Some folks have HAM operator shacks, I call mine a Bridge.

W2IDK was Marvin’s callsign when he was an amateur ham operator. When I passed my ham radio operator license the FCC in July the FCC issued me the call sign KJ7PVA, 7 designating the state I am from. Marvin wondered whatever happened to his call sign W2IDK so I looked it up. It wasn’t available. In early October I looked up his call sign again and it said it didn’t belong to anyone. I applied for it to replace my call sign and it was issued to me a week later. Marvin thought that the person probably didn’t like the last three letters of the call sign because it’s the acronym for “I Don’t Know.” Two weeks before Marvin’s death he sent a package that included his plastic station ID (call sign) nameplate.

What used to sit on top of his radio now sits on top of mine. W2IDK lives on. CQ CQ CQ

July 2020

An email from Marvin after I told him I was taking the amateur radio license test

Dear Sam (or .. . . .-. … .- –),

I was W2IDK. There were only two tests then for the “general” license: code and a theory test on which one might be asked to draw, say, the schematic for a piezo-electric crystal-controlled oscillator. I wonder what the three tests are now. While I was a ham, they introduced a novice license that required less and was temporary like a beginner’s driving license.

It used to be that you had to say that you had been on the air a certain number of hours over a recent period of time to renew your license, but I told the truth—I was gone from home and had been inactive. Hence, I am no longer W2IDK. I gave away the last of my ham equipment only last year, my beloved HQ 129X receiver, a kind of receiver once used on Coast Guard ships.

The equipment has changed, of course, It’s a whole new world from what I knew.

I was a high school kid. The grownups were very nice to me. I’d peddle my bike to nearby towns to meet them. They were unusual people. In those days, you were expected to build your first transmitter and power supply, and not from a kit. You’d choose schematic and buy the parts from Radio Row stores in NYC. W2OQI, who lived like a hermit up a dirt road, helped me do that. Herbert Snell, W2FCH gave me rides to the radio club meetings in another town. W2EBT (Two Eggs, Bacon & Toast, or Elderly, Bald & Toothless) first showed me a ham shack and set me trying to copy code while the grownups visited downstairs.

At one time, I got hold of a piece of Coast Guard equipment that could be converted to work on 2 meters. I’d need an antenna beyond just a ling rise for that. One day I came home from school and there were 4-5 hams putting up an antenna, bent into shape from aluminum clothesline, on the garage roof.

The way to improve your copying code is to tune in a ham station using code slowly. It will come.

Once in a while at the AWP meetings, someone would ask me to say a poem in code.

Here are two paragraphs on the topic, one you may remember from After the Fact and one from the unpublished vol. 2, Here & Now:

MB:
Code

In a small town, everything is elsewhere. My memory of radio remains lodged in Morse code. That’s how we went from here to there in those days. Roy’s ham radio shack was his attic. Herb’s was his backyard repair shop. Van’s was a one-room house in the woods, where he built transmitters only to see if they worked, one after another. The smell of solder glued the walls, and a dozen dials glowed to measure space. Memory, like the fabled primordial ooze, lies shapeless at a murky depth. It may emerge in the form of a boy’s twenty-watt call to the far world, it may live again as a whiff of smoke or solder, or as a song at highway speed, and it may hold a kind of code. My memories go their own way. Some are too personal for words. Some are just dry storage. But oh my, the ones that still matter––if one can crack the code and read between the lines. The old telegraph operators could “copy behind,” and would let the Morse message run on ahead while they packed a pipe or retied their shoes. Just so, the years run on ahead, but memory catches up. Morse code has been phased out, like muscle memory over time. It was years before I knew that Dorothy puts herself to sleep by silently reciting poems, state capitals, the 99 counties of Iowa… Yet she has tried to learn International Morse code and cannot. So she says. I suggested she learn the dots and dashes for the day when I might have a stroke but be able to blink my eyes in code. I think this reason has something to do with her not being able to learn Morse code. Love is the child who closes her eyes to make things go away. And to relive the past. I heard three times from Saint-Pierre & Miquelon Islands.

MB:
W2IDK

Back when amateur radio was still amateur, when a novice wanting to be accepted by the grownups had to build a transmitter and power supply but was relieved from the more difficult task of building a receiver, we made fun of the single-sideband users whose voices sounded over a normal receiver like Donald Duck. We laughed at the squawking, allowing it no credit for using only half a frequency, and easily abandoned any attempt to adjust the beat frequency oscillator to land so precisely on the signal that we might make out the voice. Does this sound technical? It was primitive compared to amateur TV, bouncing signals off the moon, and the general turn toward the interplanetary that would come later. Now when I think of early single-sideband, I think not of a Disney character but of Donald Trump, a one-man squawk team, a whiner I would imagine wearing a diaper had I not seen pictures of him pasted to his tie. If Baby Trump had been required to build a transmitter and power supply, not from a kit but from parts and tools to match a schematic, would he not now be more than a brat? CQ, CQ, is anyone out there? QRM? QRN? Interference? Static? QSA? Am I getting through? QSL. Please acknowledge. I am the ghost of W2IDK, the boy who stayed up after midnight to listen to the dark.

Love from Flyover,
Marvin

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