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THREE CW STORIES FROM MY PAST |
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CW IN AN EMERGENCY With the current code/no-code debates, one often hears how effective CW is in an emergency. I had the occasion to use CW in an emergency in ham radio (and several times in
government radio but that's not a story for here) though I probably could have got by with phone operation if I had had a phone rig. I didn't. I had an Eico 720 CW rig. My wife and I were
living in a beach cabin in Delaware, along the Delaware Bay. It was very isolated, a long, winding road leading out to the beach. It was fall, and all the cabins were empty except ours. We
were alone. A major storm, an off-season hurricane, was along the Atlantic coast, and the surf on the Bay was reaching substantial heights. As the evening wore on, waves began crashing over the
dike, 50 feet from us, and rolling in toward our cabin. It was raining extremely hard, and the ground around the cabin, which was on five foot high stilts, was about an inch deep in water.
The wind was ferocious, probably 60-70 mph. We had no telephone, but fortunately our electricity remained on. I decided, as the spray was soaking our elevated front porch, that we were probably in
danger. It was time to leave. We rounded up some clothes and the cat. We decided we could drive to my parents' house in Dover, and wait out the storm there. I went out to start the
car. It would not start. Apparently the rain had drowned out the ignition system. We were stranded. By now the front, screened porch, that faced the water, was soaked, and the water was
seeping into the house. I had a vertical antenna, mounted on the ground, between the cabin and the beach, but I knew it would be badly affected by the water that was coming over the dike. Still,
it was our only hope to make contact to the world. I fired up the Eico on 40 meters, using a phone band crystal. A fellow just north of Dover, named Ed Brown (I think he call was K3OCE but I
am not sure that is correct) responded to my call, which was not urgent. I was calling "CQ Dover DEL" on CW. Ed heard me and answered on phone, then switched to CW. I told him our
predicament and gave him my parents' phone number. He called them, then came back on the air and said they were coming out to get us, and to be ready. The rescue went reasonably well, considering
the roads were now a good two inches deep in water, making it very difficult to even find the edges of the road across the marshland. Fortunately there were reflective markers often, and my father just
"aimed" his car from one set of markers to the next. A mis-step and we would slip into a deep ditch, on either side of the road, used for marsh draining. It would mean death, for the ditches
would swallow the car in that flooding. But we made it. The next day we went back to the cabin and got the car dried off. There was no damage; the cabin had withstood the onslaught well,
and there were no signs water had gone far under the front door and into the living room. Probably we had weathered the worst of the storm. But we had not known that, and do not know that to this
day. Another foot higher on the tides and we would have been in far more serious trouble. If I had owned a phone rig I probably could have got through just as easily. But I didn't, and CW got
us out of there! |
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JOHN F. KENNEDY In that same cabin, in November 1963, I was on the air, again on 40 meters CW. My wife was watching TV but the picture was snowy, as we were more than 75 miles from Philadelphia,
PA, the nearest TV station. She had gone to the kitchen and though the TV was on, she wasn't watching it any longer, and the volume was down. I could not see the TV from my ham operating position.
Someone I was talking to asked me if I had heard the news. I said "what news?" He said "President Kennedy has been shot. I think he's dead." I thought he was
joking. He repeated it, and told me he was going off the air to watch more of the news. I signed, too, and turned to get the TV going. He was right. The news was live, in black and
white, and yes, JFK was shot. I learned about it from 40 meter CW. |
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NOVEMBER, 1964 I no longer lived in the beach cabin, but lived in a mobile home in a trailer park, not the best place to have an antenna. I had put that old vertical on the roof of the home,
though, and it seemed to work very well. It was base loaded, with a tapped coil, so it was difficult to change bands. I still had the Eico 720 and a Hallicrafters S-85 receiver. I worked mostly
40 meters, so didn't bother to get on the roof and change taps. It was possibly 7 or 8 PM that Monday night. I had worked until 4 PM, then come home, had dinner, and had gone down to see my
brother-in-law, also a ham, and who lived in the same trailer park. We had had a beer or two, then I had come back home. Now I was on the air. I worked a couple of people, then was thinking of
going in and watching TV, when someone else called me. I responded, and we had a rather short contact. We exchanged names and QTH, and signal reports. I mentioned that I was getting ready
for bed soon and would be closing down. He responded that he had to get ready for bed, too, as he had a very long day the next day, Tuesday. He had to be up early, and would get no rest until
very late that night. I wished him well, and then I wished him luck in his endeavor on that fateful Tuesday. "He" was Barry Goldwater, K7UGA, (though he was using his second station call that
night, from Washington, DC) and the next day was Election Day, 1964. Barry was the Repubican candiate for President of the United States, and I was probably his last ham radio contact of the night before
Election Day! As history shows, he was not elected, losing to Lyndon Johnson. His l"long day tomorrow" turned out to be a sad one. |
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