Originally published in the August 1989 issue of the Collector and Emitter.
Q. R. Zedd, A5A, the world’s mightiest DXer and all-around great guy, was out of town recently, flying around the planet in the VTOL jet plane of his own design. The great man does this every once in a while to give the deserving of other nations a chance to bask in his greatness and have, as they say, an eyeball.
In Zedd’s absence, things grew quiet around Honor Roll Ranch, just a hoot and a holler south of town. Which gave Tondelayo time to paint some of the towers and supervise the harvesting of some mountain oysters, and Homer Klott the study time he needed to continue his memorization of the Morse letter “L.” Some of the boys from the South Canadian Amateur Radio Society, unable to have the usual fun of watching the great one operate, lit out for Colorado and other places where the temperature may be below 110.
The hiatus also gave your obedient author time to create this comment about an aspect of the Zedd column that seems to have worried a few guys.
It was back in the Spring, I think, when the telephone jingled and yours truly got the first call concerning the Zedd saga that he has received in, oh, maybe two years.
It was a nice feller, a fellow member of the amateur radio fraternity and subscriber to CAE, who had a bone to pick.
Namely, about our good friend and sometime star of the saga, the greatest DXer of the Soviet Union, Boris Badenov.
We have a lot of fun from time to time with Boris, who — like our own Zedd — manages to pull off a lot of great radio feats, but seldom hesitates to proclaim himself as the greatest. All in good fun.
The problem alluded to by my caller, however, was that he works with some youthful radio amateurs (and ham aspirants) who sometimes take the jokes about Boris Badenov too seriously. My friend reported that some of his guys are quite young and quite patriotic, and they sometimes carried over their patriotic sentiments into an interpretation of the Zedd column.
In short, said my caller, his young guys sometimes tended to conclude that all real Russian radio amateurs must be jerks like Boris.
You can imagine the next mistake if somebody makes this first one. Intentional QRM on signals from UA-land, gross on-air comments to or about Soviet operators, etc. My caller was concerned that printed jokes about Boris Badenov might encourage such hooliganism, and damage international good will.
I think an occasional joke about Boris Badenov, restricted to the pages of Collector & Emitter, is not really very likely to topple the Soviet leadership or enflame world opinion. But the friendly phone call did bother me in that it would be a real shame if even one young radio amateur took some silly gags as justification for un-hamlike rudeness to anybody else on the airwaves.
Personally, I have never had an unpleasant contact with a Russian ham station. Which is a lot more than I can say for a number of other countries — certainly including our own. Russian operators are well trained and unfailingly polite and precise in their station operation. I like ’em. I like to, work ’em. When things were going badly between our nations, it was faintly reassuring to chat with a guy in Moscow or someplace over there and imagine that in a very small way at least the two of us were acting civilized, Now that the Soviet government appears to be trying to open up and liberalize its operation in some ways, it seems even more important to me that everybody remember the spirit of brotherhood that is supposed to be a hallmark of amateur radio.
So — as I told my earnest caller — I might continue to relate stories about old Boris from time to time, along with his beautiful, slinky, dark, nasty QSL secretary from Box 88, Natasha Bullwinkle… she of the threats to stick Tondelayo with her knife.
But my gracious. Just as Bill Buckeye is an exaggeration, just as Legendary Surf is meant to be a good-natured spoof on the 6’s of the world — and just as Zedd sometimes looks just a leeetle bit (if you look real, real hard) like a bodacious, braggadocios jerk — Boris Badenov is for fun, and any connection with reality is strictly accidental, and not intended.
We don’t do reality here. We don’t even do windows. Please don’t try to relate to reality anything that goes on here. I am not about to sing a love song to the Russians, but I am not exactly an admirer of Dingfod Armstrong or Harley Mincemeat, either. I’m doing jokes, men, not social commentary. Most every character in the column has one characteristic that I have to laugh at, or I would cry — both in the column and in the reality of the airwaves.
And that’s rudeness.
So don’t pick on Boris, He’s no worse or better than any of the others, and in realistic terms he’s probably less characteristic of his real-life counterparts at home than anybody else who appears here.
As a matter of fact, the only character in the Zedd column I really like, and consider a real person, is Homer Klott. I didn’t intend to let this out, but he is based on my own personal experiences when I was trying to get into ham radio, I still believe in him 100 percent, and I still have experiences regularly that make me realize how much he and I are alike.
Like not long ago, when I got back on 40 meters after an absence of several years, and learned that a transmitted signal on that band sets off my underground lawn-watering system.
Hey, what do you do to ground a system that’s already in the ground? Does anybody have a diagram showing how you wrap a choke around a sprinkler head? Where do I hook the bypass capacitor leads — to the puddles or to the mud? Does anybody have an underwater soldering iron?
Move over, Homer.
As N5ALG is fond of saying, “I wish I understood what I know about this….”
— KU5B