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K5LAD - 50+ Years
of Ham Radio Memories
Volume XIII
Picking
the Frequencies – When and Why?
Have you ever wondered about how some of the default
2 meter FM frequencies were determined? Some
of the reasoning behind these decisions are known and some are not, at least by me.
I got into the 2 meter FM arena in late 1964 or early
1965. I’d just gotten married and
graduated from college with a degree in education. I
was now prepared to go out into the cold cruel world and make my fortune by teaching
school. With such a stunning resume and all
the tremendous financial possibilities, I was ready to spend hundreds, no thousands of
dollars in setting up my complete ham station. Why
then did I not even have enough to buy a used vacuum tube?
Back in those days, when you heard the old saying,” He
didn’t have a pot…..” they were not making reference to drugs. I sure wanted to get on that WA5LVT repeater on
146.94 MHz but I couldn’t afford to even buy one of the Motorola or GE surplus
radios, which were what almost everyone on the repeater was running. At that time, WA5LVT had been active on the Tulsa
airwaves for several years.
By a fortunate stroke of fate, a company in Tulsa
donated quite a few RCA Carfone 10 watt, dual-frequency mobile transceivers to the Tulsa
Red Cross, which was working very closely with the Tulsa Repeater Organization and the
Electron Benders ARC. The Red Cross offered
the free, long-term use of one of these fully operational radios with just a few
restrictions:
1.
The user must buy two sets of crystals; one set was to go into that user’s
Carfone and the other to one of the other Carfones that would be used by the Red Cross. A set of crystals consisted of 3 pieces: 1 – 146.94 RX, 1 – 146.34 TX, and 1
– 146.94 TX and, as I recall, cost about $30-$35 per set.
2.
In addition, the recipient would agree to work with the Tulsa Red Cross in the
position of “Disaster Representative.” This
was the person who monitored the Tulsa Fire Department radio frequencies and went to bad
fires to help families (or individuals) who were burned out of their homes and had no
place to live. As an aside, I don’t know
how many times, when I told someone I was a “Disaster Representative” their
first question was, “What kind of disasters do you represent?”
This all is just to say that almost every repeater, at
least in most of this part of the country and also much of the rest of the U.S., used
(146).34/.94 as their frequency. The reasons
were, if everyone used the same frequency, regardless of where you traveled, you could
usually find someone to talk with. When you
were on the road you could use 146.94 direct when no repeaters were available. Few hams used a PL (sub-audible tone) so you
didn’t need a list of what tone to switch to. There
were a few areas in California that wanted more than just one repeater so the frequency
146.76 became the output frequency for a 2nd repeater in the area. There was even a popular regular article in the
maverick but popular publication, FM Magazine, called “The
Chronicles of ‘76.” The stories
often told about questionable activities carried out on the 76 repeaters out west.
When, in the early 1970s, some companies began
offering solid state and/or hybrid (tube and transistor) 2 meter transceivers, which were
smaller they became quite popular with many hams. They
did not require long and heavy cables run through the vehicle to the rear trunk where the
radio was mounted, so many hams abandoned their older, heavier, nosier, power-hungry
police and taxi radios for new model. Even
better, these new radios were multi-frequency, i.e., they had empty spaces for additional
crystals, so the user could add more direct (car to car) frequencies and it became much
easier to have more repeaters in an area. With
more possibilities of direct frequencies and some pairs or groups going off on “their
own secret frequency,” the question came up – if we’re out traveling and
want to communicate with FMers who are also out traveling, what frequency should we use?
BTW – There is no “secret frequency”
available to only a few. Abraham Lincoln once
said, “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five? No,
four – just calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” By the same token, just saying that 146.### is
YOUR private frequency doesn’t make it YOUR private frequency. The FCC has made this abundantly clear. As some would say, “It ain’t yours, it
ain’t mine; it’s ours.”
There was a need for a “standard” 2 meter
FM frequency for everyone, but what should it be? You
didn’t want to use a direct frequency on a repeater’s output, i.e., 146.94,
146.76, or the newly popular 146.82, since operation there could be covered when one came
into range of a powerful repeater on that same frequency.
No, we needed a direct frequency which would never have a repeater output
placed upon it. You could drive in town or on
the interstate and have a better-than-average chance of having other hams listening on the
same frequency. This would be a National 2
Meter Calling frequency.
At about this time, and I’m guessing this is
about 1971 (plus or minus a year), Wayne Green entered the picture. Wayne Green – W2NSD/1, was well known in ham
circles as an “especially active ham” or perhaps a “pot-stirrer” or
even a “rabble-rouser.” He had been
editor of CQ Magazine in the 1950s and very early 1960s.
Wayne had been one of the early pushers of RTTY (Radio TeleTYpe) in those
days and was a frequent “thorn in the flesh” of the ARRL. In late 1961, Wayne had left CQ (at their
insistence) and had moved to New Hampshire where he started a new ham magazine called, 73
Magazine
This magazine was closer to the average ham who liked to
build, repair, and tinker with electronic projects.
The articles were using parts and pieces that were affordable enough for the
average ham, practical enough for experimenters and might even be using many of the parts
many hams already had collecting dust in their “Junque Box.”
The ham population was fairly divided in their
opinion of Wayne. You usually liked him or
hated him. Wayne relished this position and
often wore it like a badge of honor. I will
admit right here that I was in the former group. I
didn’t always agree with some of his ideas but I thought he had been a genuine
benefit to amateur radio. I understood more
of 73 Magazine and found it to be more practical for me than the other available ham
magazines.
Wayne Green was one of the early promoters of RTTY, 2
meter FM communications, ham usage of computers, and any number of other important areas
we use today. He started a number of other
magazines to support new technical areas including BYTE and KiloBaud
Magazines. Anyway, he was a heavy and active
promoter of 2 meter FM activities when the user groups were few and far between, both
personally and geographically.
In around 1971 or 1972, Wayne started a promotion to
make 146.520 MHz the standard calling frequency in the USA.
I don’t know why this frequency was chosen except it was between the
tunings of repeater inputs and their outputs – in an era where many were still
running commercial mobile equipment which tuned very narrowly. He proposed that every manufacturer of 2 meter FM
equipment provide a set of crystals on 146.52 MHz as standard equipment. In addition, he proposed that any ham radio dealer
or any crystal manufacturing facility offer crystals for .52 at a reduced price to equip
all the existing equipment with that frequency.
At that time, I was co-owner of Derrick Electronics,
a ham radio store (aka “Candy Store”) located in Broken Arrow. At this time I had an agreement with a company who
would custom manufacture my crystals and I was selling hundreds, shipping them daily all
over the US and beyond. I received a letter
from Wayne asking me to consider offering .52 crystals at a reduced rate and in return, he
would add me to the list of dealers who he freely advertised who were offering this
service. I gladly jumped aboard that train
and I couldn’t even begin to tell how many thousands of .52 crystal pairs I sold,
both locally and via the US Mail.
I had already become known as “Crystal Jim”
and carried that nickname for many years, even long after I sold the store in 1981 and
went off into the sunset to regain my life and raise boys.
That’s another story, however, and perhaps I’ll write it up
sometime in the future if there is any interest.
So Wayne Green – W2NSD/1 is the primary reason
that 146.52 MHz is the recognized US 2 meter FM Calling Frequency today. Wayne went on to write stranger and stranger
columns in 73 Magazine, columns about cold fusion, UFOs, and the
“fact”(his words, not mine) that the U.S. journey to the moon was a complete
hoax and was all staged in the deserts of the western USA.
Still, I always liked 73 Magazine best of all. I wrote articles that were published in the
magazine and I have an almost complete collection of the issues from Dec. 1961 (I believe)
until the magazine folded about 5 years ago. I
even had a “Lifetime Subscription” to 73 Magazine although I
discovered that they meant their lifetime and not mine.
Incidentally, I did have my “Lifetime
Subscription” cancelled – TWICE – during those years. That, however, is a different story for a
different time.
73 (the greeting, not the magazine)
Jim – K5LAD
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