-- AM, THEN and Now -- and other thoughts...

[WBear2GCR]

Since there have been a number of various threads about AM and its presence and place in hAmateur Radio, I thought I'd post some of my thoughts on the subject...

Now that I am almost a real old "fart" and being that I got the bug when I was about 10-11 years old in a serious way, and that I listened on what was my dad's cheezy Hallicrafters 6 tube "shortwave radio" when I was even younger, I remember how the bands sounded when AM was the ONLY mode.

Wall to wall heterodyne. [/font][/color]

None too pleasant in reality.

It was a mess. Fondly recalled perhaps, but a mess.

The benefit to SSB remains. That is that a far greater number of conversations without interference will fit on the band. Truthfully and realistically the level of splatter and interference is at an all time low in my view. Due in part to a far greater number of well designed rigs on the air, and also (sadly) to a generally decreasing number of active hams.

In my view there is nothing that compares to listening to a nice AM QSO... it simply sounds GOOD... it's just a pleasureable thing. Like enjoying any other fine thing in life. It has its own benefits and rewards that can not be duplicated.

I also think there is something kewl about a good SSB QSO... while it doesn't sound the same, it has its own unique aspects. I remember the 70s on 3895. That was one heck of a crew in there. (later they slid up to 3898...) One of the absolute best 30 min sections of amateur radio happened there that I can recall, and I caught it on cassette tape... which may now be trashed    But that was high power break-in SSB, and some wild personalities...

I give credit to everyone who has kept the AM dream alive all this time... quite frankly it's a darn good thing that they did - and you know who you are.

Long live Amateur Radio. Long live AM.

I think it is high time, and past due that we start to refer to this thing of ours as ART[/b].

It is an art form[/b].
Calling it a "hobby' doesn't fully explain or describe it. Ham Radio needs to be elevated beyond a mere "hobby" in the minds of the public & policy makers, in my view.
Let's start calling this theArt of Amateur Radio, not the hobby of amateur radio! 

Use that phrase every chance you get... it will slowly permeate. percolate and migrate. Do it.


          _-_-bear  WB2GCR

[k4kyv]

I remember in the late 50's and early 60's 75m would rapidly fill up with QRM about 4 PM in winter.  Before that hour you could work plenty of stations running low power (up to 100 watts or so).  To be able to hold a frequency past that hour required a big signal.

Today, hardly a signal can be heard before 4 PM, and it doesn't get that crowded even during prime evening hours on static-free winter weekends.

SSB generally stayed up above 3900 while AM ran 3800-3900.  The heterodyne mess was there, but still many hams stayed put in the heterodyne jungle below 3900 rather than joining the quackity-quack above.

Back then, it wasn't easy to get on SSB.  You had to have the expertise and test equipment to homebrew a SSB exciter from scratch, using the phasing method of generation, or building a sideband filter for a filter-type exciter, using surplus xtals to make a multi-pole filter.  There were regularly published an abundance of SSB construction articles in QST, CQ and the new ham radio rag, 73 Magazine. Commercially-built equipment was high-quality but expensive.  About the only choices you had were Collins and Central Electronics.  Heathkit and EF Johnson made "SSB adaptors" to convert rigs like the DX-100 and Valiant to SSB, but these were generally tedious to adjust and didn't really work satisfactorily.  Many of the AM stations still on the air were SSB wannabes who couldn't afford commercial equipment and lacked the capability to build a  homebrew exciter.

The two modes pretty much co-existed peacefully until the advent of the low quality, cheap SSB transceivers like Galaxy, Swan, and Heathkit "Hotwater" rigs.  "Sideband for the masses" had arrived!  The AM vs SSB war heated up about 1963 as SSB began to move down below 3900, and the ham radio "establishment" began a hard sell campaign to convince every ham that it was his patriotic duty to toss out the old solidly-built homebrew or commercial AM/CW rig and replace it with one of the new transceivers.  All the major ham rags were filled with pro-SSB propaganda, designed to make anyone who remained on AM feel inferior and inadequate.  A huge potential market for a new product had been created, so there were commercial interests along with ARRL and the FCC that wanted to force everyone to change over. There was a lot of peer pressure, from fellow amateurs and local radio clubs to "go SSB."  With the advent of "affordable" transceivers,  wannabe SSB'ers finally got their wish, while many other AM'ers were reluctant, but eventually caved into the pressure and went to SSB.

Out of the heated AM/SSB wars, mostly on 75 and 20m, deliberate QRM and jamming became commonplace, a legacy that remains with us to this day.

One of the reasons I never "went SSB" and to this day have never owned a SSB rig, was that I strongly resented the pressure that was being put on everyone to abandon AM, and decided that I was going to stay with AM come hell or high water.

The milestone marking the end of the old AM era was the advent of incentive licensing in 1969.  As the new restrictions took effect, almost overnight nearly all the remaining AM activity disappeared, along with most of the homebrew rigs that had been heard on the air for years.

But it was only 3-4 years after that, that the "comeback" of AM began to take place, but that's a whole other story.

[W2VW]

Nice read Don. How about high level DSB. I never hear about that anymore. One guy once told me that there were lots of high level DSB kits sold to fit to the DX-100 level rigs.
Always good fun to put ssb only rigs on AM also....

[K1JJ]

Yep, Don, it WASN'T easy to get on ssb back in the early sixties. You remember it well.

My first ssb rig in '65 as a 13 year old JN was an Apache with an SB-10 ssb adapter.  [I think Joe/IBX has one] The Apache itself wasn't all that stable, never mind getting on ssb with an SB-10.

My first contact was breaking into an established group of W4 ssb alligators on 3999. They worked me over so bad, it was laughable.   I remember they saying I had no sideband suppression, had too much carrier and was never on frequency. One told the other not to be so hard on the poor kid. I sold off the SB-10 and stayed on AM for a full year until I bought a used TR-3 in 1966 with  paper route money. Now THAT was luxery in those days....     A new whirl.

T

[WA3VJB]

I was not around when AM was the mainstream mode of phone.
As things eventually sorted themselves out, I am convinced AM as a specialty has SSB to thank for making room for those of us who wish to pursue the mode as a nostalgic radio activity.

[W9GT]

I wonder if the AM community hurts itself by viewing AM as a “nostalgic radio activity”.    I’ve heard AM referred to as “Heritage Mode”,  “Legacy Mode” etc, and both of these definitions conjure up the image of old timers holding onto their past while wanting AM to continue to exist because of sentimentality.  Within the AM community I’m sure this is not the image portrayed, but it is the one brought to mind outside of the AM community;  and it’s the “outsiders” that we’d like to discover AM.

I prefer to think of AM as “Another Mode”; no better or no worse than any other mode, which  stands on it’s own merits that does not include an appeal to one’s sentimental side.

Whether running old tube gear or new Class E radios, AM requires much more technical knowledge that your run of the mill SSB setup, whether knowing the theory and having the skills to repair an old tube radio, or having the skills to homebrew a nice Class E job.   Your average SSB op does not have any of these;  I suspect the closest group we’d find would be the QRP folks.

To be sure, there is an element of nostalgia when running AM which all of us enjoy,  but this shouldn’t be a justification for AM’s existence.   We can certainly stand on our own technical merits.

Hmmmmm..............I don't really understand why it is necessary to be on the defensive at all about enjoying nostalgic vintage AM radio.  If some people view that as being "behind the times", only old-timers, or stuck in the past.....let them!!!!!  There is certainly room for us all and I refuse to apologize for enjoying a truly unique aspect of the hobby.  If some us didn't enjoy it and strive to preserve some aspects of our heitage, it would be lost forever.

73,  W9GT  "licensed since 1959 and Proud of it"

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Good point Mark. We need not be defensive about the nostalgic/legacy aspect of the mode, but AM does offer MUCH more and this should be touted.

[W9GT]

[
Being on the defensive has nothing to do with it.  We're all proud of our vintage stations.   It's the preception of what AM is and how we fit into the overall amateur community that I'm addressing.   I think AM brings a lot more value to amateur radio than we get credit for.

Unfortunately, as they say, preception is everything.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.  I really agree with what you are saying about AM and the fact that it is a viable mode even in this day and age.  What I am trying to get across to you and/or others that might consider nostalgic pursuits as things that detract from our position as AM enthusiasts is.... that need not be the case!  Certainly it is not a good thing to consider nostalgia as a sole reason for the existence of AM.  Neither should it be ruled out as a very positive aspect.  It is something that intrigues young and old and is appreciated by old-timers because they may have been a part of it.  It also, however, is not just something that should be associated with negativity just because it does not include cutting edge techniques.  Think of the classic car analogy.  16 year olds can appreciate the beauty of a '57 Chevy just as those old geezers that remember driving them when they were new. 
I am also intrigued by how great some of those class E rigs sound.  I think we can all enjoy the mode without giving too much credence to detractors who concentrate on name calling because of false or uninformed perceptions.

73,  Jack, W9GT

[Bacon, WA3WDR]

A lot of things changed around 1969.  The Baby Boomers went to college, and then they moved into apartments and tried to make a living.  Some went to war, and came home to a cold shoulder.  Then they got married and had kids.  There was less and less time for things like ham radio every year that went by.  Many of the older hams were active in nets and whatnot, but it took a lot of energy to raise antennas and keep tham up, while home electronics went solid-state and picked up every signal for miles.  Too many hams used the ubiquitous end-fed wire with poor audio, and could not cut it with AM in the evening QRM.  You couldn't find AM gear for sale any more, it was all SSB stuff that could not run AM worth mentioning.  And their receivers had such horrible audio that the only thing you could even hear was SSB and heterodynes.  AM equipment got dirt cheap, because people thought it was worthless.

Population increased, communities got more crowded, and home lots got smaller.   The oil embargo was a shock.  There were more things to do, movies on Beta and then VHS, society was mobile, and not so much time for radio any more.

Kids weren't interested in radio any more.  It was probably the advent of instant world-wide satellite links, especially from the Gulf War where the link quality was so good that you lost that exciting sense of news from a distance.  Certainly short wave wasn't the only way to communicate any more.  Now it was corporate and military satellites, which were something to know about, but out of any practical reach, except to get TV shows and now radio programs.

The general disinterest in short wave resulted in today's situation of very little English broadcasting, and it was accompanied with disinterest in ham radio as well.  People confused ham radio with CB, and what was the difference anyway?  Most people just saw a bunch of scuzzy nerds messing up the TV.

And generally not rich nerds, either.  The radio jobs started drying up.  TV and radio repair pretty much became history, the commercial radio licenses dropped enormously in importance and value, and electronic design started moving out of the country.  Meanwhile, computers were really interesting, and people started making money with them.  President Reagan actually cited Jobs and Wozniak of Apple, although he was a bit behind those rapidly changing times, because Wozniak had already left Apple by then.  Computer nerds like Bill Gates were cool when they amassed 55 billion dollars.

Packet radio was amateur radio's marriage to computer technology, but then came the internet.  Now we find out about band openings by monitoring a website.  For the most part, the web has replaced amateur radio.  You can communicate, you can have a cool site, no TVI, the only thing is wireless mobile is primitive - but who cares?  You can have a camera on a portable radio linked phone... you won't do that on short wave.

Amateur radio, as we have known it, has become a niche specialty.  Where I see opportunity for amateur radio is in the application of digital technology to signal generation and detection.  DRM and other commercial technologies are doing this (think Rich Nerds), but DSP can be applied to analog DSB AM as well.  High power transmitters don't have to be big heavy boatanchors full of mysterious, hard to find components any more, although plenty of mystery remains.

[Vortex Joe - N3IBX]

My first ssb rig in '65 as a 13 year old JN was an Apache with an SB-10 ssb adapter.  [I think Joe/IBX has one]

Tom - You're absolutely Cro-rect.I still have the SB-10 I used with my Apache. The SB-10 is a squirrely little thing and a lot of people used them with all kinds of 100W class AM rigs. Ditto on the B&W 51SB-B slopbucket converter. I used to run one with a B&W 5100B/HQ-170 combo and was using it when my old 5100B launched it's mod tranny. I was on 10M SSB at the time - go figger?

BTW, B&W made an outboard product detector with it's own built in speaker. (model # escapes me) as did Hammarlund. I have the B&W variant and have used the Hammarlund (RC-10???) that a friend of mine had connected to his R-390. The Hammarlund had better AVC action, and was a pleasure to use. The B&W is just so-so.

I was in a nice QSO last night on 1890KC with Bob, W2Zed-M, Teena, W1IA, Dave, K2DK, and Chuck, K1KW; reminiscing about how difficult it was to operate an old ssb phasing rig like most slopbucket transmitters were years ago. One had to constantly readjust the carrier balance whenever you changed frequency, etc; and the drift was terrible. Your receiver would go one way and your transmitter another. Besides having to keep your gear "in synch", one had to make sure you were zero beat with the other stations in the QSO.  When I think back about the various slopbucket stations I had, the squirrely ones were the most challenging and fun to operate. Plug-n-Play had'nt been invented yet!

Hope to mod-u-sooner-than-later,
                                             Joe Cro N3IBX

[WA3VJB]

Mark, add me to Steve's comment --
Good point Mark. We need not be defensive about the nostalgic/legacy aspect of the mode, but AM does offer MUCH more and this should be touted.

Ever since Steve/QIX began touting the MOSFET-based solid state AM transmitters people can build, I've been aware of some sensitivity against putting down the "old" ways of doing things.

It was easy to be swept up in the novelty of a "new" way of generating a good sounding AM signal, and to unwittingly give off the impression that the use of tubes, plate transformers, driver stage iron was somehow less worthy. This pissed some people off.

Same with Mark's comment -- against Jack's response. Both you guys have an appreciation of the range of ways to accomplish AM, and each has your own ways of carrying that out.  It's unfortunate, and unintentional, that when pushing one type of AM it ruffles feathers of others who feel their way of AM has been given short shrift in the process.

The Class E thing has evolved to a point those who are involved with it now promote the methods and results on their own merits, not in comparison with other ways of accomplishing a good-sounding AM station. THAT has smoothed things nicely, to my observation anyway, and has made additional people receptive to those techniques that they otherwise might have rejected because of HOW they came across.

[K1JJ]

I was in a nice QSO last night on 1890KC with Bob, W2Zed-M, Teena, W1IA, Dave, K2DK, and Chuck, K1KW; reminiscing about how difficult it was to operate an old ssb phasing rig like most slopbucket transmitters were years ago. One had to constantly readjust the carrier balance whenever you changed frequency, etc; and the drift was terrible.                                              Joe Cro N3IBX

HA!   Yep.  I was listening into that 160M QSO last night while working on the new rigs drilling and blasting.  I thought that was one of the more interesting QSOs I've heard in a long time.  The talk of how particular older rigs functioned, the disappointments of seeing the ads and actually running the gear was funny.  The Eico 753, the SBE33/34.  Hilarious comments about the Central Electronics 10A/20A. Too much.

The comment of the night went something like, " Yeah, when running that old separate tube TX/RX ssb stuff, we spent MORE qso time adjustulating -  and talking about adjusting -   carrier suppression, zero beating after every transmission, who has the best sideband suppression, who was off frequency...THAN talking about anything else!"

      So true.

T

[w1guh]

My whole ham radio history has been defined by rifts and cliques.  My first ham club was OCARS (Oakland Count Amateur Radio Society) in Pontiac, MI, and my first meeting was in April, 1960 just after getting my novice ticket.  The very next election saw a new president installed and he brought his own ideas into the club while the old timers bitched.  For example, 1961 was Pontiac's centennial and the "new regime" set up an operating event where, if you worked N (forget the number) stations in Pontiac you could get a piece of wallpaper for the shack.

At the time my barber was a great old-timer ham, the late W8BQG (Bald Queer Guy(those phonetics are indicative of his great sense of humor)) (Eldico 100F, 75A4, Thunderbolt) and I asked him what he thought of the idea.  His response was "Chicken sh!t.  Just a way for Tommy (last name witheld) to make money printing certificates."  Then he said something about Tommy's clique.  I was taken aback being a callow youth, but I got the picture.  The pity was that that was when a lot of great old-timers stopped being active.

But that rift was minor compared with what was to come.  The club by-laws said that to be a board member you had to have a general class or above license.  A bunch of techs got together to try to change that to allow some (a minority) technician board members.  Their effort was defeated and they left to form the Greater Pontiac VHF society, again siphoning off some good guys.  That was very similar to the insensitive licensing that was coming down the pike.

So ham radio has, for me, always been an activity where there were groups squabbling and bitching about and to each other.  I wonder why that is?  You guys into cars...does this happen among classic and muscle car enthusiasts?  Or is there something about radio that encourages such stuff?


Back to 'BQG and more of his humor.  I went to get a haircut just after my son was born and when I told him, he looked at me with a mock stern expression and said I should've called him up that night 9 months before and asked him if I should "let 'er rip?"  I don't think they make 'em like him anymore!

[Paul, K2ORC]

So ham radio has, for me, always been an activity where there were groups squabbling and bitching about and to each other.  I wonder why that is?  You guys into cars...does this happen among classic and muscle car enthusiasts?  Or is there something about radio that encourages such stuff?

I was active for many years in dog shows.  Believe me, Paul, the pissing and moaning that goes on with the hammies doesn't begin to hold a candle to the crap that happens in the world of dog show people.   Not even close.   I've come to realize that no matter what it is, as soon as you get a group of people together for the purpose of engaging in a common interest, trouble starts.  It's human nature.