Kulpsville Reflections

STILL WAITING FOR MY PERSONAL HOVERCRAFT

Uncle Skip’s reflections on 1988 and the first SWL fest.

© 2007 by T.J. “Skip” Arey N2EI

It was 20 years ago in a fairly cheesy location called the Fiesta Motor Lodge that the largely informal gathering of radio hobbyists called The Winter SWLfest began. Those of you who know me are more than aware that I do not spend a great deal of time looking over my shoulder. I am far too interested in what tomorrow has to offer and, as Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long put it, “This is one monkey who is going to keep climbing until the tree runs out.”

That said, recalling that first Kulpsville gathering has put me in a sufficiently pensive mood that I will attempt a bit of free association about the year, the times, radio and other things. Hang on tight… we’re headed back.

First, a look at the 1988 shortwave world. The receivers of choice for so called serious DXers were the Icom ICR71A and the Japan Radio NRD-525. But some of us still held fast to our surplus Collins R-390A tube monsters. They not only heard really well but they kept the shack warm. Other popular General Coverage receivers included the Yaesu FRG8800 and the Kenwood R5000.

Shortwave brands such as AOR and Lowe had yet to make their mark in 1988. Grundig was positioned to reemerge in the market a short time in the future as well.

There were some players that you may have thought would have made a bigger splash in the market. Panasonic’s RF-B6000 for instance and the all too short lived Ten Tec RX-325 (I always regret missing the chance to buy one of those receivers.) In 1988 we even saw Heathkit’s “last gasp”, the SW-7800.

We all loved our Sony ICF 2010’s. . . Most of us still do.

The 1988 Passport to Worldband Radio had 352 pages and sold for $15. It was in this era that Larry’s Magne’s labor of love became an essential tool to the serious shortwave hobbyist’s efforts.

There were a few VHF/UHF oriented folks at the first Kulpsville gathering, including the founding fathers of that notorious group of radio madmen, The Scanner Scum. Just as shortwave equipment was advancing into a new era, scanning receivers were providing new features that would change the face of the hobby as well.

Popular handheld scanners in 1988 included the Bearcat BC100XLT, and the Regency HX1500. On the desktop you were likely to see the Bearcat BC145XL or the Radio Shack Pro 2005. It was also the era when the late great “Dr. Rigor Mortis” Bill Cheek began teaching folks how to modify their scanners to perform feats not even imagined by the manufacturers.

You could also buy the Bearcat BC800XLT and the Regency TS2, covering the 800MHz band. This era also saw the first communications quality VHF/UHF receivers made available to the hobbyist. Units such as the Icom ICR7000 and the Yaesu FRG9600 were making their mark. The ECPA was only 2 years old and “open” receivers were not yet outlawed.

If you played ham radio in 1988 there was a lot of great gear to be had as well.

The Icom IC2AT was the handheld 2 meter FM transceiver of choice for many hams.

Most full featured HF transceivers in the era began to include General Coverage, encouraging hams to tune around to see what else was out there on the bands. The Kenwood TS-440S was the cool HF rig with a ton of features. My friend Jon Cohen WB2KKS described it has having more buttons than he could figure out how to use. High end transceivers included the Ten Tec Paragon.

Packet Radio was starting to become an exciting ham mode. This early practical synthesis of radios and personal computers has had its ups and downs over the years but in 1988 everyone was beginning to find out what this mode had to offer.

Radio shack sold a “Complete Novice License Exam” package for $19.95 after all, they just got increased privileges the year before.

Good old Heathkit was still selling ham gear and computers, but the boys from Benton Harbor were not long for this world as a radio hobby company. Still, in 1988 they offered lots of opportunities to melt solder.

The most curious folks in the radio hobby were really beginning to see the practical side of personal computing and how it could enhance the enjoyment of the hobby.

In 1988, a popular program being used by DXers was Mini Prop. That was also the year that Kulpsville regular Mark Fine released his first “Fineware” program Map v1.10.

In 1988 the Internet was still DARPANET and out of reach to folks not in either the military or certain institutes of higher learning. The rest of us were using Q-link (the predecessor of AOL), Genie, Compuserve and Delphi to get on line along with Fidonet and other local and regional BBS systems. The online community was beginning to take shape and radio hobbyists of all stripes carved out their corner of the digital world.

Commodore C-64 and C-128 computers were very popular systems for those of us who could not yet afford the dough for an IBM PC or one of its early clones. I did a lot of Utility chasing using a RTTY decoder board that plugged into the back of a C-64.

The Intel 386 chip series was the dream set up if you could afford it (especially in the Compaq Deskpro line). 32 bit architecture running at 20 MHz. Today I use 386 chips to make keyrings!

Those of us using computers in our professions were enjoying the features of Lotus 1-2-3 release 3.0 or Borland Quattro. You could still make a living programming in Fortran, Cobol and even CP/M, but you were hitting the books hard if you planned to stay in the industry.

IBM had just announced the PS/2. All that is left of that design is the pinout for hard wired mice.

You thought you were on top of the world if you could afford a 1200 bps modem.

In the world of media, audio CD sales were beginning to outstrip vinyl LPs and we were all beginning to expect quite a bit more quality out of our audio systems.

We were watching “Max Headroom” on TV. If you ever get a chance to see those episodes again in the context of today, you will see just how amazingly prophetic the series was. Even more on target than the writings of the Cyberpunk SF school. It accurately predicted cell phones, extreme sports, multiple television networks, imbedded journalism, subliminal advertising, life extension scams and dozens of other things. As William Gibson put it himself, “There were no cell phones in ‘Neuromancer’.”

The world at large gave radio enthusiasts a lot to listen to. In 1988 we still had the Soviet Bloc but the first rips were beginning to form in the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union began its program of economic restructuring, Perestroika, with legislation initiated by Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. In that same time period, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heated up as the first Intifada began in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The world was an interesting place and the best place to learn about it remained shortwave radio.

As a radio hobby journalist, my life began to get very interesting right after the first SWLfest. The editorial staff of Frendx/NASWA Journal decided it was time to let someone else write the Technical Topics column that year. I had a bunch of stuff “in the can” so, at the suggestion of Paul Swearingan of the National Radio Club, I gave Bob Grove a call to see if he had any use for my words. In 1989, my first column appeared in Monitoring Times under the “Beginner’s Corner” header and that association has continued to this day. From that point on began a string of professional writing assignments that has kept my shack full of quality radio gear and computers ever since.

Fast forward to my typical day 20 years after the first SWLfest. At work I check my Blackberry ™ to see if I have any incoming messages, then I make a couple of calls on my cell phone (separate accounts…go figure). I use a nearby WiFi hot spot to log my laptop into the office network to update some information on my inventory. During my lunch hour I settle back to listen to Glen Hauser’s “World of Radio” podcast on my iPod. After lunch I get in the car and use its resident GPS system to locate my next appointment for the day. And, when the work day is though, I go home, kiss my wife, pet my dogs and then settle in to an evening of plying the shortwaves with two “black box” computer controlled, digital signal processing receivers supported by the vast array of information found on the Internet. My shack makes use of three networked computers to help with gathering information, logging and control applications for the radios. On my shelf above my HF gear I have four VHF/UHF scanners, all programmed by way of computer generated frequency files. In my basement workshop I am looking ahead to the next 20 years, beginning experiments with Software Derived Radio (SDR).

No flying cars yet, but 2007 sure has given me a lot of fun gadgets to play with. It occurred to me, as I look back on that weekend in February 1988, that I had none of these toys to play with back then. Most of these technologies were in their infancy (if they existed at all), or at least they were not in the hands of the common person.

It has been a good run, and I intend to keep climbing until the tree runs out.

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