In rehabilitation, his family set up for him a local access point to the amateur radio D-STAR digital voice communication network, which he now can access with a small handheld transceiver. Now that his speech is returning, he is supposed to practice as much as possible – and his ham radio transceiver allows him to do just that. A few days ago, he told how difficult and tiring it was, but he kept on going. His speech gets better everyday, and due to the connected network of digital radio repeaters, his radio friends all over Germany share in his delight.

There has been a lot of (sometimes polemic) discussion whether the Digital Voice (or D-STAR) network was amateur radio at all. Only one manufacturer supplies the radios (even though others could, it is not that ICOM has a patent or anything), the vocoder (AMBE) is proprietary, and the repeaters and access points are linked via Internet. And for a while, you had to buy an ICOM repeater,but this has changed.

To me, this radio ham’s story shows that Digital Voice is ham radio at its best. Ham radio has always also been about providing a window to the world for handicapped people, a medium to interact socially, make friends, forget their specific challenge for a while – long before Facebook, Google+ and the like came along. 

We are at present setting up a Digital Voice repeater for Ulm, at the university. It is a homebrew (non-ICOM) solution, using surplus Motorola GM1200 trunked network transceivers, a soundcard, a surplus HP laptop. Putting it together, installing and fine-tuning the software has been a lot of fun. Due to its location, it will provide easy access from three large hospitals, one of which provides specialized care to stroke victims. If, indeed, it could provide a window on the world for one radio amateur in one of these hospitals, all our efforts would have paid off nicely.

Elecraft K3 in my backyard

My last purchase of a serious shortwave transceiver was more than 15 years ago, the venerable IC-706. Time to add another species to my radio zoo – the Elecraft K3, which I chose based on rave reviews of its receiver performance. Low on time as I am right now, I opted to buy it fully assembled, from the good people at QRPproject in Berlin. Its concept as a self-assembly kit, however, makes it easy to upgrade and modify later on, another reason for choosing this particular rig.

The K3 is a dedicated shortwave machine – no VHF/UHF bands (unless you buy the optional transverters), no general coverage receiver – unless you buy the optional board which adds the necessary bandpass filters for quasi-general coverage of the shortwave range. Besides, the low intermediate frequency (IF) concept of the K3 does not allow for true general coverage, as you have to skip the IF region at approximately 8 MHz anyway. And the K3 is a no-frills radio – where other manufacturers offer PC class computing power and full color large LCD panels, the K3 sports a monochrome. small LCD panel, and is managed by a PIC microcontroller.

The K3 does, what it does, exceedingly well. The low IF allows a bank of high Q roofing filters which provide for excellent performance in the presence of close-in interferers. 32-bit digital signal processing (DSP) allows effective noise reduction and continuously variable receiver bandwidth which really shines for Morse code (CW) receiption, where the bandwidth can be reduced to 50 Hz, with negligible ringing, due to the finite impulse response filters implemented in the K3. It was a real joy to hunt for low power (QRP) stations and pull them out of the noise. The no-frills display and control software result in a reasonable current drain on receive (0.9 A), which, together with the relatively low weight, make the K3 suitable for portable operation (not physically demanding summit-on-the-air operations, however).

Several comments I read on the Internet stated that this transceiver “is not a state of the art single-sideband (SSB) radio”, while its virtues for CW operation are undisputed. I dare to disagree, but should note that I rarely work SSB voice, and that my newest radio until recently was 15 years old. The K3 is a great SSB radio. I love the monitor function which assists in setting the microphone gain and the voice compression levels. For both the Heil MH2 handheld microphone and my trusty Sennheiser PC-style headset (which is easily connected to the back panel of the radio), I received excellent modulation reports, and even using low power (10W), I was able to make voice contacts throughout Europe.

The K3 also offers the ability to decode a few digital modes “right in the box”, without a PC. This function is restricted to 45 baud and 75 baud FSK teletype, and BPSK 31. I found the results worse than with dedicated computer programs, and the tuning is quite tedious with just a simple tuning indicator (which can also be used for CW). A funny feature is “CW to data” which allows to enter text using Morse code, which is then sent in teletype or BPSK. I managed one contact this way, but it will need a lot more practice, and probaly not going to be my favorite way of operating. With the small display, you have to pay close attention to the received text, and the slow method of text entry will tax the other ham’s patience (most of them press only a few macro keys anyway and always send the same text).

In short, the K3 is a great radio, especially for CW and SSB operation, and most likely also for data, together with external software.

Ulm scored big with its efficient administration, its low unemployment, and its low number of people dependent on welfare. The study saw improvement opportunities in the area of employment among older citizens, and the number of places in day care centers. However, as the article said, you have to use a magnifying glass to find real weaknesses in Ulm.

So who’s ahead of Ulm? Ingolstadt, home of the Audi cars, and Erlangen. And Munich, everyone’s favorite city? No. 4, just behind Ulm. Stuttgart, our state capital, didn’t even make it into the top 20.

A team from the Institute of Microwave Techniques, led by Peter Feil, was rewarded for their work on Millimeter-Wave Synthetic Aperture Radar for Surveillance and Security Applications. The fourth place was awarded to Bernd Schleicher of the Institute of Electron Devices and Circuits for his work on FM-IR-UWB – a simple Communications Concept, which describes how legacy FM short-range communication links can be easily converted to use the new impulse radio ultra-wideband frequency allocations in the GHz range, which can be used license free, yet are largely unused at present.

Read more: Gerotron Press Release “Ausgezeichnete Ideen” (in German)

Interestingly, and luckily, the fibers were absent in air samples, but found on top of shelves and on books. The facility needs to be cleaned (by specialists), but more importantly, the source of contamination will have to be identified and eliminated before the library can re-open.

When we lived in New Jersey in the 1980′s, some of my business trips led me past the borough of Manville, and whenever I hear asbestos stories, I remember that place. Manville, named after the Johns-Manville corporation, whose manufacturing facilities used to dominate the town. Founded in 1886  as the Manville Covering Company in Milwaukee, WI, it pioneered the use of asbestos as a building material [1]. The hazards of working with asbestos, especially the risk of developing malignant pulmonary diseases, became apparent in the early twentieth century, and as early as 1918, life insurance companies refused coverage to asbestos workers due to their workplace health risks [2]. It took until 1979, however, before the US Environmental Protection Agency contemplated a complete ban on asbestos use.  This complete ban went finally into effect in 1989. It was, however, revoked in court in 1991. Severe restrictions on its use, however, remain.

A story I heard while living in New Jersey was that frequently it was the wives of asbestos workers who were stricken. While the workplace hazards were recognized, and some means of protection against inhaling the fibers was worn at work, nobody thought of the dust covering work clothes, and the exposure suffered while trying to clean them at home.

In Germany, the use of asbestos has been illegal since 1993, and the European Commission enacted a Europe-wide ban in 2005. But, as the Konstanz incident proves, the heavy, almost unrestricted use of the fiber material especially in the building industry for almost a century leaves a legacy for generations to come. As many of the illnesses linked to asbestos are long-term, the incidence of deaths is still high. In Germany, more that 1000 people per year die from asbestos exposure, more than from workplace accidents [3].

Ham radio was not free for all. You had, and still have, to pass an exam to obtain your government license. Yet, the licensing requirements creates an instant esprit de corps, the feeling of belonging to a select group – something that is thoroughly lost in the free-for-all social networks of today.

But once you got your ticket, you accessed a virtual network in the true sense of the word: without boundaries, without infrastructure, owned by nobody, governed by laws, yes, but more importantly by a general consensus called the ham spirit.

I got into ham radio when I was fifteen. The Grundig shortwave receiver I bought from money I received from relatives for my Confirmation celebration, was able to decode the amateur single-sideband voice communications, which had puzzled me for years of listening to shortwave radio broadcasts.

At that point, I was already used to receiving news and opinion from all over the world, and from beyond the Iron Curtain which divided the world in the seventies. Shortwave broadcasts, in those days, were seen as the primary means of projecting your own ideology into areas beyond your immediate control, and so broadcasts were plentiful, and transmitters powerful. Like many other radio listeners, I wrote reception reports to foreign radio stations, expecting confirmation cards (“QSLs”) in return. Imagine my parents’ concern when our mailbox started to fill up with calendars from China touting the “Red Detachment of Women”, Mao’s little red book, and portrait cards showing the likeness of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

Ham radio, by contrast, was apolitical, by law, restricted to conversations of a technical and personal nature. Not a severe restriction, it turned out, judging from the long conversations I listened to with growing fascination, especially on the 80 meter band. I learned about personal concerns, about fascinating technical details I had no clue about. Soon, I joined the German Amateur Radio Club (DARC), and faithfully traveled to Siegen once a week for a ham radio training course. The licensed radio amateurs I met there seemed omniscient, became my personal heroes for a while.

Many of the parental fears associated with the Internet today were common in those days as well. There were the differing political views we young radio listeners were exposed to through short wave broadcasting; there was the fact that we associated with older men, ‘and you never know about their motives’. And as for the unlicensed Citizens Band radio, there were rumors about men preying upon young boys (radio was an almost all male avocation then), very similar to the stories about adults preying upon unsuspecting minors in Internet chat rooms today.

There were evil hackers, too. Still convinced that radio amateurs were a very special bunch, always well meaning, always ham spirited, and immune to any illegal activity, I learned with horror that a club member had been systematically eavesdropping on mobile phone conversations, with a bank of receivers and tape recorders documenting the few analog, unencrypted mobile phone channels simultaneously. Our geographic proximity to Bonn, then the federal capital, meant that quite a few ministers ended up on his tapes, something that foolishly he bragged about in public. He was tried, convicted to a prison sentence, and worse yet (so I thought), he lost his license.

I earned my first license (for VHF only) in 1973, and upgraded to a “full” license, with shortwave privileges in 1976. Near the height of an eleven-year sunspot cycle, even my simple antennas allowed global contacts. My first conversation with a radio ham in Australia, in Morse telegraphy, I will never forget. Is there anything that compares to this in today’s Internet? The joy of communicating around the world, thanks to your own skills, the antennas you built, without any network operator in between.

And occasionally, a contact which was truly newsworthy. In 1978, I had a long single-sideband voice contact with a radio amateur in Guyana, South America. The young man on the other end spoke enthusiastically about the religious group he was a member of – the People’s Temple, the community they had built, Jonestown, and the assistance they provided to the poor people of Guyana.

A few months later, the group was headline news all over the world. A US congressman had visited Jonestown, and had been killed along with four other people. Before authorities were able to investigate, the whole community had committed suicide, with unwilling members being brutally murdered. At that time, I already had the “QSL” confirmation card for the earlier radio contact in hand. This earned me my very first mentioning in a local newspaper.

Can you top this, Facebook?

Further reading:

• The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage
• The Original Social Network?

Frederick Collins operating his radio telephone, 1904

A recent visit to the excellent American Museum of Electricity and Radio in Bellingham, WA, drew my attention to the somewhat tragic inventor and writer Archie Frederick Collins.  Collins was born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1869, and died in Nyack, NY, in 1952. Please refer to the Wikipedia article for further biographical information. Collins had the idea of connecting a carbon microphone between an arc radio frequency generator and the antenna, modulating the antenna current with sound picked up by the microphone. The radio frequency current from the arc generator was passed through resonant circuits using large inductive coils – we would call this today a bandpass filter with high quality factor. From Collins’ own accounts (in 1905), he first tested his ideas in an experiment, over a distance of 200 feet, in 1899.

After obtaining a patent on his modulation technique, he set up his own company and began efforts to commercially exploit wireless telephony, claiming to have spanned a distance of 81 miles, between Newark, NJ and Philadelphia, PA in 1908. The same year, Marconi examined Collins’ setup and gave him credit as the inventor of wireless telephony.

But in his quest for commercial success, Collins was badly side-tracked, or as sparkmuseum.com aptly puts it,

“this technical visionary formed partnerships with businessmen of questionable character – men more interested in making a killing in wireless stock speculation than in building a successful company.”

His company’s stock (by then part of Continental Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company, with Collins as its Technical Director) was bloated by exaggerated technical claims and rigged demonstrations, the company’s directors were indicted for mail fraud (a common Federal offence in the US), and Collins was sentenced to three years in prison, of which he served one.

Government officials, among them Mayor Goldwater, attending a Wireless Telephony demo in Prescott, AZ (from sparkmuseum.com)

The 1909 demonstration in Madison Square Garden, which Marconi saw, was later ruled fraudulent. Apparently, many of Collins’ demonstrations were not long distance experiments at all, but relied on inductively coupled sets placed on opposite sides of walls in adjacent hotel rooms rented for the occasion (Source: Spark Museum). The company also claimed a method to accommodate multiple users, which we now would call frequency division multiple access, and whose description foresaw direct dialing mobile telephony (at a time when all telephone exchanges were manual), and was pushing mobile radio installations as a safety feature for automobiles (calling for help when stranded on the road). Alas, none of this was ever shown in practice.

The claims to having developed frequency division multiple access, and mobile radio telephones, were also entered as evidence in the trial.

An aside: Mayor Goldwater in the picture is likely Morris Goldwater, the uncle of Republican politician Barry M. Goldwater, who lost the race for President of the United States to Lyndon B. Johnson. Barry Goldwater was an avid Radio Amateur all his life and one of the amateur radio service’s most important spokespersons of the 20th century. He even appeared in promotional videos for ham radio, such as “Today’s People“.

Collins modulation technique, direct amplitude modulation of the antenna current by a resistive element, has its obvious limitations. Especially, the currents the microphone has to handle can be huge (the claimed Newark-to-Philadelphia experiment is said to have used a 2.1 kW arc transmitter), and one of Collins’ main inventions was a water-cooled microphone array able to handle the large power dissipation.

However, before the invention of the triode electron tube, direct modulation of current using a resistive element was inevitable and also practiced by Canadian radio pioneer Reginald Fessenden. Fessenden, who is known as the man who invented broadcast radio, did not use an arc-type generator (even though he perfected the latter with his rotary sparc transmitter), but a multi-pole high-speed electromechanical generator, which created a continuous alternating current of 50 kHz at its output terminals. This current was then sent through the carbon microphone to the antenna. On Christmas Eve 1906, he performed the first audio broadcast ever made.

Fessenden’s first audio transmission experiments were reported to have taken place on December 23, 1900, outside of Washington, DC, which would have been after Collins’ initial experiments in 1899. However, Fessenden’s work is very well documented, and he developed the underlying theory of an amplitude modulated continuous wave transmission, where the radio frequency component (the carrier) is removed at the receiver, leaving only the audible envelope signal.  US Federal Communications Commission even offers an audio file demonstrating how Fessenden’s first wirelessly transmitted phase,

“One – two – three – four, is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? If it is, would you telegraph back to me?”

might have sounded like.

The Fessenden audio broadcasts are referenced in a New York Times article entitled “Telephoning at Sea”, published September 1, 1907, and amazingly still available on the NYT website. The article mentions several other contemporary attempts at transmitting audio wirelessly:

• Alexander Graham Bell’s Radiophone, which uses light as the carrier, and a Selenium photocell at the receiver;
• Ernst Ruhmer’s “Speaking arc”, another electro-optical device, used to transmit voice between land and a boat on the Wannsee near Berlin, as described in this 1905 document by, interestingly, Archie Frederick Collins;
• Georg Graf von Arco, one of the founders of Telefunken;
• Lee De Forest, counted among the inventors of the electron tube, and another figure shrouded in controversy.

But back to Archie Frederick Collins. After his year in prison, his reputation as an engineer was shot, and he turned toward technical and scientific popular writing. Wikipedia notes over 100 books and over 500 articles on various topics and continues to point out that Alan McDiarmid, 1999 Nobel Laureate for Chemistry, credits Collins’ book “The Boy Chemist” for sparking his interest in chemistry.

The original article on Alan McDiarmid mentions a “Reverend Archie Collins” as the author of “The Boy Chemist”, but that is a mistake. You can download the 1924 book here, if you are looking for some inspiration yourself.

Components for a rotary spark transmitter, from Collins' Handbook for the Radio Amateur" (Source: Project Gutenberg)

Speaking of inspiration: a book which flamed my fascination for wireless for many decades has been the Handbook for the Radio Amateur, published by the American Radio Relay League. The first book with this title was published in 1922, by, who else, Archie Frederick Collins. It is freely available for download at Project Gutenberg, albeit in HTML format. As a recent article on the ARRL web site reports, the ARRL staff reviewing the book was highly critical of its contents:

It “is written down to the small boy, the absolute beginner…” It has “well-conceived diagrams and figures,” but “weak draughtsmanship.” “In these pages are preserved the well-nigh forgotten …spark sending sets that have wholly disappeared.”

But it is this backwardness which makes Collins’ Handbook an intriguing read. It is a comprehensive account of a world long since lost, but which laid the foundation for many of the wireless devices which we enjoy today. And its intention, to allow young people, on a budget, experimentation with radio communications and thus fan their enthusiasm for the field, is now more relevant than ever.

We need another Archie Frederick Collins. Just leave the scheming and the rigged demos behind. We have enough of that already, thanks.

I stand corrected on what I wrote about the recent history of the place. The houses were not razed in the 1930′s, after the villagers were forced out to make room for the expansion of the military training grounds. The houses were merely left to decay.

After the end of world war II, some villagers returned to their old homes, believing that all was over now. They were joined by refugees from the eastern part of the former German Reich, now forced out of their homes by the Red Army. But in the early fifties, it became apparent that the military would increasingly use the area again, and the last inhabitants left in 1952 (by other accounts I heard, in 1956).

The buildings decayed further, were partly used for target practice, and finally in the 1970′s became so unsafe that they had to be flattened, with the exception of the church and the old schoolhouse, which had served as a storage facility all along.

Gruorn had almost died once before. At the beginning of the “30 Years War” (in 1618), the flourishing village had had over 600 inhabitants, an astounding size here on top of the Swabian Jura, which is still quite sparsely populated today. Gruorn had fertile fields and five water springs – the latter almost a miracle on this limestone mountain range where surface water is very scarce. At the end of the war, in 1648, the number of inhabitants had decreased to 82, a reflection of the unparalleled devastation which the previous three decades had brought to Germany.

But owing again to the excellent farming, the village recovered, when people from Switzerland and the Alpine Allgäu region of Germany settled here. The population peaked at 713 in the 19th century.

We also had the chance to visit the little church, which has been nicely restored. Its oldest parts date back into the eleventh century, with additions in late Gothic style finished in 1522. Some old fresco paintings remain, and the new stained glass windows in the choir are rather striking. Only two church services are held each year, and occasionally the church is used for concerts during the summer.

We decided to join the club which supports the upkeep of what remains of Gruorn, so I may occasionally report on this fascinating place in the future.

There was something odd about C. When sober, he spoke a very elaborate English, completely out of line with his social status of the day. He would show up at church potluck dinners and engage the pastor in lengthy theological discourse. Occasionally, he would relate to the life he had had, graduating from Brown University, and working for a TV advertising agency in Manhattan. We did not take that seriously at the time, we heard too many similar stories from the homeless, even though his demeanor provided some credibility.

Some of us called him the Reverend.

It was all downhill for C. Sometime in 1987 he lost his flat and moved into an abandoned car close to the River. And there, in a little park close to his residence, on a hot 1988 summer night, he made the fatal mistake of asking two youngsters from an affluent neighboring community for some change. He was beaten, kicked in the throat, and died.

There were rumors from the police inquiry which followed that indeed much of what he had told was true. I never knew for certain, and periodically images of C. came back to haunt me.

Google to the rescue!

Armed with just his name (a rather common one, I found) and what I remembered from his stories 22 years ago, I retrieved the following.

C. was indeed an alumnus of Brown University, and graduated in 1946. He also apparently served in World War II, according to his tomb stone inscription, which I found using www.findagrave.com (yep, that is a legitimate website) – his tomb stone also tells that he was just 63 years old when he died. After graduating from college, he lived in an affluent North Jersey community which was also home to Astronaut Buzz Aldrin and baseball great Yogi Berra.

A 1954 facsimile of Billboard, reproduced in the Google Books project, mentions C. joining an ad agency which is today one of the big players in the US TV advertising industry, with over 1300 employees nationwide.

What happened next, and why C. ended up living in an abandoned car in New Jersey, I was unable to ascertain. The last trace I found of him was a note in the New York Times reporting that one of the criminals who killed him had walked away from a prison release program in northern NJ in 2000. No word whether he had been re-apprehended.

The full extent of this personal tragedy, and its true meaning, if there is one, remain a mystery.

Modern snow making equipment can actually produce snow at air temperatures up to 30°C,  so they should be safe for decades to come. But artificial snow is also used in areas which are cold enough (say, Kasachstan), but have very dry air, which leads to flakes which are too fluffy and cannot be compacted well – my dad always raved about the “deep white powder” of the Rockies, but seems like today’s skiers are not particularly into it – they prefer hard, carefully graded surfaces, which only artificial snow can offer.

Oh yes, ecology … the report claims that the snow makers of the Alps consume as much electricity as Nuremberg, and as much water as Munich, in a year.