Sorry folks--looks like the reflector ate my message and
the embedded photo. Here is the text again without the
photo. If you want to see the B&W photo I will mail a copy
to you privately, upon request. Thanks--John
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Dear Contesters--
I had a short exchange with Steve, K4FJ, that started out about
windmills and progressed into a little post-WWII contest history.
It got me to thinking that while some of these pioneers in
"Big Time Radio" are still alive, many are not. In fact many
of their "Elmerites" are getting pretty long in the tooth now
as well.
So while there is still lots of first-hand information and
some CLOSE second-hand information fairly fresh in our
collective memories maybe we should start a web site
history of these stations. It could be fun for a lot of us old
timers as well as very instructive for some of the newer ops
who missed out on this post-WWII explosion in technology
and station design.
One place to start would be with the Contest Hall of Fame list.
But there are a lot of stations and operators who are very
worthy of being "enshrined" in some sort of history book who
have never been so honored.
Of course there are the well known guys like W3GRF, W4KFC,
K2GL, W9TO, etc. But there are a lot of guys from the west coast
who are less well known and yet have made some serious
contributions both to station design and operating. And some
guys in the midwest who will never get any notice at all unless
we really make an effort to concentrate on their contributions.
What I am thinking about first are the Silent Keys out there
and those who are no longer active due to old age and poorer
health. (W7RM comes to mind here.) Or maybe just starting out
with stations who were pushing the state of the art in the 1950s
and then add the 1960s at some point.
Seems that it would be nice to generate a history book and cover
the guys that might be forgotten if we don't make some sort of
serious group effort. Hopefully there are some good photos of the
old-time stations that could be scanned and added to such a
book. And I would hope to spread the load so that any one
person only needs to write a few pages. With a little effort
we could get the first 100 guys into a site like this and it
would not be much of a burden on any one individual.
Part of my interest is to provide some recognition to my own
personal DX and contest Elmer--W0AR/W0AIW. Lee published
the first 4 element quad in QST in the early 60s as well as
the 4CX1000 der Loudenboomer amp that many used in the
KC area. W0AIH recently sent me this old photo of W0AIW
from the late 50s. N1GL and I did a MS in the CQWW CW
from here in 1962. By then an S-Line had been added to the
desk and one of the 75A4s had been retired. Lee founded
Radio Industries and manufactured amplifiers and rotators
under that name until he sold out to Hallicrafters and was a
long-time Honor Roll member. And Lee is still pretty active
with skeds with many friends (less anyone think he is a SK).
Just seems like it would be nice to get a lot of the history of
"Big Time Radio" collected into one place. And I would probably
not limit it to JUST contesters, but to anyone who made a
serious contribution to antennas, amplifiers, equipment, operating,
etc. Other midwest stations like W0SYK come to mind. Bill Brown
built some very nice amps for guys in the midwest. And W0NFA
is not well known but he did some serious MMs in the early
1960s with antennas that would still be competitive to this day.
I am NOT an HTML guy or a web master or anything that would
be very helpful in actually pulling this off. Best I can do is to
start the discussion and to cover a couple of guys that helped
me to get started. But it seems like a way to honor any Elmer
that helped make a real contribution to the advancement of the
state of the art of competitive radio.
So what do you think??
73--John W0UN
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