Originally published in the February 1984 C&E.
A dozen of the faithful had gathered at the Commons Restaurant on the University of Oklahoma’s campus for adult education a couple of weeks ago when the door whisked open and in walked the world’s greatest DXer, Oklahoma’s own Q. R. Zedd. Well, you can imagine how thrilled the boys were. W5SQJ swallowed his Red Man and W5MCJ hurt his leg rushing over to shake hands. W5LFK quickly zippered his jacket to hide his Penn State tee shirt, knowing the legendary man’s preference for Big Eight teams in general and his beloved Sooners and Cowboys in particular, and WA5RPP, reporter for the SCARS group, quickly whipped out his pencil and Big Chief tablet. W5MCN rushed off for a fresh cup of coffee and a dozen doughnuts, one of which he planned to hand over to Zedd. “Howdy, boys,” the holder of the world’s only one-by-one callsign, A5A, said, straddling a chair at the far end of the table and quickly signing 73 SK to a contact in Rangoon which he had been working with the TR7 strapped to his chest with velcro tape and the straight key he always has taped to his right thigh. “How’s it going? How’s DX?” “Well, I worked a couple of SVs and an XU and BV2A and a flock of ZLs and VKs this morning on 10 meters,” quoth W5MCN, breathless from running back with the coffee and bolting eleven doughnuts with chocolate icing and little red and green speckledy things on them. “That’s interesting,” quoth Zedd. “You use the long path for the SVs?” “Could hear ’em both directions,” W5MCN replied. “The band was real good.” “I remember a band opening on 75 one night back in fifty-ought-seven,” said Zedd. “Durndest thing I ever did see.” Then, as is his wont, being so modest and all, he lapsed into silence, slurped up his coffee, and fired up a Roi Tan, sending out clouds of CW smoke signals (and, incidentally, confirming a contact with WA5MLT in Richardson, Texas), The boys all waited. Even_W5UZD stopped talking. But Zedd said nothing more. “You want to tell us about it, Q. R,?” finally asked W5OU. “It was about two o’clock in the ayem,” said Zedd, turning his chair around and leaning back against the lady running the Tuesday morning vacuum cleaner, “and I was working a few QRP contacts into Albania and Rumania and Turkey and commonplace QTHs like that, when all at once there was a kind of sizzling sound on the receiver and I began to hear a lot of faint signals down underneath the religious fanatics and fellers talking about the good old days, “With my uncanny sense of the dramatic, I cut in one of my smaller linears and accidentally overdrove it a minute, to kind Pf clear me out a little swath, and when I let up on the key, sure enough the fanatics were off about a hundred Kc and the other guys couldn’t be heard anywhere stall. “And there in the nice quiet I’d made, I heard a ragchew net amongst a bunch of ‘Eskimos at the South Pole. So naturally I gave ’em a shout and they were all thrilled to work me. “Eskimo radioing is kind of interesting. In the first place,, they haven’t got any electricity. What they have to do is make capacitors out of old blubber cans and charge them up by rubbing sea lion tusks against seal skins. Then they run the output through a whole series of voltage dividers, shooting most of the charge right back into the big cap, bleeding off just enough to run a
homebrew one-watt rig made out of old ice trays, rusty nails, and bits of electronic junk they scrounge periodically from the innards of stray sharks and whales. “You can’t use a regular antenna down there. It gets too cold. How cold does it get? It gets so cold, if you radiate normal rf, it plumb freezes in midair about three meters off the broadside of the wire, and sometimes there’s a spring melt six months later and all that energy gets soft and falls to the earth, killing I don’t know how many novices and sled dogs every year. So what you have to do, if you’re an Eskimo, is you have to use Sterno and such like for your antenna. Which really complicates hooking up your PL259s and all. The favorite method is a blubber bonfire, where you inject your signal into the blubber with a resonant blowtorch and then you add or siphon off blubber depending on band conditions and all. “But I digress. “That same night, the band was so good, I worked a Russian modulating a vodka bottle, a kid with a broken Mickey Mouse watch feeding a rusty fence in South Africa, two hams in Japan that as near I could tell were using home-brew flashlight modifications, and a German’s back-teeth fillings in Munich. What made this all the more incredible was that when I got up the next morning to give the guys on the West Coast nets a thrill, I found that a goat had chewed through my coax and I had done it with no antenna at all.” There was a profound silence around the Commons coffee table, and somebody went to the bathroom. But Zedd, it seemed, was only warming to his topic. “I am reminded,” he told us, “of one or two other famous exploits.” (To be continued.)