Useless Stuff

As a ham for over 45 years it is perhaps unsurprising that I have a large junk box. It's not really a box but rather dozens of boxes and piles of equipment and parts spread all over the place: basement, shack, garage and lurking among the trees. Some is little different than pure junk while others are fully functional though dated or with no foreseeable application.

Very little of my junk disappeared during the 20 years I was out of the hobby, or before or since for that matter. Since returning 5 years ago I have collected even more. Far more Storing, categorizing and finding stuff has been difficult. Not a week goes by that I don't find something interesting or valuable that I forgot that I had or didn't realize that I had it at all.

With that said I will now present a select set of junk that may induce nostalgia, bewilderment, "hey, I need one of those!" or violent disagreement over what, in fact, is junk or whether it can possibly have any use.

Heil headset

I purchased this headset over 30 years ago and I loved it. I still do. It's light, comfortable, and has a high talk power mic element.When the microphone cable became intermittent a few years ago and the ear pads deteriorated it was retired in favour of a modern headset. Here are the reasons:

• Modern rigs have equalizers. A special "talk power" mic element is redundant. It is better to adjust the rig equalization once and then use any mic with a flat response.
• The mic element is dynamic. It can't easily be connected to a PC and some rigs only support high output electrets. Again, it is better in today's contesting shacks to stick with electret.
• Good quality PC gaming or VoIP headsets are inexpensive. Ham specific headsets are no longer necessary.
• I like open air ear pads despite not attenuating ambient sound. When I start doing multi-op contests from my station they will present a problem.

FT-102

When I bought this rig (used) in 1985 it was fabulous. The receiver was quiet and performed very well in comparison to competitors. It has a bit of a cult following. Unfortunately it does not work, suffering as it does from a pernicious design flaw: short life relays throughout.

Many have replaced the relays and continue the rig it to this day. But its time has passed. The transmitters are tubes that must be periodically replaced and frequency changes require manual transmitter tuning. The rig is not PC friendly, although there are ways to do it if you insist. Receiver performance is not comparable to the best modern rigs.

I can't bear parting with it and I also won't waste time fixing it. So it sits on a shelf. Behind it is a another useless item: a home brew power supply I built 30 years ago for a kilowatt 2 meter amplifier. The power supply works, the amplifier was never built and never will be built.

Magazines

I have come to despise paper. Whether it be logs, QSLs, newspapers, books or magazines. In this way I am quite modern. Before I moved from Ottawa 2 years ago I discarded over 40 years worth of ham radio magazines, catalogues, hamfest material and much more. Other than one big bundle of QSTs that I gave away to an interested ham it all got recycled. Well, except for one old issue of QST that had my picture in it.

If I need to look up an old article it is almost always accessible online. Most magazines I now get are electronic. Publishers that will insist on sending me paper magazines are magazines that I no longer subscribe to. Really, most of the subscription price is printing and postage, and the postage can be quite dear when sent from other countries. They are no longer worth the trouble, time or money.

I have a life ARRL membership so the QSTs keep coming, and they are once more accumulating. Before long I will once more be feeding the recycler.

Scrap hardware

When you have a fastener, clamp, clip or other bit of hardware is bent, rusted or of indefinite function what do you do with it. Provided it is somewhat usable I toss it into a box with similar stuff, roughly sorted by type. The rest goes into the garbage. I have even scooped up such stuff that other hams are discarding. I must have 100 lb or more of this scrap hardware.

I do this because of the many times I encounter an odd situation where I need an odd bit of hardware to accomplish a task but I don't want to waste or buy a new one. For example, old and rusty muffler clamps are used to jam a tube or pipe, or a perplexing plate with scattered holes in it becomes a shim or clamp washer, or a few old hose clamps are connected end to end lash a pipe to a tree or tower leg.

All of this scrap is stored outside or in the garage where there is lots of room and I don't care if it corrodes further. I often toss the stuff beyond the pale into the garbage bag when I root around for something useful.

Tuner

Flip through any ham magazine and you'll find many pages of advertisements for antenna tuners of all types and sizes. They can come in handy and for many hams with limited space they may be the only practical way to get on the air with whatever they are able to put up for an antenna. Tuners have occasionally found a use in my station over the years.

However tuners have their limits. While you may be able to transform most anything to 50 Ω it may be at the expense of efficiency. The cost can be exceptionally high, especially with short antennas on the low bands. As a contester I have additional concerns when it comes to tuning antennas since doing so costs valuable time even when the tuning is largely automatic.

Despite these qualms I still hold on to my tuners, large and small. Although I don't want to ever use one again I can't shake the feeling that one day in a pinch -- an antenna blows down in January when a rare DXpedition appears -- I absolutely have to have one.

Guy wire

I have a lot of guy wire. I have far more than I need or can ever hope to use. Most of it is used but is in excellent condition, whether from others hams or commercial surplus. Quite a lot of it I got for free.

The large quantity of guy wire in the picture is, unfortunately, truly useless except in the station of a truly extreme ham. I am unlikely to use it. The reason is that it is ⅜" EHS. That's heavier than you'd need on a big tower with stacked 40 meter yagis!

The reason it's useless is that guy wire must be tensioned to ~10% of breaking strength if it is to be taut enough to prevent excess tower motion or bending when the big winds hit. For this cable the breaking strength is 16,000 lb, so the pre-load tension is 1,600 lb. At each guy station on the tower that's 4,800 lb of force trying to tear the tower apart. There aren't many towers used by hams that are designed to withstand that radial and axial load.

On the other hand, well, you never know. Perhaps I'll find a use for it.

Rotator

This AR22 light duty rotator turned a Moseley TA-33jr on my first tower, back in the 1970s. For a television antenna rotator it struggled with a small tri-band yagi. Whenever the wind blew over about 60 kph (very common out on the VE4 prairie) the antenna spun and the rotator had to be recalibrated. But it was certainly inexpensive, perfect for a budding contester.

In addition to its low capacity it wasn't very robust. The controller's pulse-driven direction indicator uses a cheap electro-mechanical ratchet made of plastic and a spring that doesn't work well. It's one great feature is that you crank the dial to the desired direction, whereupon it starts up, turns, and shuts down when done. A harbinger of things to come in later years.

40 meter wire yagi

This antenna is proof that I have used low band wire yagis in the past, and that I not only design and write about them on this blog. This is a 2-element reversible inverted vee yagi I put up 30 years ago. The box contains the relays for the switching unit.

To simplify the antenna the driven element is fixed and the parasitic element is switched to be either a director or reflector. Well, this was 30 years ago and I didn't yet have a MiniNEC tool, nor did I appreciate the problems with this arrangement. When I fired it up I quickly learned why. The version you'll find on this blog is a far better design.

Despite its design problems it worked quite well. Although it'll never go up again I enjoy the memories whenever I come across it while I'm rooting through boxes looking for something.

Heliax connectors

I have been fortunate to find sources of used Heliax connectors at very good prices. They come available when commercial systems are decommissioned or the cables replaced. Among a bunch of connectors me and my hacksaw liberated last year were a couple of UHF female connectors for ⅞" Heliax. Those are rare and I was pleased with my good fortune. That changed when I got home and opened them up.

They are older than I realized. These connectors only fit the cable series that predates the LDF series. Connectors for the two series are not compatible since the older cable outer conductor has spiral corrugations while the LDF and AVA series have concentric corrugations. That's a shame.

Unfortunately the connectors have little use now because the ancient cable they are made for is rarely still in service. For now I can only admire them.

More obsolete equipment

Two years ago I made an effort, mostly successful, to clear out some useless stuff cluttering my basement by taking a table at a local flea market. The pictured items did not sell. I was not surprised. Despite working perfectly well they have little use today.

Packet radio is certainly around, though perhaps not so much at the data rates the PK-88 supports. The interest it received was no more than smiles for the memories it provoked. The high power low pass TVI filter has little purpose now that over-the-air (OTA) television reception is a rarity. It's good that TVI due to HF harmonics has been relegated to history, but then so is the TVI filter. It didn't get a second glance at the flea market. Both went back to the basement.

So much more

This sampling just scratches the surface. I didn't show my stock of ancient TTL logic chips and op amps, metal stock, short lengths of wire and rope, transformers, and so on. I suspect most of it will stay in boxes until after I'm gone when they'll finally go to the landfill. Indeed, that is also the likely fate of my towers and antennas if current trends in our hobby continue.

I do not keep the perpetually useless stuff for nostalgia or because I favour older generations of technology. I favour the march of technology, and that is what I aim for in my station. I will not buy and restore boat anchors, not even if I fondly look back on those products from my early days in the hobby. Others love doing that and I applaud their enthusiasm. But I won't even buy a paper book or magazine anymore.

Do I sell this stuff? Most of it has no value. Do I give it away? Most hams are in the same situation, having junk that they'll never use or need. Throw it out? I admit that it's hard to let go of stuff that maybe, just maybe will find a purpose someday. Part of my problem is that out here in the great emptiness I have far too much room to store the useless stuff hams tend to accumulate. So on it goes.