Originally published in the March 1984 C&E.
Faithful readers will recall that last month we were telling how Oklahoma’s own Q. R. Zedd, the world’s greatest DXer and holder of the nation’s only one-by-one callsign, A5A, thrilled the Tuesday morning coffee-drinking and lie-swapping meeting in Norman recently when he unbent a bit and got to reminiscing about the good old days.
After telling how he worked Eskimos feeding blubber antennas on 75, and smoked the gold fillings out of a Munich orthopedist’s mouth with a shot of well-aimed rf, Zedd got a coffee refill and allowed as how he was reminded of some other fun stuff that had happened over the years.
“It was in 1977, I reckon, that I got in a pileup shootout with ole Bill Buckeye and Bill Blast,” Zedd recalled. “I think it was an A51 we were after, and it was on 20 meters, so about sixty thousand others were in there calling, and I wanted to asked my pal Pradahn what was new with him since ur QSO of the previous afternoon, so naturally I keyed up and dropped my call in there fifty times, along with everybody else.
“Naturally Pradahn came right back to me and we got a right nice QSO going, but some of the nerds as usual got jealous and started laying a lot of carriers and things on us. I had no trouble with my filters in line, but Pradahn was having a problem. So Bill Buckeye came on, being helpful, and started calling everybody lids and CBers and all, and cussing, and Bill Blast chimed in with this lecture about being polite and everything, and laid on his own carrier to show them crappy it sounded, and a laughing machine, too.
“Unfortunately, the band changed and A51 faded out, but about as I was going to QSY, I hear this little signal down under there, so naturally I yell a couple of QIZs, and back comes this feeble signal from somewhere in China. It was hard to make out, but I figured out that it was a Chinese scientist lost in the mountains, and he had modified his quarter-watt handi talkie to the ham bands in the hope somebody would hear him and get him out of the avalanche he had got himself stuck in.
“I got his location and all, but now the question was how to get the word to Peking authorities fast enough? What I did was swing the beam around the the right heading and crank up the big linear and hit the color TV set in the home of the Peking police chief. I had to talk fast to get him to understand the message before he ran out of the room to start kicking his dog and complaining about the local CBer to the neighborhood committee, believe me. But I managed, and later the Chinese gummint invited me over to honor me for my greatness, and they named part of the Great Wall after me.
“There was another time during the peak of one sunspot cycle when propagation was so good, I quit working the bands one night about midnight, and when I went back out there the next morning, there was this enormous pileup of JAS, working my long-delayed echos that were just going around and around the globe, picking up more contacts every trip.
“Then there was the time when I joined 10-10 International and worked the whole club in a four-hour sitting. But that was earlier, and 10-10 had only about seventeen, eighteen thousand members at the time. I even worked the Chatanooga ChooChoo. I only knew two other people do that, WB5QNK, who is inactive now in ham radio, and WB5TZZ, who got some new weird call and is never on the bands any more.
“I like Straight Key Night. I worked all stations in that one year. Of course I can’t contest much any more because people like Boris Badenov over there in Russia get upset when I show them up bad. That’s why I quit working the ten-meter contest and Radiosport and some of those. Like I was telling KA5EFJ the other night, when we were out dirt-biking in some snowdrifts, you’ve got to give the younger boys a chance.”
Zedd lapsed into silence, and the boys shot his a few questions. Here are some of the opinions he rendered:
DXing will get worse this cycle before it gets better.
George Steinbrenner will fire his manager again this year.
W2NSD/1 will be named chairman of the FCC.
The cost of sausage and vacuum tubes will go up.
N5MS will spell “obviously” as “odviously” in his C&E column at least eight more times this year.
W5OU will get a beam up for 20 meters and wipeout the world, except for W5NUT, who will then wipe out W5OU.
The Chicago Cubs will lead the league on the Fourth of July, then lose 74 straight to finish as usual.
There might have been more, but the TR7 strapped to Zedd’s tee shirt came alive at this point (about 10 a.m.), and the great one had to rush away.
Tondelayo was calling. It was time for their singing lesson. They are, it has been reliably reported, giving Kenny Rogers a little tuneup.