Calling CQ

Of course it would have been more natural for his boy to have helped him
on the roof, but the boy's cousin would do fine. He was 11, and big for
11, so the two of them should be able to hoist up the home-made antenna
structure without any difficulty.

He had been working on his ham rig for several years now, soldering
the basic parts of the transmitter together while living in that tiny
little one bedroom apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, an abode
he and his wife had been fortunate to rent, and a rather pleasant spot to
live with the two kids (one a newborn) during the final days of the war.
He had acquired his amateur radio license the previous fall. The hard part
had been that Morse code test, in which you had to correctly interpret
at least thirteen words per minute and, as easy as that may sound,
he had struggled to do it. Learning the code itself wasn't all that
difficult; after all it was just combinations of dots and dashes---or as
the cognescenti called them, di's and dah's. But unravelling those di's
and dah's he heard in the headphones at a rate of five or six per second,
and then having to scribble down on paper the corresponding letters had
been a struggle.

He had also taught his boy the code, and he knew one day that kid would
surely get his own license and they'd both be on the air communicating
with hams around the world. It really would have been better had he
been able to have his boy help him install this damn antenna on the roof,
but the nephew would do nicely. He was 11, and he was strong.

"Dah-di-dah-di dah-dah-di-dah, Dah-di-dah-di dah-dah-di-dah, " he'd
say to his boy, and the kid was quick and repeated it right away.
"That's how you call CQ, CQ," he told him, "and then you listen to see if
somebody calls back. It's the way you let somebody know you're wanting
to connect." He told him that you needed to let the others know your
call letters so they could respond, and the way you indicated that was
to send the word "de," which in code was dah-di-di di. This word meant
"from," probably was Latin or something, and then after that you'd send
out your call letters. His call was W1OCW, so that meant you'd send "CQ,
CQ, de w1ocw." The boy caught on immediately and could type out the code:
"dah-di-dah-di dah-dah-di-dah dah-di-dah-di dah-dah-di-dah dah-di-di
di di-dah-dah di-dah-dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah dah-di-dah-di di-dah-dah"
He was proud of his boy.

After all the soldering was done and the basic transmitter built, he
bought a receiver from some commercial outfit, and then he was ready to
get on the air. But he never wanted to broadcast CW---in code---he wanted
to use "phone," meaning install a mike and use voice transmission. To
accomplish that, the transmitter had to be a good bit more complicated,
but he thought it would be worth it. In fact, he never really liked the
dots and dashes as much as his son did. That kid would turn out to be
a mathematician, the kind of guy who'd relish codes and ciphers and such.

Then later, the war being over, relocated with his family in Florida,
the home-made transmitter properly upgraded to phone, and his call letters
having been changed to W4OCW from W1OCW, he was finally on the air.

"I'm using two 6l6's to drive a pair of 807's," he'd describe his
transmitter to whoever had responded to his CQ---now broadcast by voice
instead of with those di's and dah's. The boy would sit with him in
the ham shack, the dad constantly watching to make sure the boy's hand
wouldn't accidentally touch a hot wire, while he himself called out over
the air to talk to another amateur radio guy.

"The handle here is Larry," he'd say, although his name wasn't Larry
at all. That was his boy's name. He himself was called Button by all
of his family, and he must have reckoned that, though Button might be
a kind of clasp, it was not a fit ham's handle.

Never mind your 6l6's and your 807's, if you wanted to have some
real broadcasting muscle, you needed a personally-designed antenna,
one especially configured for your shack's topography, your local
atmospheric conditions, the frequency band to which you were assigned,
etc., and that's what he'd finally learned how to make. After several
months of intently studying antenna designs in ham magazines, and then
running his plans by fellow radio enthusiasts at his work, he built two
6-foot wooden squares out of 1 by 2's, each having antenna wire strung
in a critically-designed criss-cross pattern. Then he joined the two
assemblies using a metal rod to form a kind of dumbell, maybe ten feet
long, with the wired squares as the two ends. This whole apparatus
was to be mounted on a rotatable wheel at the end of a vertical post
sticking up out of the roof, allowing the antenna to be precisely aligned,
from inside the shack, with the incoming radio waves. To get this damn
thing in place was going to take some coordinated muscle. He would have
preferred his boy to be helping him, but the nephew would do fine. He
was big for his age, ...

He was a quiet man, a temperate fellow, an accepting and accommodating
gentle man, whose voice was rarely raised. He had sat patiently for
hours carefully soldering little wires to little posts to build his radio
transmitter, had calmly sat on the couch practicing his dots and dashes,
displaying naught but commitment and diligence, and had unselfishly
spent many days explaining to his boy as best he could---with his own
limited accurate knowledge of electronics and radio transmission---just
how the electromagnetic wave came in here, was modulated there, filtered
through this condenser, then amplified here, and finally converted to
audio in the speaker. He sounded, actually was, that same calm fellow
when he was on the air---never bragging about his 6l6's and his 807's
and how they were designed in a push-pull circuit that would efficiently
double his power---but just pleasantly used his on-air time describing
the beautiful Orlando weather, agreeing to exchange QSL cards, and
wishing his conversationalists the best of luck with their equipment.
"73's," he say, using the ham's code for "have a nice day."

But he couldn't ask his boy to climb on to the edge of the roof, and try
to balance a six foot square of wires, while his dad drilled a hole in the
post and tried to secure the dumbell-shaped antenna onto it. the boy was
also 11 and strong enough, but it just wouldn't do. The cousin didn't
know anything about dah-di-dah-di dah-dah-di-dah, but he'd do fine to
help erect this highly-improved access to the ham world.

His boy stood in the yard listening to the construction on the roof, in
a way longing to have been up there helping. He couldn't see anything,
but he imagined them wrenching the big bolts into place so that South
America, India, Norway, and everywhere else in the world would come in
loud and clear when they next cranked up the rig.

But then something went wrong. Was there some wind, a breath of a
breeze throwing something off balance? Did his cousin drop his end of
the antenna? Did some wire break, ruining the whole antenna circuitry?
The boy didn't know, and he never really was told exactly what
happened. All he heard was his dad saying something, in an unfamiliar
loud voice, like "OK, never mind, let it go, it ain't gonna work, just
step back." And then apparently his dad had somehow taken hold of the
entire contraption in his own hands, releasing the cousin from duty,
and had thrown the whole goddam thing, probably his most ambitious ham
project, off the roof and sent it crashing to the ground midst the orange
trees beside the house.

The boy wondered if he could have helped out. Was his father crying?