Originally Posted by
buffo
Man, back when I was in Jr High School my pals and I would have been busted for sure then. See, we had a ham radio club at school (my Dad was a teacher at the school, and a ham, so he ran the club), and since we were the only club allowed to sell ice cream in the lunch room, we always had tons of money to blow on equipment.
We had a Drake TR7 with an Alpha linear feeding a KLM 6 element 10 meter beam, a KLM 5 element 15 meter beam, a Mosley 2 element 40 meter beam, and a big dipole antenna for 80 meters. All the antenna were mounted on 50 ft towers atop a 3 story school, so yeah, even when the ionosphere was for shit, we still got out. (This was in 1979, mind you.) Only band we were silent on was 20 meters, because we were all over the school's PA system when we transmitted on 20 meters, and installing filters on the intercom boxes in every classroom just wasn't an option.
Anyway, one issue of either 73 or QST had an article about the Russian "woodpecker" radar. (Any old ham will remember this bastard as the bane of our existence in the late 1970's.) The article suggested that it was possible to disrupt the illegal radar by sending "H 5 H" CW at 19 words per minute over and over. But to do so, you needed a good directional antenna - trained roughly NNW - and you needed a good bit of grunt to pull it off. If you successfully confused the radar, it would jump to another frequency (usually around 150kc up or down), freeing your frequency for whatever traffic you wanted to send.
Well, confronted with this challenge (and backed up by the knowledge that the Drake could tune *anywhere* in the band, not just in the ham spectrum) and considering that with the Alpha linear maxed out we could pump close to 3 KW into any of 3 beams on the roof, we decided that it was our duty to hunt the woodpecker whenever we could. I remember spending *hours* chasing that damn thing. With the electronic keyer it was fairly simple to adjust the speed up or down slightly. Eventually, it would hop to a new frequency, and the race would be on to find out where it went. Then a quick re-tune and a small adjustment to the transmatch, and we were back in business!
No call signs, no real traffic at all, just H 5 H H 5 H over and over again. At times we were so far out of the legal ham bands that I wonder what else we were interfering with besides the damn woodpecker... Illegal as hell, to be sure, but since we were messing with the Russians we figured we were doing a public service. (Hey, it's easy to rationalize things when you're only in 9th grade!)
No one ever complained, and we never got caught either. I think my Dad had some idea about what we were doing, but I don't think he had any clue how far out of the ham bands we strayed. Still, it was tons of fun, and quite thrilling to boot.
Club station call sign was WB9UON. Dad was K9ERO, and I was KA9KPG. Club is long gone, Dad died in 2004, and I let my license lapse back before they made them permanent. But I'll always have fond memories of my ham radio days...
Adam
Needs moar photons
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buffo