The G used to live at Rough and Tumble in Kinzers, PA until 2008.

Nice 77. My grandad farmed with Olivers, and he had a 70, 77, and 770. We still have the 70.

  Working on and driving the snot out of my 1978 Chevy Caprice two door Sport Coupe with full tilt race motor and serious suspension mods for handling, my Hotrod 98 Crown Vic cop car and other cars, gunsmithing and target shooting all manner of rifles and handguns. My greatest passion next to radio is playing Jazz on vintage Gibson archtop guitars. I play every day without fail which is something I can't say about operating radio. If I feel the need to find trouble I like chasing Redheaded women...

Playing euphonium in two local groups.

Keeping vintage Mercedes Diesels as daily drivers

Crushing the beejesus out of targets with foreign military rifles.

https://www.inmaricopa.com/maricopa-orchestra-in-concert-for-the-holidays-gallery/

73DG

During the cold winter months I enjoy late-night online multiplayer gaming with a bunch of other old guys. Currently, we are playing Tom Clancy's "The Division" where we team up and run missions to restore civilization in NYC following the apocalypse. That's me standing in front of the HQ waiting for the rest of the team to gear up. Yeah, we are a bunch of tough old men gone wild in the big bad city...

Rob W1AEX

 

I guess my other hobby might be called business market experimentation.

Who turned the lights back on? 

Other hobbies, we have two ancient Mercedes Diesels that I like working on, and want to see
how long we can keep driving them. The silver one is approaching 400k miles.
Recently rebuilt the rear suspension on one. Put new ball joints and rebuilt the AC system on the other.

Along the same vein, I have a small machine shop to fabricate anything metal.
(Bridgeport mill, Logan Lathe, Lincoln TIG machine, etc)

Before radio, I was a competitive shooter, (Service Rifle), then got old and fat and squinty, switched to match rifle.
(Gilles-Ross chambered for 6BR)

Fly fishing can be a serious hobby and I used to make my own rods from blanks and tie flies but I have scaled back and only get out 3 or 4 times a year. I can not stand running but like hiking and love to get out cross country skiing and do some snowshoeing. I do like playing with audio and have designed and built guitar and headphone amps. And making videos and editing is fun.

I'm astonished at what we all have in common. I build tube guitar amps, reload my own ammo to shoot in rifles I build. I rescue feral cats Currently have 4. Ferals are AWESOME if you have love and patience. My hardest case took two years to "win" over, and she is beautiful. Also restoring/building a 1970 Dodge Coronet Super Bee.

Railroad speeders, otherwise known as rail cars or putt-putts.

Standard and narrow gauge for some of the mountain runs.

I just retired last year after 25 years of flying FedEx Cessna Caravans. I miss the flying but not the motel life.

Nice 300TD wagons there Frank.  My son  Dave had one given to him with about 300K on it back around 2001 when he was at UCONN, same color, think that's called Desert Beige.  He put a ton of miles on it and then gave it to a young guy that I worked with, who in turn gave it to someone else, for all I know, maybe it has made it's way around to you!  Amazing cars, built like tanks!

Old hobbyist machinist's joke:  "So what to you do with your lathe,Bridgeport, and drill press?" "Make spare parts for my lathe , Bridgeport, and drill press."  You guys are good to have around, you can make anything for anything made out of metal.

Other hobbies here:

Fishing, especially salt water surfcasting, which course leads to collecting and restoring classic custom rods and reels, and plugs.

Carpentry and woodworking, when you have a creative wife you never lack for opportunities to exercise and improve your skills in building stuff and doing finish carpentry while re-trimming rooms, and building furniture - I hire out the heavy framing stuff but enjoy doing finish work.

All the maintaining hobbies, maintaining a lawn, maintaining and improving the landscaping, again when you have a wife that has a degree in landscape design the yard is  a continuum, vs. a static thing.

Maintaining old cars as daily drivers, have favored most Volvos in that respect.  when i retire in a few years, I want to get a classic project car, most likely a 67-68 Mustang to go to cruise nights with.  Had a 67 289 Mustang rag top as my first car, never should have sold it (for 150 dollars no less).  

We recently bought ourselves a reproduction 18th century tall case pendulum clock.  Learning about the history of these mechanical marvels of their time, and trying to get the new one dialed in to keep as perfect time as possible has been a lot of fun.  I currently have it holding to within a couple of seconds a week.  We also have  a much simpler Shaker style tall case clock with a spring wound movement, so the challenge is to get the both of them striking the hour at the same time.

Don't play any instruments except a Morse key, but appreciate and am always listening to and exploring great music, especially classic rock and blues guitarists like Clapton. JJ Cale, and Mark Knopfler.  After going to Hawaii two years ago, have really gotten into Hawaiian slack-key guitar, fantastically beautiful stuff that is generally not well known outside of the islands.  Sounds in many cases similar to Spanish and Mexican style guitar, because Mexican cowboys hired to work on cattle ranches in Hawaii brought their guitars and music with them.  And the Portuguese hired to work in the sugar cane fields there brought their little stringed instrument called the machete, which then became the ukulele.  Most of my smart phone bandwidth  is used on Pandora chasing this stuff down, or rather, having it brought to me.

Have many memories of old clocks,  and old radios.

My family did renovations and then finally bought large apartments (city blocks square)  in the San Fran mission district,  when it was cheap in the 70s and 80s.

My uncle and grandpa made it their personal challenge to get all their clocks 'bonging'  at the same time.

This,  coupled with grandmother's cuckoo clock collection......   Well,  you get the picture!

Still have one of my uncles mantel clocks.

Thanks for the clock memories!


--Shane
KD6VXI

Writing fiction. I've published 3 novels and 1 novella in the past 12 years.

www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Richard+Leverone

I bet you get a lot of juicy stuff from 75 meters, Rich.....

Oh my! Can you imagine putting to pen the stories, antics, and all the other wild and crazy ham stuff that we lived through over the last 25 plus years from the 75 meter activities and the many other on the road activities we all participated in and all in the spirit of amplitude modulation.

Hmm, that might  actually be a good topic for another discussion ... " what's the strangest radio related story you've ever been part of?"

I dare ya.... ;D

I'd always thought that some of the things I witnessed or was involved in were pretty far out, but over the years some of the stories I heard at hamfests, AM parties, Dayton, and elsewhere just left me speechless. Still don't think I've ever laughed as hard as I did at Dayton in 2007. Though there was this time at a little Italian place near Raymond, NH after one of the first NEAR-Fests.....

My opinion of single engine aircraft just improved. I've only been in a very small Cessna 2-seater and it was very cramped. It was also deafening and a freezing cold blast of air was coming in - crack around the door I think. Well at least every control was well within reach! But maybe that big monster there is also noisy.