K9YA Telegraph Robert F

K9YA Telegraph Robert F. Heytow Memorial Radio Club Volume 17, Issue 10 October 2020 Andy Hardy’s QSP “W8XZR” Relays Judge Hardy’s Traffic

Philip Cala-Lazar, K9PL

Place Artwork Here he K9YA Facebook page Bringham[?] Canada”); manual receiver/transmitter T(https://www.facebook. switching; plentiful ID’ing from both operators; and com/k9ya.telegraph) recently the casual use of ham radio jargon including “73,” linked an oft viewed but little “Old Man,” “QSL card” and “DX.” researched film clip from the 1938 MGM movie, Love For an instant, in a medium shot, a number of QSL Finds Andy Hardy. In that cards displayed on the wall behind the operating desk https://vimeo.com/248714142 clip Andy Hardy’s (Mickey are clearly visible ( ); freezing the frame they are the cards of W6DTA, Rooney) father, Judge Hardy W6ESD, W6NYD, W6OWM and K6PAS. Philip Cala-Lazar, K9PL (Lewis Stone), wants to send a message (from Carvel, Editor in an unnamed Midwestern state) to Extracted from the spring 1939 edi- his wife, Emily (Fay Holden). Trouble Mike Dinelli, N9BOR tion of the Radio Amateur Call Book: Layout is Mrs. Hardy is caring for her mother, W6DTA, Albert W. Brunner, 940 who recently suffered a stroke, at a Cedar St., San Carlos, Calif.; W6ESD, Jeff Murray, K1NSS Staff Cartoonist farm in rural Ontario, Canada where A.G. Neumann, 1228 Rimpau Blvd., there’s no telephone and telegrams “plentiful ID’ing” Los Angeles, Calif.; W6NYD, [Lt.] unnerve his wife. Andy suggests that A.W. Greenlee,* 621 I Ave., Coronado, 12-year-old amateur radio operator Calif.; W6OWM, Leo G. Stoeckle, Jr, Jimmy MacMahon, “W8XZR,” played 1330 45th, Sacramento, Calif.; and Dick Sylvan, W9CBT by 15-year-old Gene Reynolds, can get K6PAS, F.J. Bishop, 3244 Pahoa Ave., Cartoonist Emeritus the message through. (Note: during that Honolulu, T.H. [Territory of Hawaii]. Rod Newkirk, VA3ZBB (SK) period the FCC reserved “X” suffixed call signs for Research revealed none of these hams were employed Contributing Editor experimental stations, making for a fictitious amateur by the motion picture industry. 2004 - 2012 radio call sign.) Curious hams want to know; who advised and Steadfastly making calls long into the night, Jimmy oversaw the scene’s authenticity and contributed the succeeds in raising another 12-year-old ham, Basil Gordon, VE3AVS. Basil copies the message and Continued - Andy Hardy’s QSP on Page 8 hand delivers it to its nearby destination. Some time later Basil calls back to acknowledge delivery. The Inside This Issue… winter 1937 Radio Amateur Call Book lists VE3AV, Andy Hardy’s QSP Page 1 but VE3AVS was not yet assigned. The winter 1938 edition lists VE3AVR and VE3AVT, VE3AVS still not My First Day on the Job… Page 2 assigned—another fictitious amateur radio call sign. MorseLs–16 Page 4 Robert F. Heytow The scene, depicted in Jimmy’s well-equipped and “Rig Here is an Eico GDO” Page 6 Memorial Radio Club authentic looking shack, finds him closely adher- WB2ABJ & MARS Page 7 www.k9ya.org ing to realistic, contemporary, radio amateur AM Oh! The Hamanity Page 8 t[email protected] phone procedure with repeated directed CQs (“CQ

Warren McFarland

“DS RY EAT,” I slowly not have indoor plumbing. Some had no electric clicked out on the telegraph lights. Raiford had both. key, using my fist. When the I had no concerns about my ability to handle the Train Dispatcher replied, railroad and Railway Express Agency work. My fa- “OK DS,” I heaved a sigh ther had trained me well in those aspects of rail- of relief and immediately roading. But telegraphy was another matter. It’s cut out all of the telegraph sort of like learning a foreign language and at the lines in the office, achiev- Place Artwork Here same time patting your head and rubbing your ing blessed silence after my stomach. It requires considerably more practice first morning on the job than the average young person is likely to perform. as an agent-operator. Even The solution is to jump in and sink or swim. Rai- though I had spent many ford was my first jump. months as a telegraph stu- dent under my father, who I had always been intrigued by telegraphy. I can re- Warren McFarland was the agent for the Atlan- call as a small boy, probably in 1928, when the base- tic Coast Line Railroad in Avon Park, Fla., there ball World Series was being played, going with my was a tremendous difference between that and in mother and younger brother to the bandstand in a being only 18 years old and having total responsi- park in the middle of downtown Avon Park where bility for an agency, including all telegraphic com- telegraph instruments and a blackboard had been munications in the office. set up. The Seaboard Airline Railway agent, A. O. Kinsey, the Western That day in February 1942 began my Union agent and my father, the ACL seniority as a telegrapher on the Ocala “jump in and agent, all took turns copying the tele- District (Division) of the ACL. I had graph transmissions from the games arrived before daylight on train No. sink or swim” and posting the play by play, inning 38 to relieve the agent, W. K. Jen- by inning results on the blackboard. kins, who would be absent for about There was a large crowd and I can still a week, attending the annual conven- recall the sense of pride I had, that it tion of the Order of Railroad Telegra- was my father telling all of these peo- phers, of which he was an officer. Raiford, Fla. was ple about the World Series. That was the beginning a very small town, located about 45 miles south- of my interest, but I didn’t seriously attempt to learn west of Jacksonville on the ACL line running from how to do it until my senior year in high school, Jacksonville to St. Petersburg. It was a one-man after I had decided that I wanted to make railroad- agency, but it was home to the only penitentiary ing my career. in the state at that time, which meant that it was a fairly busy office. At Raiford, as in all the one-man agencies, the agent was required to keep a different set of accounts for In a one-man agency, the agent was responsible for each of the two or three hats he wore, railroad, Rail- everything—passenger business, freight business, way Express and, sometimes, Western Union. In Railway Express (the United Parcel Service of the larger towns there were usually separate Western day) packages and Western Union telegrams. He, Union offices, thus the railroad agent-telegrapher Robert F. Heytow Memorial Radio Club and it was nearly always “he” in those days, even had no Western Union responsibility, except in swept the floors, dusted the furniture and cleaned emergencies. Each agency had a large “Cash Book,” www.k9ya.org t[email protected] the restrooms, if there were any. Many agencies did which my father taught me must be balanced at the

K9YA Telegraph Copyright © 2020 Robert F. Heytow Memorial Radio Club. All rights reserved. end of each day, for keeping the railroad account. have made it through those days without his as- Railroad station accounting was a double-entry sys- sistance and in my youth I am certain that I failed tem, but was different from normal accounting, or to thank him adequately. 3 bookkeeping as it was known then. Money received On the other hand, the outbound shipments of li- was entered as a debit, while money deposited to the cense plates to the various County Clerks through- railroad account was entered as a credit. out the state did result in commissions being paid The agent also was paid separately for each hat he by Railway Express. Rail- wore. The railroad paid a salary ranging from $100 way Express commissions to $150 per month at that time, while Railway Ex- ranged from ten per cent press and Western Union paid a commission based down to six per cent, based upon the cost of shipments or telegrams handled. on the volume of business The difference between the two was that Railway in a given location. These Express paid a commission on both collect and commissions kept the li- prepaid shipments, either inbound or outbound, cense plate business from while Western Union only paid a commission on being a complete loss to the Place Artwork Here collect telegrams received and prepaid telegrams Raiford agent. sent. Raiford had the usual as- The Western Union commission policies resulted in sortment of telegraph wires the agent at Raiford performing considerable work running through the office, for which he received no pay. Inmates at the state a dispatcher’s wire, No. 17, penitentiary manufactured the automobile license with an alternate, No. 16, a Ocala Union Station plates for the entire state. The County Clerk in Western Union wire, and two or three other, lo- each county would order license plates, by Western cal wires. I cannot recall if there was a “bluestone” Union telegram sent prepaid. Penitentiary officials battery located at Raiford to serve as a power would notify the County Clerks of license plates booster, but many of the one-man agencies did shipped by Western Union telegram have them. The local agent had some sent collect. These types of telegrams responsibility in maintaining these constituted the bulk of the Western batteries, but the signalman came by Union business at Raiford, thus the on a regular basis to assure they were agent received no commission on “a ‘bluestone’ working properly. the largest part of his Western Union battery” At that time all communications on work. To make matters worse, the the Division were by Morse telegraph, telegrams consisted largely of groups company mail or U. S. Mail. The tele- of mixed letters and numbers for each graph wires were never silent except category of license plates ordered or at noon as everyone listened for the shipped. As most readers of Dots and Dashes know, time signal. It was the strain of listening for “RY RY mixed groups of letters and numbers are probably RY” in what seemed to be a cacophony of dots and the most difficult for a telegraph operator to copy dashes that caused me to seek silence by cutting out or send. the wires in the office while I ate my lunch on that Needless to say, I struggled mightily during those first day on the job. Eventually I learned to hear first few days to copy the license plate telegrams. the call sign of whatever office I was in as easily as The Western Union relay operators in Jackson- picking my own name out of the buzz of conver- ville had very little patience with a beginning sation in a crowded room. But, that was months operator. Fortunately, G. M. Faircloth, agent at away from that first day in Raiford. Lake Butler, Fla., only seven miles away, took pity on me and copied the inbound telegrams as they Reprinted by permission from Lines South, publi- Robert F. Heytow were sent to me, then called me on the commer- cation of the ACL & SAL Railroads Historical So- Memorial Radio Club cial telephone (there was no company telephone) ciety. Copyright 2003, ACL & SAL HS, all rights www.k9ya.org to verify I had copied them correctly. I might not reserved. t[email protected]

John Swartz, WA9AQN

The Other Side of the Coin accomplished by the Germans throughout the war, with particular attention to interception of On any number of occasions naval signals during the Battle of the Atlantic, to over the years I have asked military signals in Germany’s conquests in Eastern myself fleetingly whether the Europe and the Middle East, through D-Day and Germans broke Allied codes the decline of the Nazi war machine ultimately during WWII. I had not leading to the unconditional surrender and end Place Artwork Here come across any particular of the war in Europe. titles addressing that subject in the venues that have be- The highlighted examples of German cryptographic come my grazing territory. breakthroughs make for chilling reading and reflection. Some of the books I had read made passing reference to When reading other authors who have focused on German codebreaking, but the cryptographic successes of the Allies, and par- not in depth. On a recent ticularly the British, we learned how often the Allied trip to a local outlet of a well-known bookstore breakthroughs into Enigma had been the result of (before the corona pandemic closed them down) careless enemy operators and of mistakes made dur- I noticed a title that I had not seen previously, The ing encryption and transmission of messages. What Third Reich is Listening.1 we learn from Jennings is that the Germans were no less attuned to the importance and The author, Christian Jennings, has frequency of errors by the Allies and offered a history of 20th century Ger- that German cryptanalysts were able man cryptography in 335 pages of well to mine Allied communications that composed text, organized succinctly “Battle of the were sometimes plagued with similar and treated in some depth. Jennings Atlantic” problems. has drawn on documents that were discovered, those that were created and I decided to revisit the original source those that have been released after the of our knowledge about breaking the Allies combed the Continent in what German codes, F.W. Winterbotham’s 2 were called TICOM teams (Target Intelligence revelatory work from 1974, The Ultra Secret. I had Committee) that accompanied or immediately fol- forgotten that Winterbotham’s book had not really lowed Allied troops advancing across Europe after D-Day.

The story opens with a history of German signals intelligence commencing in World War I. Jennings then addresses the development of the complex web of German bureaucracies, both “civil” and “military” that played roles in intelligence operations of the armed forces and the Nazi party as it solidi- Robert F. Heytow fied its control of the country. The story includes Memorial Radio Club numerous examples of cryptologic breakthroughs www.k9ya.org 1 Jennings, Christian, The Third Reich is 2 Winterbotham, F.W., The Ultra Secret, t[email protected] Listening, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, 2018. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1974.

K9YA Telegraph Copyright © 2020 Robert F. Heytow Memorial Radio Club. All rights reserved. dealt with the subject of cryptology or the Enigma from the TICOM reports which had been released as much as it described how the intelligence gleaned by the National Security Agency and are available from the work at Bletchley was used operationally. for public inspection online.3 5 Winterbotham went to great lengths to discuss how the existence of the British codebreaking effort was There are at least two more books of recent vintage to be hidden, covered, and to what lengths the which treat the subject of German codebreaking 4 British went to limit the dissemination of Bletchley which I hope to explore in the near future. In addi- Park’s output, to disguise its source, and to control tion, there are several online any ability the Germans may have had to possibly resources that may be worth trace Allied operations back to Allied cryptologic time and effort that I haven’t 5 successes. yet expended. What Jennings so nicely does is to destroy any illusion that the Germans didn’t get very far in breaking Allied Place Artwork Here codes. They got far enough to have cost lives, dearly. Jen- nings also addresses the subject, opened by TICOM and touched upon by Kahn, that the paranoid Nazi governance machine and bureaucracies themselves impaired the development of far more sophisticated cryptographic resources. Bletchley Park - Hut 8

Jennings tells us that there were those in the Ger- man command who had doubts about the security of the Enigma system and who did not fully be- 3 Kahn, David, The Codebreakers, Scribner, lieve in its infallibility. Those doubts were largely New York, 1967, 1996 edition. suppressed and not taken very seriously. After https://www.nsa.gov/News-Features/News-Stories/ having revealed just how deeply the Germans had Article-View/Article/1623741/nsa-releases-thou- penetrated Allied codes and cyphers, what is more impressive, however, was that even if there were sands-of-wwii-era-documents-to-national-archives/ doubts on the German side about the security of https://catalog.archives.gov/id/5957379 their own cryptologic systems, the overall security plan adopted by the British to protect the Ultra 4 TICOM: the Hunt for Hitler’s Code- Secret succeeded. Regardless of Allied mistakes, breakers, Randy Rezabek , Rochester, NY, 2016 German cryptanalysts did not seem to have discovered evidence within broken Allied communica- Hitler’s Codebreakers: German Signals Intelligence tions that directly attributed Allied intelligence to in World War 2, John Jackson, BookTower Publish- broken German codes. ing, Redditch, Worcestershire, 2012 Jennings’ fine work is the first title I had come across 5 https://www.feldgrau.com/WW2-Ger- addressing the subject. German cryptanalysis dur- man-Code-Breaking ing the war has received some attention in popular literature. When I looked back at what I consider https://www.bletchleyparkresearch.co.uk/research- the “Bible” on the subject, David Kahn’s epic work, notes/how-successful-were-hitlers-codebreakers/ The Codebreakers, I found that Kahn himself had Robert F. Heytow Memorial Radio Club described some German accomplishments in co- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_code_break- debreaking. Much of his material was also derived ing_in_World_War_II www.k9ya.org t[email protected]

Doug Hall, K4DSP

t’s been over 40 years since turned it on and let it warm up and plugged in the Iwe worked the W3 on 2.9-7.5 MHz (sorry, megacycle) coil. Soon I was 2M with an Eico grid dip sweeping a carrier across the 75m frequency John meter, and while the details was listening to, making a “”fweep!” sound each are getting a little hazy I still time it went by and further annoying everyone in remember it. the ham shack except for John who thought it was cool. Bored with that I found the 100-250 megacycle Place Artwork Here It’s not like we didn’t have coil and was able to tune across the 146.88 MHz anything else to do. It was frequency on the Icom. This time it went “fwump” getting near the end of the fall instead of “fweep” since it was FM, and I spent the semester, and there was home- next few minutes trying to get it to land right on work to do, papers to write, 146.88 MHz. When it finally did I noticed that the and final exams to study for. GDO was terribly microphonic–tapping on the case Nevertheless there were a half resulted in a tapping sound coming from the Icom. It dozen of us crowded into the was almost like the GDO had a built-in microphone. W4ATC university club sta- Then the idea hit. tion, and while most of us had our books with us, nobody was studying. WN4BBJ (he was not a Novice, I think it hit John and me at the same time, because he just liked that callsign) was sitting at the Kenwood we both paused what we were doing and looked at TS-520 listening to some argument on each other with that, “Hey, I’ve got 3.898. John had the volume up way too an idea!” kind of look. He jumped up loud which, in addition to annoying from the rig and ran down the hall, us, annoyed the other tenants in the returning shortly with a toilet paper building that housed the ham shack. “fweep!” roll. I don’t know what happened WD4MBK was explaining an idea for to the toilet paper. Even though he an AZ-EL mount for the 70cm EME ar- hadn’t said anything. I knew exactly ray to anyone who would listen, and the what he was thinking. We proceeded rest of the crew were poring over a stack to tape the toilet roll to the side of of old QST magazines that someone had the Eico GDO, using half of a roll of donated to the club. Meanwhile, the local .88 repeater Scotch Tape in the process. John turned down could be heard (just barely over the 3.898 QRM) from the volume on the Kenwood (finally, to the relief a heavily modified Icom IC-22S in the corner of the of those in the ham shack and all the professors on shack, and some W3 was driving up I-95 droning on the hall) and started adjusting the Eico again until and on about his gall bladder surgery and occasionally with one last “fwump!” it landed right on 146.88. timing out the repeater. The same W3 could be heard Then very carefully John leaned over and hollered on a beat-up Icom 2AT HT sitting on the other end into the toilet roll “W4ATC!” His voice rattled the of the bench from the 22S. “2M stereo.” said John case of the GDO, and shook its microphonic guts with a grin. In other words, it was a typical evening enough that I could hear him faintly on the Icom! in the university club station. We were ecstatic! And once again, we both got that look in our eyes. John asked, “Do you think we I was digging through a box of surplus stuff that had Robert F. Heytow could do it?” I knew what he was talking about. He Memorial Radio Club also been donated to the club when I came across wanted to see if we could key the .88 repeater with a rather forlorn-looking Eico 710 Grid Dip Oscil- www.k9ya.org lator, along with a mostly-complete set of coils. I Continued - “Rig Here is an Eico GDO” on Page 8 t[email protected]

Jordan Makower, WA2BRV

uly 21, 1976. NASA’s Viking Lander settled on and watched in awe as the JMars, and sent back the first ground-based surface Martian surface filled the TV photos from that planet. The pictures were taken with screen, one line at a time, cre- a black and white camera. The same camera took suc- ating a picture every eight sec- cessive images through three different color filters and onds. Next to the card read- later blended to create its iconic color photos. The ing “CQ SSTV WB2ABJ” is a pictures were transmitted using an image-scanning Panasonic tape recorder used technique, similar to amateur radio “slow-scan.” to record and playback signals Place Artwork Here Slow-scan pictures are formed by a camera scanning received with our Robot 400 the received image from top to bottom, converting slow-scan converter. Other colors to various shades of black and white, then equipment: homemade RF- converting those values to audio tones. A scan con- converter; Panasonic B&W verter would take the tones and restore the picture TV; Heathkit SB200 linear values, one line at a time, with approximately 128 amplifier; HW-101 trans- lines comprising a complete image. ceiver, its power supply with built-in speaker; and an Elec- First Color Photo from Radio amateurs, with slow-scan equipment, audio- tro-Voice dynamic microphone. Viking Lander 1 taped those images and sent them out to other hams as part of their own transmissions. WB2ABJ, the Oddly enough, this had not been our first connec- Pearl River HS Radio Club, made the local paper as tion with MARS. Henry Seidner, WA2ROA, (then we received those images. graduated) had been involved in message-passing nets on the east coast; The New York Public John Mennell is now a philanthropist Operations Net (the “Post Office Net”), in charge of many charitable organiza- ECARS (East Coast Amateur Radio tions (like MagLiteracy.org); he sent in “CQ SSTV Service) and MARS (Military Auxiliary this photo, as published in the Rock- Radio System). At the top right, on the land Journal News. Others in the pho- WB2ABJ” slanted lid of the plywood box holding to have become lawyers, teachers, or our equipment, is a certificate acknowl- entered fields in electronic technology. edging our radio participation. We were crowded into a 6’-wide storage As WA2BRV, I was assigned the room in the fall of 1976, when this photo was taken, MARS callsign AAR2FP, and for twenty-five years attended training nets (at least two hours/week), and relayed messages into and out of Rockland County on behalf of military service members (and their families) around the world. Each month I would send postcards to Fort Meade, Md., detailing my involvement. On occasion, MARS held a luncheon where members were offered surplus radio equipment, stickers and buttons. The satisfaction I got while performing that service was more rewarding than anything tangible I could have received. Robert F. Heytow Today, even though I don’t participate in most electron- Memorial Radio Club ics social networks, my past students and former radio Club Members Surround Faculty Advisor, Jordan Makower, club members manage to “find” and thank me for their www.k9ya.org seated, to Watch Taped Telecast of Mars educational training. Who needs “tangible”? t[email protected]

Copyright © 2020 Robert F. Heytow Memorial Radio Club. All rights reserved. Volume 17, Issue 10 Continued - “Rig Here is Eico GDO” from Page 6 Continued - Andy Hardy’s QSP from Page 1 8 the GDO. It was a crazy idea, but if we could pull it off it would be the coolest QSO in the history of W4ATC, maybe anywhere ever.

This was in the days before every repeater had CTCSS tone access, so all we needed was to get enough RF into an antenna on the 146.28 MHz input frequency and get it to stay there long enough to be heard. From the ham shack window we could “see” the tower where the .88 machine Judge Hardy, Andy Hardy, Jimmy MacMahon Place Artwork Here was located, so we didn’t need much power. QSL card “wallpaper”? I nominate Clyde De Vinna, W6OJ, famed MGM cinematographer. De Vinna was I disconnected the coax that a very visible and vocal promoter of the amateur radio fed the old Ringo Ranger service as detailed in several K9YA Telegraph articles† from the Icom 22S, leaving devoted to his exploits. In 1938 he was the cinema- the IC 2AT as the “monitor tographer for five MGM features and short subject receiver.” A clip lead pro- films shot in Hollywood. That proximity helps close vided a loop to couple to the feedline, and we used the circle on his oversight of the ham shack scene. the rest of the roll of tape to secure everything. More Eighty-two years on, an amateur radio archaeologi- careful tuning of the GDO ensued. At last we were cal examination of that short film clip reveals more, rewarded with a “fwump” and the sound of the re- perhaps, than the filmmakers ever thought likely or peater in the HT! We were keying the repeater with possible. the Eico GDO! John immediately started yelling *Coronado Citizen newspaper, “Society and Personal into the toilet paper roll “Whisky Four Alpha Tango News,” Nov. 11, 1937 Charlie! Whisky 4 Alpha Tango Charlie!” but in his † excitement he bumped the grid dip meter, and the Clyde De Vinna, W6OJ, in the K9YA Telegraph: repeater dropped out. Then from the HT we heard “’Our Radio Amateurs,’” Oct. 2013; “Debunked?” the gall bladder guy say, “The Whisky Four station, Dec. 2014; “Hams Oughta Be In Pictures,” July 2017; “W6OJ in Africa,” Sept. 2018 your audio is very low, try it again.”

By then everyone was either laughing or jumping up and down in excitement, and we couldn’t get the GDO on frequency again. We reattached the antenna to the Icom and told the W3 what we had done. Either he didn’t believe us or he didn’t find it as interesting. Or maybe he didn’t know what an Eico GDO was. Later John wanted to send the guy a QSL, in hopes of getting one in return, but nobody could remember the W3’s callsign. And one of the guys (I think it was AA4NC) joked that it wouldn’t count anyway since we didn’t holler “Triplets! Trip- Robert F. Heytow lets!” and it wasn’t a “roger contact.”* But it was Memorial Radio Club good enough for us. www.k9ya.org * Not a derogatory reference to the Century Club Net. t[email protected]