Dave Bruebeck Quartet when Paul Desmond was with him. Double Trouble with Stevie Ray Vaughn
Ok, I know what you mean. I am just following the newly established protocol. I gather you are looking for an emotional response for "favorite band" rather than a technical one for "best band". In that case, I would say that my favorites are 80m and 40m. 80m came from my rockbound ragchewing days as a novice living on a small lot with nothing very high to hang antennas. Here is my story for 80m. I became a novice at age 15 in 1965. In those days novices had to be xtal controlled during transmit, and most of us had only one or two xtals. Mine was at 3717 khz. Consider that most novices had low antennas and one xtal, so each time you went on 80m with the predictable high angle medium range propagation, you would find essentially the same people who had xtals nearby in frequency. Each afternoon I would get home from school, turn on the DX-60/HR-10 and talk to a number other teenagers in nearby states (me in CT, them in NY, NJ, PA, usually). Being talkative and energetic teenagers, we did a lot of CW day after day, not realizing what good CW practice it was. However, one of us had a horrendous fist (not me) that only through experience the rest of us could copy. His problem stemmed from his call sign which had an EW in it. For some reason the rhythm of dit ditdahdah would be carried over into letters like F which he would send as dit ditdahdit, etc. As we became aware that what we were doing was called a "net" and that nets often had names, we named our net in honor of our ham-fisted buddy, and called it the QLF Net (QLF is an unofficial Q signal for "I can't copy you. Try sending with your left foot for a while instead of your right"). From all that fun CW practice, in less than a year, most of us had passed the General exam and set out for 80m parts unknown with our chirpy VFOs and the N in our calls changed to an A. That spelled the end of the QLF Net. But a year or so later, I went back to see what 3717 was like and called CQ one afternoon. I was surprised to find at least three enthusiastic responses from calls I did not recognize. I rounded them all up in a roundtable and soon found out that they seemed to know who I was. It turns out that each of them had become fans of the QLF Net as SWLs while trying to learn CW to get their license. They were teenage groupies of the QLF Net. They lamented the demise of the QLF net, but I assured them that they surely must be the logical heirs of the net and should immediately revive it as their own, which they did. So that's my 80m story. At 14, that was my 15 minutes of 80m fame. My love for 80m persisted and I ended up doing a lot of ragchewing and traffic handling on CW, but it all ended when I got my driving "ticket" and discovered girls. My next megahertzian romance was 40m 20 years later, but that's a different story and I think I used up my bandwidth for today. 73's de WA1X Message: 9 Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 08:17:31 -0700 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Elecraft] Your favorite bands To: elecraft@mailman.qth.net Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii It's been a while since I sent out a general question like this: What is/are your favorite band(s) and why? Let's hear lots of good stories here. That CW neophyte, Jeff ********************************* _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
