Radio in the fleet was much like radio in Puerto Rico. The difference was a matter of mass. The Sara was an aircraft carrier, one of those long, flat-topped ships sporting 2,000 crew members, 86 airplanes, four catapult tracks and a firetruck. There were at least three rooms full of radios that listened to nothing but HF (3-30 MHz) traffic. Another room held enough VHF radios to listen to every airplane on the flight deck. And two rooms full of transmitters. There was a lot more mass in radios on the Sara than I had ever seen in Puerto Rico.
    But there was room enough for me. And there was a ham radio set up aft on the portside, just forward of the last bulkhead, before the first arresting cable. Eventually I gained access to that space and spent the rest of my USN underway and in-port time playing with a Collins S-Line & one of the Sara's 32 ft vertical whip antennas.
        It was actually a pretty cool way to spend the five months of a Med cruise. I didn't have palm trees and island verdure on the Sara, but I had a heck-of-a-better station than the simple set-up that I'd cobbled together in Puerto Rico. Only one problem: phone patches.
    Not that I didn't know how to do 'em. It's just that once the rest of the crew found out about the ham shack being open again (it had been left untended for probably the better part of the year I was on the Sara), they lined up at the door wanting to "call home."
    There was even a guy who had a "head of the line chit" from the chaplain, on the grounds that he was suffering from the long-term separation from his wife & he had a tendency to get nutty because of it. (More like he would send her thoughtless, mean letters accusing her of sleeping with the fleet and then suddenly have a change of heart about two days after the mail plane left . . . at which point he'd go to the chaplain, whine and weedle a bit and then show up at the shack door wanting to tell his wife not to read the letters that he'd just sent to her. 
    At any rate, I soon enough figured out how to get out of running phone patches: I claimed that my license had been modified so that I could no longer run patches and besides, the comm officer controlled the spaces and he had placed a limit on the "on-air" time that the room was allowed to have.
    Which left me with a lot of time to play CW. It was really quite a deal, what with me being unable to say what ship I was on or where in the universe I was posted. I could only say that I was on a USN ship in whatever maritime region I happened to be. My name & callsign were supposed to be the limit. It made for very bizarre conversations, especially with DX stations (which meant, even in Europe, almost anyone on the planet) who wanted to know all the hairy details.
    Another things that was weird was the guys who I met on CW. Most of 'em were nice enough folks, not too cranked up on high-speed CW. But every now and then, after saying that I was in the USN, one or the other of 'em would crank up the CW speed to see if I was really salty enough. In some ways it was a joke. I could copy easily 20 WPM back then, mostly from just being on the air with it or hearing it all the time (sometimes in my sleep). It's just that it got to be a kind of game: see if I can snow the sailor.
    At the end of the cruise, everything was nominally back to normal, and I also got access to the Mayport Naval Station ham radio club set up. Nice Drake gear. Serious antennas. A lot of fun. And then there was the little TRC77 military surplus rig in my beach apartment. Which leads directly into QRP, except I ain't finished tellin' you about the ham radio stuff quite yet . . .

Back to Civilian Life Again

Updated 25 July 2004

Woodstock, the Kent State killings, the escalated Vietnam War bombings and subsequent public protests all happened in the late 60s, when I was in Puerto Rico. I read about the events or heard about them second hand from others who listened to the local AFRTS radio station or got local newspapers from home. 
    My only sure knowledge of it was reading about them in the American Radio Relay League's publication, QST. In those pages I read about younger hams, mostly at protest-ridden colleges around the US, who had set up nets & discussion groups on the air to keep track of and keep people informed of the events. The ARRL editorialized dead against the practice.
    The nets, however, continued, often against the noisy interference of other hams who sided with the ARRL or who felt that politics should be kept off the ham bands. After all, the argument went, it was part of the ham's operating code: "No politics, no religion, no sex, no swearing."
    The protests & violence continued unabated and the radio nets continued. For me in Puerto Rico or on the USS Saratoga in the Mediterranean, it was all moot point.
    But on 18 March 1972, when I signed out of the active-duty Navy and returned to being what, was for me & at long last, a civilian, all of that changed. I moved my radio junk into the basement of my parents' house & started getting acquainted with the "local gang." Among the first people I met was the Ohio Valley Teenage Net. The fact that most of the members were well out of high school was of little importance to me then, and I gladly joined in their radio madness. Well, as much as I could, working nights & afternoons at the local newspaper. The same one where my father worked until his retirement.
    At some point along this time line, I moved into an apartment shared with a former college friend & tried to set up my Argonaut & homebrew accessories in a small bedroom. It was fun for a while & I got to have a few dozen QSOs with people around the country but seldom around the world.
    And then there was the Dayton Hamvention, which I learned about from Mike Suhar, WB8GXB, whom I met on 20m one afternoon while calling CQ. I went to that first civilian-issue Hamvention with my father. Dad considered all the expensive equipment and was impressed. He told me about the broadcaster he had worked at once in his youth. 
    The owners had set up studios in a house. The studios were in the various bedrooms and the transmitter had ended up in the bathroom where a bath tub had previously been. Dad said you could sit on the can & watch the mercury vapor rectifiers glow & pulse in time with the modulation peaks. station
    But 1972's Hamvention was the only one to which Dad ever went. It was a trying thing for him, keeping up with my youthful exuberance taxing his already slower rate of progress. We had to stop a couple times to just sit and let him catch his breath.
    The radio station was still in there. It was just slowing down, which is another story, further on, but another story just the same . . which leads to the next page.