Tag: books

Travels With Barley

travels_with_barley

I started reading this book, by Ken Wells, on my Kindle. Great read that covers the history of beer – which I knew started in Iraq but ironically you are not allowed to drink it there now. The story follows beer to America, the development of the brewery system, the ascendancy of the big breweries, and the explosion of microbrews. The backdrop for the story is Ken Wells journey along the Mississippi River, from north to south, in his attempt to locate cool beer joints.

Wells even mentions the first recognized microbrew in the US – Bert Grant’s place in Yakima, Washington. I’ve been there and was a big fan of Bert’s brew. I think it is closed now and been replaced by the Yakima Craft Brewing Co. Grant’s was a great pub with wonderful brew. Although my favorite Washington microbrew is the Ram Big Horn Brewing Company.

I’m really enjoying Ken’s roadtrip but it’s making me thirsty.

The Review, Part 2: The World of Ham Radio, 1901-1950: A Social History

Read part 1 of the review here

This was a book I hated to finish reading. Chapters 9 – 12 are full of amateur radio’s involvement in aviation, sea journeys, and the exploration of the polar regions. There is great coverage of the private schooner Yankee, which sailed around-the-world with a crew made up of college age young men and stops included the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island, Pitcairn (a fascinating story there), Manga, and Tahiti. Alan Eurich, W8IGO, worked the onboard rig and was an invaluable member of the crew. Chapter 10 talks about an amazing air race between Oakland, CA and Hawaii – amateur radio played a key role in tracking the planes and providing help. Anne Morrow Lindbergh operated a rig when flying with her husband, making contacts with many amateurs. The most interesting of the Antarctica explorations involved radio operator Sidney Jeffryes who’s isolation and resulting insanity jeopardized the mission… sending crazed reports back to Australia via Macquarie Island. Almost all the major polar expeditions used radio. QST covered almost all these adventures, sparking the imagination of young hams back home.


Chapter 13 covers amateur radio’s involvement in supporting emergency and disaster response. Flooding, hurricanes, and fire – hams responded and used their radios to help the authorities organize their efforts as well as to pass health and welfare traffic. The forest service was also instrumental in the development of portable radio with the help of dedicated amateurs.

Chapters 14 and 15 cover the neutrality period prior to WWII, WWII itself, and the early post-war years. QST encouraged those hams enlisting in the service to bring along their FCC license and push to be placed in a signal organization to take advantage of their skills.

The World of Ham Radio, 1901-1950: A Social History is a great book, well written, entertaining, and enlightening as to the roots of amateur radio in the US. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history of ham radio and the individual hams who have contributed so much in the early years.

The Review, Part 1: The World of Ham Radio, 1901-1950: A Social History

This is a modern telling of Clinton DeSoto’s 1936 classic 200 Meters and Down story through meticulous research of the author, Richard Bartlett, and the amateur radio experiences of the his brother Forrest, W6OWP. Tracing the start of radio from Marconi through the emergence of a thriving hobby in the post WWI years, Bartlett does a wonderful job of taking the reader on a journey through the history of ham radio. It is a more vibrant story than 200 Meters, aided by hindsight and a wealth of primary sources the author pulls from. When he describes the early boy-ham experimenter, I immediately drew a parallel with the boy-“hackers” of the 1980s and 90s. Teenage boys, curious and prone to mischief with knowledge of a new technology unfamiliar to most. Ignorance easily creates fear, and these early boy-hams were often looked at as a danger and a threat.


There is good coverage of the early organizations supporting ham radio to include The Royal Order of the Wouff Hong. I’d always heard about the Wouff Hong and it was fascinating to read about it’s humorous origins.

Bartlett covers many of the highlights of ham radios initial contributions: demonstrating the ability to relay messages across the country, providing a means of communications in support of disaster areas, and sending messages across the globe. It is amazing that amateur radio survived the post-WWI years – threatened by both the military and commercial broadcast interests. The hobby also created a commercial industry of amateur radio equipment suppliers – Bartlett describes the elaborate displays these businesses put on at the Chicago’s 1933-34 World’s Fair that helped capture the imagination of the public.

The best part of the book so far is Bartlett’s coverage of ham radio’s support to exploration in the 1920s and 30s (Chapter 7, Amateurs as Experimenters and Adventurers). Harry Wells, W3ZD, accompanied a 1929 scientific expedition to Borneo and sent reports back to hams in the states. Bertram Sandham, W6EQF supported an automobile expedition to open up an International Pacific Highway from Fairbanks, AK to Buenos Aires. The descriptions of both these portable and mobile operations are exciting and inspiring.


I’m still working through the book, so more to come.

… part 2 of the review is here

Progress… slow and steady

– I’m making a solid effort to improve my working knowledge of basic electronics. I’ve been working through Understanding Basic Electronics and Chapter 4, Electrical Fundamentals, from the ARRL 2007 Handbook.


Honestly, this stuff does not come easy to me. But I’m committed to slug through it.
– Also working on my CW skills. It is slow going, but it feels great when I can actually get solid copy on a real QSO.

And totally unrelated:
– Been watching the new Battlestar Galatica series. I remember watching the original way back when. I’m enjoying the episodes so far.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

This is the first book I’m reading on my Sony Reader. I’m not really sure how I ended up with this book… I was noodling through Sony’s Connect digital bookstore and before I knew it, I’d downloaded the book. The author, Chuck Klosterman, is brilliantly insightful and a pleasure to read. The book consists of a dozen or so essays on Gen X culture and life in general. His writing style reminds me of a long, lost friend Scott Petri… witty, intellectual, and diabolically hilarious.

More on the Sony Reader: I like it! Weight is nice. Size is comfortable. Best of all is the readability of the eInk…. it is almost like reading off of paper. I’ve loaded up a total of 70 some odd books to include two additional Klosterman novels. When I find an author I like, I tend to want to read all they’ve written: Nick Hornsby, Neal Stephenson, Bill Bryson…. and my maddening addiction to Rick Steves travel guides.

Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio by Danny Gregory and Paul Sahre

Author Danny Gregory went to a flea market and found a ring binder containing 369 colorful and cryptic-looking postcards. Intrigued, he bought the collection and did some investigating. These cards were ham radio QSL cards, which are postcards that hams send to one another after they make contact over the airwaves. This particular collection once belonged to a man named Jerry Powell, an aeronautical engineer who died at age 93 in 2000. Jerry was a lifelong ham radio enthusiast his earliest QSL card is from 1928. Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio won’t teach you how to become a ham, or show you new ham radio techniques. Its not a technical book at all. Instead, this book is about Jerry Powells life as seen through his lifelong hobby, and its a compelling and absorbing read, even for readers who aren’t hams. All QSL cards are unique. They feature the call sign for a radio station, and includes cryptic notes on the conversation, the kind of radio equipment used in this connection, and little personal touches that reflect the ham’s personality. Each QSL card is either made by or for the ham, and it’s very much like a picture postcard from that region. Some cards look like regular tourist postcards, and others are hand-drawn, or feature photos of the ham with family or, more commonly, in their radio shack.

Hello World was designed by Paul Sahre, a well-known illustrator. His design work in this book is amazing and carefully organized so both diehard ham radio operators and novices can appreciate Jerry Powell’s worldwide ham radio contacts over the course of his lifetime. All the pages are adorned with colorful QSL cards with detailed annotations for many of them. There’s a fold-out map of the world with little dots for all of the ham connections Powell made worldwide, so readers can cross-reference the QSL cards in his collection. There’s also a chart graphing the number of QSL cards that Powell received per decade. 1940-1949 was his most prolific period, with 98 contacts.

http://www.theconnection.org/photogallery/hamradios/default.asp?counter=1

Talk of the Nation, April 30, 2003 Join host Neal Conan for a discussion on
ham radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1248508

Playing With Trains – Sam Posey

I saw this book about 2 weeks ago on the “three books for the price of two” table at Borders. I’d just purchased Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods about his adventures on the Appalachian Trail or otherwise I think I would have purchased the Posey book on the spot. A book about railroad modeling…. very cool. Like amateur radio, model railroading is a hobby I wish I could devote more time to. I had a layout as a kid and also remember setting up my Dad’s old Lionel train set around the Christmas tree. I still have the Lionel train and some of the track.

Great book… nicely told story.

In the Beginning…was the Command Line

My latest dabblings in Linux prompted me to dig out my copy of Neal Stephenson’s “In the Beginning… was the Command Line” – it’s a wonderful read:

“So when I got home I began messing around with Linux, which is one of many, many different concrete implementations of the abstract, Platonic ideal called Unix. I was not looking forward to changing over to a new OS, because my credit cards were still smoking from all the money I’d spent on Mac hardware over the years. But Linux’s great virtue was, and is, that it would run on exactly the same sort of hardware as the Microsoft OSes–which is to say, the cheapest hardware in existence. As if to demonstrate why this was a great idea, I was, within a week or two of returning home, able to get my hand on a then-decent computer (a 33-MHz 486 box) for free, because I knew a guy who worked in an office where they were simply being thrown away. Once I got it home, I yanked the hood off, stuck my hands in, and began switching cards around. If something didn’t work, I went to a used-computer outlet and pawed through a bin full of components and bought a new card for a few bucks.”

David F. Mangels, AC6WO, SK

David F. Mangels, AC6WO, SK (Mar 29, 2006) — Author and Amateur Radio instructor Dave Mangels, AC6WO, of Temple City, California, died March 24. He was 63. An ARRL member, instructor and volunteer examiner, Mangels taught Amateur Radio licensing classes for a fee at the Technician, General and Amateur Extra levels. In 2001, CQ Communications published his book The Mobile DXer–Your Practical Guide to Successful Mobile DXing. Mangels had 302 DXCC entities confirmed on SSB, no doubt many of them worked while he was operating mobile or portable. Survivors include his wife, Fran, AD6DC, and a son, Gary, AD6CD.