Originally published in the February 1987 issue of the Collector & Emitter.
The faithful will remember that Q, R. Zedd, world’s greatest DXer and holder of the nation’s only 1×1 callsign, A5A, recently got trapped into becoming the Elmer for a prospective new member of the amateur radio community.
It develops that the new student of amateur radio theory is named Homer Klott, and we were honored recently to witness one of his early visits to Honor Roll Ranch, just a hoot and a holler south of town.
Most folks who want to be hams are neat people. Homer, we are sorry to report, is a different kettle of fish.
He is not, as they say, real swift.
Those of us who did not fully realize the finite number of Homer’s brain cells had the enormity of Zedd’s teaching task brought home to us vividly that recent night when we were in the A5A hamshack when Homer came for his weekly lesson.
We all got up to leave. “Stay,” Zedd ordered. “Sometimes this is hard to take alone, and Tondelayo is visiting Momma over in Mena.”
So we stayed.
Homer, wearing his 10-4 Good Buddy sweat shirt and bib overalls, told Zedd he had really studied hard.
“I studied a bunch!” Homer said, pleased with himself. Zedd sat him down in a chair facing his own at the No. 1 operating position.
“All right, Homer,” said Zedd with quiet resignation, Have you been studying your book on electronic theory like I told you?”
“Forty roger affirm!”
Homer shot back gleefully. “I got a bunch of that stuff down cold, good buddy! Ask me anythang! Hey! Ask me about them resistance!”
“You mean resistors and resistance?” Zedd asked with sad resignation. ‘Like Ohm’s Law?”
“Roger forty!” Homer cried. “Circus theory! Home’s Lawl All them ham stuff!”
“Ohm’s Law,” Zedd corrected with pained calm. “Roger dodger! You wanna hear me talk Electronic? I got it down cold!”
Zedd’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling, but he gamely held his temper. “Homer, tell me what you know about resistance, Ohm’s Law, and so on.”
“Resistance,” Homer said with pride in his tone, “is what you get … its sort of like when you got a garden hose? You know? And you got the water running through it, you know, and then you go over mud you bend the hose, kind of put you a kink in it? And do you know what? Them water electrons get squoze down, they can’t flow out so fast, and out of the nozzle you get less. And that is like resistance, to put it in ham talk.”
There was a quiet grinding sound in the room: Zedd’s teeth.
“Go on,” he grated.
“When you got you some resistors in a bunch of wires, what you got is a circus,” Homer went on excitedly. “There is things to measure your circus, one is called a VOM, which stands for Valuable Old Meter.”
“In your circus you can have your resistors different ways. That’s if you have more than one. Some is big and some is small, some is brown and some is other color, but most have got these color bands on. And what the color bands do is, they tell you how to arrange your resistors so they don’t clash, and take ohms out when you want to put them in.”
“You can have your resistors in two ways. You can have them arranged in serious or you can have them arranged in perilous.”
“Serious is just what it says, when you do them that way, they WORK! You add them up, all the colors, so you get something like red-red-green-yellow-orange-black-black-yellow, which is several. When they are serious, they go together and you get a lot.”
“Perilous is different. This is the one little part I don’t have real clear yet and maybe you can help me, or maybe I have got it right. What perilous is, is this: you hook them up on the wires and all, but instead of you looking down the long way, what you do is sort of look across sideways. So they don’t add, they divide.”
“Except in solid state, where you don’t have no wires, only EPROMS. And that is a different ballgame, believe me! But I don’t have to know no Boolean arithmetic for my Novice, do I?”
“No, son,” Zedd said, opening another Coors with his mouth. “You don’t.”
“You want to hear the rest?’ Homer asked.
“Yes,” Zedd said, game to the end. “Press on.”
“When you have serious and when you have perilous, either one, you can have Home’s Law,” Homer told us. “Now, Home’s Law is hard, but the gist of it is this. Sometimes you add and sometimes you subtract. But whichever you do, you do them one at a time.”
“The way Home’s Law goes is, E, I and one other letter. You arrange them different for what you want. What you want is what you get. Laws are laws, you can’t change them.”
“The E part is like, remember when I talked about the hose? Well, the E part is the faucet. There is pressure in them faucet even when they are off. Except if you leave the hose hooked up at this time of year, then you freeze the E all the way into the sillcock and it probably leaks in your bedroom closet or someplace like that. But the E is the pressure.”
“The I part is where you have stuff corning out, it’s sort of how fast. And the other letter I think is R, which is the resistor part.”
There was a crunching sound, Zedd chewing off part of his Coors can.
“You can have big resistors,’ Homer told him, “and you measure them in kilos. The small ones come in millis. If you have a big E, you need a big R. And the opposite is equally true.”
Zedd threw his can through a window and bit a leg off his chair. “Boy, you don’t have the capacity to learn how to pick your nosel You ==”
“Capacity?” Homer repeated. “Capacity! That’s one of them other things, you got capacities and you got inducers. When you get into all that, you’re into heavier stuff, boy, because that is not just simple electrical circus, them are AC!”
Zedd looked in a mirror. Sure enough, there was more gray in his hair. He fought for calm.
“Why,” he asked, hoping for a miracle, perhaps, “do capacitors and inductors involve AC theory?”
Homer blinked, and then brightened as he found his answer in memory. “AC is alternate. DC is diligent. But in AC it takes a lot to faze the circus because of the waves.”
“I think that will be enough for tonight,” Zedd said, rising from his chewed-on chair.
“I know about safety, too,” Homer told him. “How you should stand on the ground.”
“Keep studying,” Zedd ordered, leading the nerd to the door. “Review all you’ve learned so far. We’ll talk again next week.”
“You think I’m ready for the test? You think I can take the Novice next week? Huh? Huh? Huh?”