Scratching my Radiosport Itch

There used to be an ad campaign for Major League Baseball I believe, that asked, "Baseball Fever, how bad do YOU have it?" Well, I got a real bad itch for “Radiosport” on Friday, February 28, and so after work I went to the local sporting goods store, bought a $9 closed-face fishing reel and a $4 sling shot. I used some wire ties to fasten the two together and tied a 5/8 inch nut to the end of the fishing line. I then used this contraption to launch the fishing line over a 35-foot tall light pole in the parking lot in front of my office. Once accomplished, I used the fishing line to hoist a stronger polypropylene string over the light pole. I repeated this process at another light pole about 140 feet away. I now had the foundation laid to raise a dipole. I went home knowing that I had tackled the hardest obstacle standing between the NAQP RTTY contest and me on Saturday, March 1.

On Saturday morning, I packed up my station into a storage tub, made sure that I had the software set up for the RTTY contest, and headed back to the office. Raising the antenna went without a hitch. I attached one end of the antenna to the line at the east end of the lot, and then the other end to the line over the pole at the west end. As I pulled on the west end line, the 102’ long dipole came taut about three feet from the west pole. Although the antenna was not centered between the two light poles, the center point of the antenna with the feed line attached was hanging perfectly over my car. It was almost as if it were ordained. I attached the power cable of the radio directly to the car battery, and the antenna feed line to the radio, and fired it up. I was hearing distant stations clearer than I have heard them in a long time!

Next up was the task of connecting the computer to the radio. This was to be a contest where all operators used radioteletype (abbreviated RTTY) as the means of communicating with each other. When you think back to all of the old archive footage of teletype machines of the past, and consider that they have all been replaced by software programs that run on simple personal computers, it is amazing. It is also fortunate. Having to lug a 200-pound radioteletype machine around would make this contest much less appealing. An audio cable from the radio’s speaker out jack connected to the computers audio in port, and a cable from the computers speaker out jack connected to the radio’s audio in port. The radio is set to switch to the transmit mode whenever an audio signal is heard over this cable. Easy peasy.

The way a teletype works in theory is pretty simple to explain, but the process of making it happen is another thing altogether. Whether over phone lines or over the airwaves, teletype signals are made up of two tones at specific frequencies with a fixed interval. Just as Morse code is a series of dots and dashes sent in combinations representative of alphabetic characters and symbols, teletype uses Baudot code, a combination of two tones sent alternately in specific sequences. Unlike Morse code, where a character can be represented by one, two, three, four, or five dots and/or dashes in various combinations, Baudot code uses a fixed-length five-digit binary string. All characters are made from a combination of five 1s and 0s starting with 00000 and going through 11111. One of the tones is representative of the zeros, the other the ones.

Those of you who are math geniuses will quickly calculate that the number of unique combinations of five 1s and 0s (32) is inadequate for expressing all of the characters in the English alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and basic punctuation symbols. To get around this limitation, there are two collections of characters, the letters set, and the numbers set. A special control character signals the receiver to switch from letters to numbers and then another control character to switch back (think of it as like the shift lock key on a keyboard - pressing it yields one set of characters while typing, releasing it yields another). Fortunately, all I need to know is how to load and run a piece of software.

So, with the antenna hoisted, the radio fired up, and the computer connected, I was good-to-go. At the appointed hour of noon Central time, I began scanning the airwaves for that distinctive sound of RTTY signals – a warble of the aforementioned two tones. Oblivious to the odd looks of passers-by, my sole focus was intent on listening for warbles and watching the computer screen, which showed me a graphical representation of the radio spectrum and assisted me in zeroing in on and synchronizing with the other station so that I could decode his data. Pausing only briefly at various times to crank the car engine for battery preservation, take potty breaks, and to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, I spent the next nine hours and fifty minutes sitting outside on a camp stool beside my car with my radio and computer sitting on TV trays, scanning up and down the radio frequencies looking for contacts. I was interrupted a few times by curious onlookers bold enough to enquire as what I might be doing, and who were satiated by the simple two words, “ham radio”. I invited them to stay and watch, but they all declined.

When it was all said and done, I had made 95 contacts with other RTTY enthusiasts around North America, and had a pleasant, warm experience. (I later realized that the warm feeling came from the sunburn that I had gotten on the left side of my face because I sat facing west the entire time while the sun past overhead in the southern hemisphere.) I certainly got my “fix” of radio that day, but unfortunately, it only served to heighten my “addiction”. It is hard to explain the joy of scanning the ethereal radio spectrum for strange signals from distant places. A legend in the Ham Radio hobby, Martin Jue, the owner of MFJ Enterprises, a maker of accessories for ham radio stations, probably described it the best in a recent interview with a newspaper reporter in his hometown of Starkville, Mississippi.

“People ask me if the cell phone and Internet are going to wipe out ham radio. Well it doesn’t. You can go to any Kroger store or Piggly Wiggly or some grocery store like that and buy all the fish you want to eat, but people still fish. It’s bigger than ever. One hundred years ago, people picked up the telephone and talked to anybody they wanted to. Ham radio is not just about talking to somebody. It’s about fishing. It’s a hobby. It’s a sport. So it will be around for a long time. People will do it because they want to do it. Like playing golf, you know, I can’t figure out why someone would want to try to hit that little ball into a hole, and a lot of people can’t figure out why someone would want to play with a radio. It’s a hobby. With ham radio, I can put a little box in my car and be driving down the road talking to somebody in Australia or somebody in England.” - http://www.cdispatch.com/news/article.asp?aid=395

Whether it is talking to disembodied voices hundreds or thousands of miles away, sending and decoding dots and dashes via Morse code, or exchanging information with other RTTY enthusiasts, there is always that excitement of never knowing exactly and predictably just what will happen. Like Mr. Jue said, it is a lot like fishing, and in my case, it even includes using fishing line and a reel. My itch got a major scratch last Saturday, but I’m sure it will only last a short time before I will have to do it again.