Zedd Certified as Uniquely Superior Operator

Originally published in the July 1982 Collector and Emitter.

In an unprecedented but obviously praiseworthy move, the FCC has made a significant change in its incentive licensing system, and has given the first callsign allocation in the new series to Oklahoma’s greatest, Q.R. Zedd.

Henceforth, Zedd, whose exploits during the January 3Cfi expedition finally stirred the FCC to action, will be known on the bands by the nation’s first modern one-by-one, A5A.

“I am honored to be given the nation’s first modern one-by-one callsign,” said the modest Zedd in a telephone interview from his home QTH, Honor Roll Ranch south of Norman. “However, the honor is certainly — in all modesty — nothing more than 1 richly deserve.”

The FCC is expected to announce momentarily that others may attempt to win the new license class ranking above the Amateur Extra, to be known as Amateur Superhuman. Some of the test criteria have been leaked in Washington and they include the following:

MORSE CODE REQUIREMENT: demonstrated ability to send on a hand key and receive perfect copy for a period of one hour at 100 WPM. A blunt pencil must be used.

THEORY REQUIREMENT: a grade of 95 or better on a six-hour written essay test covering, but not limited to, everything that has ever been said about electronics, spaceship technology, raising orchids and junk collecting.

PRACTICAL REQUIREMENT: The applicant must go to a Radio Shack store of his choice and there select the necessary parts to go home and within a period of 72 hours construct arid successfully launch an Oscar satellite.

It is understood that numerous complaints have already been received at FCC headquarters from those saying the easy test will cheapen this most coveted license. There has also been a letter from Wayne Green, saying there should be no license tests at all.

Zedd, long known as the greatest among all but the most myopic, finally caught the FCC’s attention, as was stated earlier, during the 3C0 expedition. Zedd did not go, but he was among the policemen sitting on Martha’s transmit frequency Thursday afternoon, January 28, when an operator in 2-land came on the frequency as he had every afternoon at 2100Z, operating a laughing machine and CM keyer running at random.

Zedd, of course, joined the others in condemning these nerdly practices, and in fact completely covered the frequency for four minutes with a brilliant speech. When he unkeyed, however, the 2-nerd had been joined by a 4-nerd doing much the same stuff and running a telephone busy signal as well.

Unfortunately for the 4-nerd, this broke Zedd’s legendary patience and he unveiled a bit of electronic wizardly which was then only in the testing stages.

Zedd activated a new, experimental direction-finding device using a pair of triangulated 32-element 15-meter quads on 350-foot towers at opposite ends of Honor Roll. After getting readings, he called his friend and sometimes-critic, the great Bill Blast (of the daily Blast Off DX net) on a discreet frequency and got a beam heading from the Pacific northwest which dovetailed exactly with his own readings. Zedd thus had the 4-land nerdly culprit pinpointed within a circle of plus or minus 18 inches.

Bringing the power of his biggest linear amplifier up to snuff (although he never dips the nasty stuff himself, preferring genuine latakia pipe tobacco roasted — as genuine latakia must be — over Syrian camel dung), Zedd, then switched off the dummy load to one of his modest antennas in order to call the offending 4-nerd and read him the riot act.

Alas, some changes had been made in the coax connections only moments before by Tondelayo Schwartz, Zedd’s blonde, nubile, 19-year-old QSL secretary and constant companion, so when Zedd imagined he was switching to a modest 10-over-10, he was actually going to a new 1200-element stack of yagis at 400 feet which had never been tested on the air for fear of injuring somebody. Not knowing of the coax change, when Zedd keyed his exciter, he sent eastward and southward an ERP that has been estimated at something in excess of four trillion megawatts.

Fortunately for innocent bystanders, including members of a SWAT team from the Long Island DX Club touring the 4’s neighborhood with directional loops liberated from an old World War II movie, the beam of Zedd’s stacked array was almost as narrow as that of his direction-finding gear, or his point of view on the ERA, and he had taken the precaution of calibrating his motorized drives so that the bolt of rf that leaped into the sky was aimed correctly and precisely not only in terms of azimuth, but elevation.

Parenthetically, we must explain that Zedd is working on a QST article which will outline his latest calculations for maximum impact of rf at any given site on the globe. He is perfecting a formula which will allow anyone, from novice on up, to figure quickly the best tilt angle of his antenna, as well as the proper azimuth, in order to bring the signal down at the most appropriate skip distance for one-hop or multiple-hop propagation. For those wishing to pursue this matter, we are authorized to reveal that the basic calculation is as follows
T=D(nm)xK/F+SA/ti-pi-Z
where T is of course the tilt angle above the horizontal; D represents the great circle distance to the targeted station in nautical miles; K represents the latest Boulder K-index; F is the frequency in MHz; SA is the sun angle at the equator; ti is local time; pi are square (whereas cornbread are round), and Z stands for GMT. Calculation of the sun angle at the equator, a crucial part of the calculations, is at present a secret and (C) Q.R. Zedd, Inc., Honor Roll Ranch, PO Box 73, Norman, Okla., 73070.

Well, to make a long story short, a horrific blue bolt of rf was seen to crash into the antenna farm at the 0TH, of the nerdly 4. When members of the DX club, local police and firemen, and the 4’s new widow reached the shack, they found all his equipment charred beyond recognition and the operator himself, as described by one of the other radio amateurs, “looking like a chicken fried steak in cowboy boots.”

Zedd expressed regret over the incident, and he was of course promptly cleared of any wrongdoing by the county coroner, the ARRL, the Supreme Court of the United States, and a special ethics committee called immediately by the South Canadian Amateur Radio Society. Zedd pledged to discontinue experimentation on the precision rf antenna system pending government tests to see how many milliwatts the human body might withstand when the power is aimed with such unreal precision.

The special license was issued immediately by the FCC when they heard details.

Zedd has been forced to hire 100 new security guards at his ranch to keep out other DXers trying to steal the rf aiming device so THEY can use it to certain individuals who appear on the DX station’s transmit frequency

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Zedd was so busy with acceptance speeches, etc, at presstime that the reporter was unable to secure from him a proper response to the many dastardly attacks made on his reputation recently by misguided unfortunates who imagine operators such as Texas’s Dingfod Armstrong or California’s Hiram Tikitoki are worthy to shine Zedd’s PL259s. We will, however, pursue this matter even though Zedd’s latest ascension would tend to prove that there is only one who is The Greatest.)

— KU5B