I am sure that the news that Ed Bissell, W3AU, ex-W3MSK, had died on May 10
at the age of 83 made a lot of people in the Amateur Radio contesting
world take a few minutes to stop and think. Ed, CQ Contest Hall of Fame
Member #10, touched the lives of quite a few of today's active contesters,
giving a number of them their first chance to enter the world of big-time
multi-multi contesting. This writer was one of them.
It has been my sad experience in recent years to see one after another of
those on my personal list of heroes pass from the scene. I feel that it is
appropriate on such occasions to pause for a bit to record for posterity's
sake remembrances of these folks so that something about them will be
available on the Web long after they and those who knew them pass from the
scene.
K7SV and KC1F have already begun this process, so let me add some of my
fond memories of Ed to theirs. Time has blurred some of my memories so I
will not attempt to assign a time frame to them in all cases. Any of the
rest of you who have memories of Ed, please post them here. No one person
can do justice to the multi-faceted, colorful personality that was Ed Bissell.
I first met Ed not long after I moved to the Washington area from Wisconsin
in 1963 as W9SZR to work for the Government. I joined PVRC almost
immediately, and since all I had with me was an SR-150 in my car with a
home-brew HF mobile whip, and since I had done reasonably well in CW DX
contests as SOHP from the station of W9EWC, at one time or another I was
invited to join the multi-multi teams at both W3MSK and W4BVV, the two
biggest multi-multi teams PVRC had at the time. W4KXV (now N4RP) was
another multi-multi available to PVRCers at that time.
Since I had joined the U. S. Foreign Service I operated at Ed's or at Tom's
off and on for several years following, on brief stints back in Washington
in between my overseas assignments at HI8XAL, HS3AL, HS5ABD, XV4AL and
LU5HFI, until I bought my own place here in 1975 and proceeded to erect my
own antenna farm. Much of the inspiration for having my own antenna farm
built came from Tom and Ed as well as Len Chertok, W3GRF. Sadly, all three
have now left us.
I recall that we would all arrive at Ed's on Friday afternoon in order to
sit around his dinner table while his XYL Grace served a sumptuous meal
before the contest began. While we ate Ed would chair a planning session
during which we reviewed what conditions would probably be like and how we
would plan to cope with them. In those days we didn't have anything to go
on but WWV which would transmit a series of numbers in Morse which told us
how good or bad things were predicted to be for the following several hours.
Then it was into the big shack to take up our assigned positions and get
ready for 0000Z Saturday to arrive. Ed had homebrew amplifiers for each
band which were lined up along one wall, and a fair collection of Collins
and Central Electronics exciters and Collins receivers, augmented by the
rigs of many of the operators who would bring their own rigs along with
them. As I recall most of the time Bob Cox, K3EST, ran the operation,
assigning the bands to the operators and forcing us to keep things moving
as the contest went on. When I first operated W3MSK Don McClennon, W3EIS,
later W3IN and N4IN, had a lock on the 160 meter position; I don't recall
who had 80; Jack Colson, W3TMZ, ran 40 meters; K3EST and Jack Reichert,
W3ZKH, now N4RV, jointly manned 20; "Big Charlie" Weir, W3FYS, later W6UA,
ran 15 and, in phone contests, Don Search, W3AZD was the 10 meter man. Ed
himself would fill in only when a position would otherwise remain unmanned;
he preferred either 160 or 10 meters; he felt his job was to keep the
hardware side of the operation running smoothly. If an antenna or rotor
problem cropped up, Ed would climb a tower to fix it no matter what the
weather, or no matter what the time of day or night. If there was an
operator to two to spare, they would go out an help Ed from the ground. If
not, Grace would generally fill that assignment herself. I can remember
once going out in the dark to help move an 80 meter sloper around in an
effort to get a CE1 who was not answering our calls, and the move was
successful! Others who filled in where needed as I did were Carl Kratzer,
WA3HRV, now K3RV, who eventually became the main 40 meter
operator; "Little Charlie" Weir, W6HOH/W3NPZ, now W6UM; Bob Morris, W4MYA;
and Gene Zimmerman, K1ANV, now W3ZZ. I'm sure I have left a few out as I
was not in the area very much during my early years in the foreign
service. On one occasion a fresh-faced 16-year-old whose call is now K3LR
came down from the Pittsburgh area to see what big-time contesting was like
at W3MSK. Another op who spent some time sitting in Ed's operating chairs
was the legendary Don Riebhoff, K7CBZ/K7ZZ, of XU1DX, HS3DR and CT4AT fame.
A new arrival to operate at W3MSK would be overwhelmed by the tall towers
sticking up through the trees on Ed's heavily-wooded lot, which supported
such monstrosities as a 5-el 40 meter Yagi, 7-el Yagis on 20 and 15, maybe
10-el on 10 -- I don't recall -- as well as a 2-el Yagi on 80 and wires for
160 and for receiving snaking through the trees in all directions. Ed's
QTH was very close to the Potomac River and the towers and antennas could
easily be seen from the other side of the river at Mount Vernon, VA, which
had been President George Washington's residence in days of yore. Ed's QTH
was so situated that when we beamed "over the Pole" into Asia we beamed
right up the Potomac River which we felt gave us a big advantage over the
competition in that direction, though we couldn't always beat the legendary
W3CRA in pile-ups on Asians.
At the end of the contest Ed would usually come to my operating position
with a potent highball to celebrate the successful completion of yet
another contest, and "bottoms-up" it was.
The principal competition in those days for W3MSK was the big installation
in Tuxedo Park, NY of Buzz Reeves, K2GL. At that time, hard as it is to
believe now, all of the W1's thought we had a big propagation advantage
over them because they thought they were too close to the North
Pole during disturbed conditions. As I recall the story, a group of W1's
surreptitiously drove down to observe Ed's operation to try to figure out
what his secrets of success were. After being parked along the road next
to Ed's lot for some time they were accosted by a county cop who told them:
"You can't park here --- CIA!"
They needn't have been so secretive about their visit, for Ed's door was
always open to ham visitors and no appointment was necessary. I recall
that at the height of the 1968 riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s
assassination, when much of downtown Washington was put to the torch, it
fell to me to pick up Dick Klein, K9OPF, later K4GKD, an old pal from
Wisconsin who was at that very moment arriving by train at Union Station in
downtown Washington to go to work for the Government. I was an apartment
dweller in suburban Virginia at the time and the direct route from my place
to the train station forced me to thread my way through smoky streets where
cars had been abandoned by their owners who had been caught in the traffic
jam created by the riots and were desperate to get out of town and to
safety. After picking Dick up the only place I could think of which might
provide a safe haven for us without requiring me to drive back through the
danger zone was Ed's, so Dick and I promptly headed there where Ed gave
Dick a warm welcome to Washington and assured him that the city was not
normally in such turmoil.
At one point there developed a nasty line noise and Ed, after some
searching, located the offending pole. Each time the noise popped up
again, Ed would hand a big sledgehammer to an operator who was unoccupied
at the moment and instruct him to drive down and hit the pole until,
listening on the car's radio, the noise stopped.
In the effort to compete with K2GL, W4BVV and W3MSK decided it would be a
good idea to join forces in pooling information and converted some old
command sets to 147.00 MHz. where DX spots were passed from one station to
the other. This may very well have been the pioneer spotting net in the
history of contesting. To this day the frequency which most PVRC'ers in
the Washington area use when driving to and from work is the repeater whose
output frequency is 147.00, K3WX, whose owner, Tony Faiola, is a
long-time PVRC member.
Ed was one of a number of PVRC contesters who came to the Washington area
to work for the U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL), and it was no coincidence
that a lot of contest sites in those days were located just south of the
District of Columbia in Maryland, not far from the Potomac River, an easy
commute to the NRL HQ along the Potomac River in Southeast DC. Before Ed
moved to his eventual QTH in Accokeek, he had rolled up some big single-op
scores from a hilltop in Forest Heights, MD. My QTH, by the way, is in the
same general area.
When NASA was formed to run the U.S. space program, the new agency raided
NRL for a lot of its initial scientists and engineers, and Ed was one of
them, as was his boss at the time, Karl Medrow, W3MCG, later W3FA, who was
also a PVRC member and later erected a multi-multi of his own. Ed
eventually became NASA's liaison to the Indian space program, and made many
a trip to the Indian spaceport at Trivandrum, where he developed lasting
personal friendships with other Indian hams including VU2JN and VU2PKK. In
recent years, after retiring to Florida and assembling yet another super
antenna farm with the assistance of Pete Raymond, N4KW, Ed had kept regular
daily CW and SSB skeds with Jayram and Kutty and others out there, as well
as weekly skeds with W6UM and other of his former ops. He was in
reasonably good health and regularly active up until about three months
before his death.
Since Ed travelled so much to India at that time, he was the principal
driving force in the effort to establish a reciprocal operating agreement
with India following the passage of the Goldwater bill which made such
agreements possible, and he was the first American licensed under the
agreement, holding the call VU2MSK for many years.
So Ed, mentor to so many budding contesters, inventor of so many
multi-multi procedures and techniques, we loved ya, man, and we'll miss
ya. If you ever learn how to communicate back here from the fifth
dimension, give us a call.
In fond remembrance,
Fred Laun, K3ZO
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