By Delmar Grumpet (A5HLE)

An humorous reminder to the new hams of today exactly how easy they have it!.

You whippersnappers with your shiny little SDR dongles and your “apps” that do everything but wipe your behinds—sit down and shut your traps.

Back in my day we didn’t have “user-friendly” anything. We had suffering, and we liked it that way because it built character. You wouldn’t last ten minutes in the real ham radio world. Let me tell you how it really was, and wipe that smirk off your face while I’m talking.

Gettin’ my callsign

Gettin’ a ham license wasn’t some click-a-button nonsense like you kids do today with your fancy computers and instant gratification. No sir, I had to walk uphill both ways to the nearest FCC testing facility—twelve miles if it was a foot, through snow in winter and that godawful Midwest humidity in summer that’d melt the solder right off your iron. And don’t get me started on the hills; they built ’em steeper just to spite folks like me. By the time I got there, my knees were creakin’ louder than a rusty dipole in a gale, and I still had to sit through the whole ordeal without so much as a decent cup of coffee. These days you probably test from your couch in your underwear, but we earned our tickets the hard way, by golly.

Then this scary FCC fella shows up—sharp suit like he was fixin’ to audit my soul, eyes colder than a linear amplifier on standby. Slaps that exam paper down like it was a court summons and stares at me the whole time, probably hopin’ I’d Morse code my answers wrong just so he could yank my dreams away. Passed it somehow, miracle of miracles, then had to limp home the same uphill route waitin’ weeks—weeks!—for that precious callsign to show up in the mail. When it finally did, I half-expected it to be wrong just to ruin my day. Kids these days get their callsigns faster than I can complain about the weather, and they wonder why us old-timers are grumpy. Bah!

The Coax That Nearly Killed Me

You think running LMR-400 is hard? In 1951 we couldn’t even buy decent coax. Had to make our own from scratch. I spent four dang days in the root cellar braiding shield by hand out of bare copper wire I pulled out of a dead sewing machine motor. My fingers bled so bad the braid was half copper, half scabs.

Then we wrapped the whole mess with strips cut from a real WWII parachute silk my no-good brother-in-law stole from the Army surplus yard. Cut every strip by hand with a dull pocket knife because real men didn’t need scissors. After that we waterproofed it by melting pitch I scraped off old telephone poles. Boiled that black tar in my wife’s best stew pot until the kitchen smelled like Satan’s outhouse. Painted it on thick with a horsehair brush while it was still smoking hot. Burned my left hand so bad I still can’t feel two fingers.

That coax weighed forty pounds for a hundred feet and sagged like a tar covered jump-rope. Every summer the pitch would melt and run down the tower like black tears. But you know what? It carried a signal to Japan when your fancy foam-dielectric garbage would’ve melted or shorted out.

Now you cry if your pre-made cable gets a little UV on it. Pathetic.

The “Legal Limit” That Wasn’t

You kids brag about running 1500 watts like it’s some big deal. In ’58 we ran whatever the tubes could take until the plates glowed cherry red and the shack smelled like ozone and burnt dreams. My final was a pair of 4-1000As I salvaged from a scrapped Navy radar set. Power supply? Three oil-filled capacitors the size of garbage cans that I charged with a motor-generator set I built from a tractor engine and an old washing machine.

One night I was working a rare VU station and the plate current spiked. The tubes lit up like searchlights, the dummy load caught fire, and the power supply made a noise like God clearing his throat.

Blew the main breaker for the whole county.

The sheriff showed up thinking we had a still running. I told him it was just ham radio. He fined me anyway.

You push a button marked “OPR” on your solid-state rig and think you’re a big operator. We pushed the limits until the insulation caught fire and called it “just barely gettin out!”

The Antenna That Ate My Dog

Need a good low-band antenna? Nowadays you buy some wire and a balun. Back then we had to invent the damn thing. In ’63 I decided I needed a 160-meter inverted-L. Used 200 feet of #12 house wire I stripped off an abandoned warehouse. The supports? Two dead pine trees and a 40-foot wooden telephone pole I “borrowed” at midnight with my cousin’s flatbed. Raised the whole mess during a lightning storm because that’s when the band was open. Halfway up, the wire snagged on the pole and my dog Buster—God rest his flea-bitten soul—decided to chase a squirrel right through the radials. The wire wrapped around his neck like a noose. Poor bastard got lifted six feet in the air before the pole snapped and the whole antenna came crashing down in a pile of sparks and dog howls. The dog was OK, but I lost the pole and half my radials, but I still worked New Zealand on that wreck the next night.

You lose one contact because your mag-mount slipped and you act like the world ended. I almost lost a dog and kept operating. That’s dedication.

The Tower Raising From Hell

Putting up a tower today? You hire some kids with a crane and drink beer while they work.

In 1955 we raised a 70-foot tower made from old railroad rail and scavenged angle iron. No crane. Just four angry men, a come-along winch, and pure stubbornness. The base was set in concrete we mixed by hand in a wheelbarrow using gravel from the creek.Halfway up, the winch cable snapped and the whole section swung like a wrecking ball. Took out my neighbor’s outhouse and nearly castrated my brother. We finally got it upright at 3 a.m. by lashing it to three different trees and the bumper of my pickup. Next morning the wind came up and the tower sang like a damn church choir. Every time I transmitted the whole thing would arc at the joints. I had to climb up there with a ball-peen hammer and beat the rust off the connections while the tower swayed in the breeze.You complain about having to tighten a few U-bolts. I still have nightmares about that tower trying to kill me, and I’d do it again just to prove you soft modern hams couldn’t handle it.

So the next time you sit there in your air-conditioned shack with your computer doing all the work, remember this: we braided our own shield, waterproofed it with tree sap and stolen parachute silk, fixed tubes with toothbrushes, lost dogs to antennas, and still worked the world while half-dead from exhaustion and hate.

You kids today got it easy. Too easy.

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