Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

Here's George Ewing's memoir of his formative years as a techie. I think it's a good example of his breezy style.

============================

Not all techies were born and grew up in Chicago. (Okay, so I was born in Elgin, but we had sense enough to got the heck out when I was three, and moved to the Great White North.)

Many GT¹ traditions have their roots up here in the GWN², thanks to three institutions: Michigan Tech (especially the old Soo branch campus, now Lake Superior State), Sault High School, and Harvey's Basement.

The old Sault High was a three-story brick monolith, two blocks square, a prime example of early State Prison Gothic Architecture. Amazingly, for techies in the Fifties and early Sixties, going to school there was a blast, even on the bleakest of dark winter days. There were two rival science clubs, Atom Crackers, devoted mostly to physics and chemistry, and E.C., the electronics and audio visual club, which overlapped about 60% with A.C. and was more engineering-oriented. E.C. boasted over forty students with ham tickets, and both clubs were hotbeds of SF, Chess, Hi-Fi music freaks, etc., and also sent many students "up the hill" to Tech (still MCMT³ in those days, OM⁴) for college credit classes in math, foreign languages, and the lab sciences while still enrolled in high school.

There were about a half dozen military bases in the area, and surplus and techie scrounge opportunities abounded. Although this also meant a certain amount of competition from horny young air force lieutenants and non-coms with Corvettes for dating Sault High girls, enough of the local military were hams to make for interesting contacts.

Likewise, the Sault Tech campus, also a converted military base (Fort Brady) had lots to offer, including the municipal ham club station, W8NTD, which was in the basement of the old Forestry Building, along with a state-of-the art darkroom and other hobby shops. W8NTD was later moved to the Civil Defense office in the municipal building and re-licensed as W8JXA, giving Soo High Techies access to zillions of flashlights, CD⁵ ham gear, geiger counters, and decontamination suits for juvenile atomic war games.

Actually, E.C. was operated by remote control from Harvey's Basement, about a mile away. Harvey Ball, W8FYX, was the local field rep from The Lorain Radio Corporation, a Cleveland area firm that operated and serviced most of the radio, radar, and other electronic equipment for the lake freighters throughout the Great Lakes, as well as "Salty" shipping as far away as Europe, the Philippines, and South America. Harvey opened up his basement hamshack and workshop to nearly everybody, and provided creative outlet for energies that otherwise would have resulted in many of us being electrocuted or blowing our hands off with home-brew rockets and pipe bombs. The basement was a regular hangout, with ping-pong, pop machine, hamshack, machine shop, stereo, three-board blind chess KriegSpiel layout, etc. always busy, even when Harvey was away for months at the shipyards in Ohio or off fixing a crashed Loran system in Venezuela.

TVRO Satellites are a dime a dozen these days, but back in the early Sixties, the pre-AMSAT⁶ OSCAR (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) program provided techies with a chance to access a real, non-synchronous satellite on two meters. I spent several late, sub-zero winter nights standing on Harvey's garage roof wearing a pair of headphones and a harness that supported a pair of 10-element Finco Yagis⁷ for two meters. One antenna fed a coax line to to the basement, and a hybrid ring of coaxial duplexing cavities feeding a receiver for the OSCAR III beacon frequency, and another that was tuneable to the translator downlink band. The other antenna coax went to the 100-watt uplink transmitter. I could stand on the roof and act as a human altazimuth mount, wiggling the array on my shoulders to dither the beacon beampath and listen to the beacon in the headphones, keeping the array centered on the satellite, OSCAR III.

These were non-synchronous satellites, similar to the Telstar series. They were in a 900 n.mi. circular orbit that was inclined slightly from true polar to provide what is called a Solar synchronous orbit, that is, it would make a pass over a given location on the Earth at approximately the same time every day. We only made a few actual QSO's⁸, being xtal controlled with only a hundred watts, the best DX⁹ being upstate New York at about 800 miles great circle distance. However, we heard hundreds of stations, and I did a school science project on decoding the telemetry, which consisted of "HIHI"¹⁰ in Morse code, and then a burst of tone pulses.

By analyzing the frequency, PRF¹¹, and duty cycle of the Morse characters and the pulses you could decode the internal and external temperature of the satellite, the efficiency of the PTC (Passive Thermal Control) array, onboard battery voltage, and a number of other things of interest.

There are hundreds of interesting techie stories from the Basement and old Soo High that I don't have space to go into here, including some, like the totally illegal "ultralight" airplane with a Buick V-8 engine and crew of six that flew all over the Midwest, that took place years before I was around. Two examples will suffice here: The Ice Survey and the Great Computer Hoax.

The ice survey was a joint NASA¹²-Coast Guard operation to survey the winter ice on the lower Great Lakes, with an eye to keeping the shipping lanes open all year in case of a national emergency.

NASA provided an aircraft, usually a C-141, with sophisticated Synthetic-Aperture SLR radar gear, which ran on a classified frequency somewhere in the short millimeter part of the spectrum, and multiplexed downlink telemetry in the 2-4 GHz¹³ region. The dowlink was supposed to be relayed through a satellite to a base in Wallops Island, but didn't work very well, so an additional downlink station was installed at Harvey's Basement by the people at Lorain.

The plane would fly a pattern over the Lakes, do a data dump over Harvey's, and then go on up to Lake Superior, turn around, and fly a different return path to Virginia, with another dump as it passed over the Sault again. The 2 GHz telemetry was recorded on tape drives at the basement, and then sent at a much lower baud rate over a leased phone line back to NASA and to the Coast Guard Icebreaker fleet HQ. ¹⁴ Although the data was all technically classified, several of the older E.C. members got together, hacked a navigational chart fax machine, and copied a number of the ice pictures. The resolution was amazing, with individual telephone wires and tree branches clearly visible from about 30K feet, and the ice thickness could be measured accurately to within a centimeter or so.
Unfortunately, a nearby Air Force radar station, part of the SAGE¹⁵ system, was running a monster radar, an AN/FPS-35, with something like 9-12 megawatts peak in the UHF¹⁶ spectrum, and a 180-foot dish antenna that rotated every 12 seconds, overlaying a PRF "BEEP"¹⁷ on every stereo, phone line, and other audio system in town. In order to keep it from trashing the ice pictures, we had to climb a 60 ft. tower and hand-wrap every inch of all the downlead waveguide and control cables with two layers of grounded aluminum foil!

The Great Computer Hoax was a joint A.C/E.C. project to build a fake mainframe computer for a student charity carnival. This was a massive installation in the Soo High gym, consisting of junk surplus relay racks, arrays of blinking lights, and odds and ends of real computer gear, The main "console", very impressive for 1962, had TeleTypes, paper tape punches, and junk TV's with flickering Lissajous patterns. A student with a RTTY¹⁸ machine was hidden in a closet in another part of the building, and the "Computer" answered carnival-goers' questions for ten cents. Many faculty members were fooled, and thought the computer was for real, or that we at least had a terminal connected to some real university mainframe downstate!

============================
1. General Technics, an loose organization for science fiction fans interested in do-it-yourself technology.
2. Great White North
3. Michigan College of Mining and Technology
4. Your guess is as good as mine. --WSH
5. Civil Defense
6. Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation
7. A kind of highly directional antenna
8 Contacts between two stations
9. . The activity of listening for distant transmitting stations, from the ham abbreviation DX for "distant"
10. Hi. Hi.
11. Pulse repetition frequency
12. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
13. Gigahertz, or billion hertz, or billion cycles per second
14. Headquarters, but I daresay you knew that already
15. Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, a system for detecting and intercepting enemy bombers
16. Ultra-high frequency
17. Apparently, "beep," only louder
18. Radio teletype

So long, George. Thanks for all the stories...