[GreenKeys] What is it?

[E. William Horne]

On 6/9/2023 12:21 AM, Harold Hallikainen via GreenKeys wrote:
> When I was a kid, my father had a marine radio manufactured
> by KAAR. It operated in the 2 MHz marine band (I remember the Coast Guard
> was 2.182 MHz). The transmitter was AM with a parallel pair of 807 tubes
> in the final and a push pull pair in the modulator. When you'd key the
> mic, you could hear the dynamotor in the bilge start up.

My favorite memory of a shipboard radio was a Pierce-Simpson set located 
on the bridge of a tour boat named the Provincetown, which took 
vacationers on trips from Boston to (you guessed it) Provincetown in the 
summer, and went to Puerto RIco during the winter. My uncle was an Able 
Seaman on the Provincetown when I was 15, and he invited my brother and 
me to wave them off when they left Boston. We were standing next to the 
dock when they called for permission to leave, but the harbormaster 
ordered them to wait for a Coast Guard inspection crew. A few minutes 
later, a couple of Chevy Suburbans pulled up, and a bunch of Coast Guard 
men got out. I followed the "radio" man up to the bridge, and he pulled 
a loose-leaf binder out of his bag, compared a list of numbers from the 
binder to the radio's serial and model numbers, and then took some 
bright-yellow tape our of this bag, and glued it to the front of the radio.

The taps said "CONDEMNED." The Provincetown had to stay in port for a 
week, and it left with a brand new radio on the bridge, and a lot of 
other repairs that the owners had intended to do down in Puerto Rico 
where they would cost a lot less. My uncle, being in the maritime union, 
got to hop on a Yellowbird and fly down, because of the delay: he told 
me that if he had kept a birth on the ship and sailed to Puerto Rico, he 
would have had to endure "Baloney sandwiches and Spam until we were 
below Cape Hatteras!"

Bill, W4EWH