Paper Logs

As you know, I write about ham radio topics on Tuesdays. I've told you a little about how I got my start and some of the things I did on the air as a teen (and pre-teen). 

From day one, I have always kept paper logs of my ham radio contacts. My dad did that and I picked up the practice from him. In the modern era, with all the electronic logging methods, I still keep my paper logs for redundancy.  Call me "old school" in that way.

Lisa usually keeps a nice supply going for me. They show up as add-ons to birthday gifts, Father's Day and so forth.

In the log, an operator documents each contact she/he makes. The home operator writes down the other station's call sign, the other operator's name and location, the date and time of the contact, the frequency where the contact took place and the signal report for both stations. I've always enjoyed this discipline. 

I'm sure I shared some of these exciting details, in the early days, when I was telling my friend, Ed, about the hobby. 

Soon, when he learned about my exploits, he was hooked. It wasn't long before he studied, passed his exams and received his license and joined me in the pursuit.

We were both in the old novice class–why it didn't occur to either of us to move up in those days is somewhat baffling as much as we were into hamming–and, as such, your frequency privileges were limited. 

The antenna that we used when I got on the air provided me access to the 40 meter band. On 40 meters, I could talk to pretty much any place in North America. In fact, if you signed on just after dinner time and stayed on the air all evening, you could feel the time zones pass from the Eastern early in the evening, to the Central mid-evening and to the Mountain and Pacific times late night. 

It was like taking an on-air tour from coast to coast.

And occasionally, you'd get the random Caribbean Island or other foreign station, which was great fun for a young fired up fellah.

I'm not sure what Ed's set-up was but early on, he teamed his eyes on faraway lands. Or, in ham radio lingo - DX (meaning distance). One day, he chatted me up and reminded me that we had some frequency privileges on 15 meters with our novice tickets and, if we operated there, we could hunt all the DX we would like to log. 

I asked my dad about our other antenna, we set it up so I could seamlessly switch back and forth, and soon, I, too was on a DX Hunt. 

Fast forward to the present day, if you will. In my ham shack, I have boxes of artifacts from my early ham radio days including those old log books I mentioned earlier. So, recently, when I started thinking of the idea for today's blog, I found the books that tracked my 1970s (and early 80s) DXing. To be accurate, the period of time was from 1977-81. 

It was fun for me to discover that, in those days, my handwriting was different. Somewhere along the line, I adopted an all-caps print. But in 1977, I was still doing upper case/lower case. I've done the all caps method so long that it feels awkward to switch back to the old style (I can do it but I don't love it). 

Anyway, here's a snippet of one of those vintage log book pages.

Like yesterday's topic: a unique form of time travel.

I went through all the log books from that era and enjoyed reliving some of the contacts. One thing that jumped off the page was the different country names from Cold War Era Europe. Yugoslavia. Czechoslovakia. West Germany. Talk about time travel.

In another box in the shack, I have a few QSL cards from that era. Specifically, I remember one from England and one from West Germany among others. I enjoyed going through that box, too.

The next thing I did for today's post, as I do now at the end of each year, was to chart the QSOs (contacts) and total them up to see which countries I worked most often. In my WA4ZJW DX Days, here is my Top 10 list: 1. West Germany; 2. France; 3. England; 4. Italy; 5. Czechoslovakia; 6. Belgium; 7. Sweden; 8. Mexico; 9. Venezuela; 10. (tie) Hungary; Poland. 

Funny thing: if you were to look at my current Top 10 and last year's (and the year before), it wouldn't look a lot different (other than the name changes) from this list. But in a way, those early contacts felt a bit more precious because it was all new to me. 

Not to say that I take the whole thing lightly now. I definitely do not. I still get a thrill out of the notion that a signal I send with my low power and modest station can make it to other parts of the world. That is no small feat.

Just last weekend, during SKCC's Weekend Sprintathon (WES), I made contacts with stations in Germany, France, Belgium, Puerto Rico and Mexico as well as four Canadian provinces. That was cool. And you know what? I added them to my paper logs, too. 

In a way, the late 70's DX hunt was Ed's gift back to me after my gift of helping him get started in the hobby. One good turn deserves another.

JG