My elmer, Irvin "Frank" Miller W5PBN, passed away this morning. He is the one that first interested me in radio. He used to let me come over and hang around during his MARS nets when he would use the teletype. He used to work for Branniff as a flight radio operator and before that was a radio operator on planes as old as the DC-2, which he would fly from Brownsville TX to the Panama Canal then to Greenland. He used to build his own equipment and preferred CW. He used AM while it was "practical" but since he was more interested in keeping to the state of the art, he went on to SSB and then to digital stuff. It was never about talking, it was always about communicating.
He built alot of equipment such as transmitters and antenna tuners. I recall him building an ST-6 teletype modem. There was alot of cursing.. and it did take weeks to do. That was the last thing he built. He saw no reason to build things that did not provide state of the art performance, and the continuing trend of miniaturization and complexity caused him to switch to store bought eqipment in the late 1970's. Being about 60 back then he did not care for working on anything of today, with parts too small to see.
He was a real stickler for all the rules as well and unlike many, he would always only use the minimum power necessary. I once asked him about his Dentron linear with four 572B's, as he had the money to buy any amplifier he wanted, and he said he didn't need any more power than that. By then the computerized modes that don't need so much power were in use and that was what he was into, always keeping abreast of the latest communication technology. I do not believe he ever went to Pactor though, I think he didn't like it because it was too automated and he preferred to pass traffic personally.
This was interesting because he would often curse the cheap quality of things like notebook PCs and the difficulty of getting anyone on the phone when there was a problem and how it was ridiculous to have to buy a keyboard when only one button was broken. So then he kept to CW and to digital. He was po'd at the local street urchins for cutting through his yard and put up a wrought iron fence. Unfortunately the little hooligans discovered that they could break the plastic phineals off the tops of the iron bars. I suggested he get pointy metal ones and weld them on, but he said the city would not allow metal spikes on the fence.
He had a fine specimen of a tomcat and he and his wife always preferred a cat, that cat is still there. They used to have a huge fat Siamese named Suki. It was not all fat though, because that one had a temper and would get her hooks into the offending hand pretty quick. His wife is legally blind, and my parents along with others from the old neighborhood take turns taking her to the store etc.
He was a meber of:
Air Transport Command (WWII)
MARS
Veteran Wireless Operators Association
the Old Old Timers Club
Quarter Century Wireless Operators Association
In this 2009 magazine article he wrote an interesting account of a flight to Greenland in a DC-2 on which he was the radio operator.
http://www.vwoa.org/Newsletters/Newsletter46.pdfIn this mag here is a story of when he was working on a large CW transmitter while it was hot to reduce downtime, told the operator not to key it, and the idiot started keying it while he was inside it
http://www.ootc.us/sgt0804c.pdfBut the way he told the story to me, this was a very large transmitter and there was 12KV on the bus and after he left the rig he went to the operator room and cussed the girl out so bad she ran from the operator room in tears, and later the chief asked him just what was going on, and after he told him what she'd done, he went back on the operator room and cussed her out himself. This was just at the start of when women were being employed in traditionally male jobs, and obviously well before the idea of human resources and OSHA had ever been thought of.
