Stand By

[hafoc]

I never got along with ham radio operators.

Since I was a teenager I've listened to shortwave radio broadcasts-- also far-away AM radio broadcasts at night, what tephra or tephralynn calls "Listening to Static." There's no real reason to do it any more; you can get all the foreign information you want, direct from foreign sources, over the Internet. (Until the Tea Party brings the McCarthy Era back and starts protecting you from truths they want to pretend don't exist.) Back then, though, if you wanted the foreign perspective on the news, uncensored, you got a shortwave receiver.



These days I still mess with shortwave broadcasts. Mainly I do it to get foreign music. There's something relaxing about drifting off to sleep on a wave of Cuban or Brazilian music, on those bitter winter nights.

Every so often I'd mention my shortwave broadcast hobby to a ham radio operator, though, and EVERY SINGLE TIME I got the same response. Their eyes would go blank, their jaw would go slack, and they would drone, in a voice reminiscent of one of the stars of Night of the Living Dead moaning for brains, the following:

"Shortwave broadcast listening is good because it might lead you into The Hobby."

Amateur radio, the One True Hobby, Passtime of Passtimes, Avocation of Avocations. And I'd listened to those guys. I was listening to the Russians to try to get some idea if and when they planned to nuke us-- kind of important stuff, I thought-- but all these hams ever did was natter natter natter about their antennas and whatever the weather was where they were. Yet in spite of the pointlessness of what they did, they would stand there and tell me, almost in so many words, that what I liked to do was only important in that it might lead me to what THEY liked to do. Other than that, get rid of those silly broadcasts; we need more frequencies so we can natter about our antennas some more.

That didn't sit so well.

I also stumbled into the realm of Ham Radio Fiction. Now, athelind has talked about the Aquaman Adventure, some script expressly constructed such that Aquaman's super powers can save the day. Where through some Incredible Series of Events, it turns out the only way to disarm the Doomsday Bomb is to exert telepathic control over an eel, for example. Ham radio fiction is like that. Disaster strikes and the only thing that still works is the lighthouse; good thing there just happens to be a Ham Radio Operator in the Lighthouse, who knows Morse Code, and another Ham Radio Operator on the shoreline 14 miles away who also knows it.

Or worse. I actually ran into a story-- you're not going to believe this-- where the nuclear bombs were flying, but the ham radio operators were talking about how they'd all switched over to their 1950s vintage tube type radios (immune to electromagnetic pulse). "OK, this is Burt, K83UTA, on my Hallicrafters S-50, but I'm just outside the gates of Lackluck Air Force Base and the hydrogen bomb is about to land there and vaporize us all, so I guess I'll sign off now." But then at the last moment space aliens came down and beamed away all the ham radio operators to Ham Heaven, I guess. Only the Hams. Because they believed in the One True Hobby, I suppose.

Anyway. Not much to enjoy there.

Except that when I was a kid, visiting my grandparents on their farm, I ran into a bit of ham radio fiction that must have belonged to my uncle when he was a kid. Back before World War II, when ham radio was still cutting edge.

I still remember that crazy little farmhouse, lit by fixtures my grandfather had scrounged from houses he was repairing or remodeling, I think-- he was a carpenter by trade. They had one little old bookcase, a kind of gothic thing with a bowed glass front. It held about three times as many books as it was designed for, and it held all the books they owned, except for the Bible, which they kept out at all times for immediate use. The books my uncle and aunts had owned as kids were in the back, behind rows of newer ones.

The name of the book was Stand By. It was about teenagers in the American South somewhere. Probably in the Tennessee Valley, since they got caught up in a flood. The Tennessee Valley Authority was established about that time, both to make rural electricity and in response to the terrible floods they had along that river back then.

Anyway, here is our hero drifting downstream on the floating wreck of a house. He's got this portable transceiver he's invented (cutting edge tech for the day) but it's been busted up, with some of the wiring lost. He takes a pencil and starts tracing out the missing wires. Noticing a buzzing following the line he's tracing (yes, that's impossible, but bear with me) he realizes that pencil marks can carry electricity. So he traces the missing wires, the radio works, and they are rescued.

This puts him in touch with the people who are planning an airship voyage to the North Pole. Interested in saving as much weight as possible, they adapt his new invention of pencil marks as radio wiring. And they take him along.

All goes well until the airship gets caught in a storm on the way back from the Pole. It crashes into the ice cap. The engine gondola where our hero is gets torn off; the rest of the airship blows away, and there he is on the ice. But through the miracle of radio, he's rescued eventually. He returns to base to find the damaged airship is already there, safe. Happy ending all around.

Fantastic, unbelievable-- until many years later I found a story from real history that seemed hauntingly familiar.

It turns out that in 1928 the Italian airship designer Umberto Nobile did try to reach the North Pole in an airship. He had every reason to think he could; he'd actually been there before, in the airship Norge (which he designed), as part of an expedition commanded by Roald Amundsen. Amundsen led the first expedition to reach the South Pole, and since neither Byrd nor Peary crossed the ice cap Europe to Alaska (or equivalent) as Amundsen did, there's no absolute proof they reached the pole at all; Amundsen, therefore, could possibly have commanded the first expedition to reach the North Pole as well.

Amundsen was not an easy man to get along with, though, and he and Nobile fell out after that. Nobile was determined to show that he could get to the North Pole on his own. He got a better airship, the Italia, and set out to do it.

He got to the Pole, but on the way back he flew into icing conditions. Weighted down, Italia crashed into the ice. The control gondola with Nobile and most of the crew ripped off. The rest of the airship blew away and was never seen again.

Amundsen came north as part of the international expedition to try to find the Italia survivors. He, and the plane he was on, disappeared. And that is how the world's greatest polar explorer died.

Meanwhile, Nobile was there on the ice with a busted radio. It was complete except for a resistor. The resistor was a cardboard tube full of powdered carbon. Nobile realized that pencil leads were carbon, so he tore a page from the logbook, scribbled pencil lead all over it, handed it to his radio operator, and said "Here. This is a resistor."

It worked. They got in contact with a Russian ham radio operator. Eventually a Russian icebreaker reached them and rescued them.

Truth is stranger than fiction-- or in this case, truth and fiction are equally strange.

Comments

[spaceoperadiva]

Thanks for the wonderful story. I especially loved the parts about Nobile.