Ham Humor

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Technology Axioms 

  • Never trust results you get on a Friday afternoon until you can repeat the results on a Monday morning1.
  • You can never tell which way the train went by looking at the track.
  • Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
  • An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
  • Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
  • All great discoveries are made by mistake.
  • Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
  • A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
  • A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection.
  • Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.
  • The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
  • To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.
  • After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.
  • Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable and three parts which are still under development.
  • If mathematically you end up with the incorrect answer, try multiplying by the page number.
  • Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
  • If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.
  • Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.
  • If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist.
  • When all else fails, read the instructions.
  • If there is a possibility of several things going wrong the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.
  • Everything that goes up must come down.
  • Any instrument when dropped will roll into the least accessible corner.
  • If you build a system that even a fool can use, then only a fool will want to use it.
  • If it jams, try to force it. If it breaks, it probably needed to be replaced anyway.
  • Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.

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    You Might Be A Ham!

     

    1. If your wife calls and asks you to bring home a ham and you show up with one of your radio friends... you might be a ham!
    2. If you go canoeing with your buddies they ask you to bring the paddles and you show up with your Vibroplex... you might be a ham!
    3. If the phone rings and you answer this is AI4QP over... you might be a ham!
    4. If your back yard looks like and aluminum Porcupine... you might be a ham!
    5. If you have to explain to your spouse that a Hamfest is not a barbecue... you might be a ham!
    6. If your car has more than two antennas on it... you might be a ham!
    7. If you are asked to show two pieces of I.D. and you present a copy of your Amateur License and your ARRL card... you might be a ham!
    8. If you are afraid to pull into a parking garage because of antennas on your roof... you might be a ham!
    9. If someone asks you what your favorite radio station is and you say W1AW... you might be a ham!
    10. If you go to a boxing match and they start talking about fists and you bring up the fact that you just got your keynote... you might be a ham.
    11. When the guys at the marina talk about their Chriscraft and you bring up your Cushcraft... you might be a ham!
    12. If your wife tells you she would like a Diamond for Christmas and you give her an antenna or a really good ARRL Membership...you're in some deep trouble!!!!!

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    Hi and welcome to my ham radio humor page. I will show you around this page that contains a bit of ham radio humor but first you need to remember that you had a sked 29 minutes ago with a rare DX station on 20 meters and you were to call the XYL to remind her to remind you to remind her so she would not forget to call you about whatever it was that you had forgotten to tell her mother, but you just remembered that you had forgotten to pay the phone bill and the telephone company did not forget that you forgot....so they cut you off!!!
    I forgot what I was going to say to you about this page...maybe you can remember to remind me!!!
    To find me, just tune your VFO to 14.313Mhz, I am there shooting Skip again....
    I tried once before but he survived!

                                                                             

     Three brothers ages 92, 94, and 96 live in a house together. One night the 96 year old draws a bath. He puts his foot in and pauses.
    He yells down the stairs and says
    "Was I getting in or out?"
    The 94 year old yells back "I don't know. I'll come up and see." He starts up the stairs and pauses. Then he yells,
    "Was I going up the stairs or down?"
    The 92 year old HAM is sitting in front of his HF rig and listening to his brothers. He shakes his head, picks up the mic and says "I sure hope I never get that forgetful."
    He knocks on wood for good measure.
    He then yells into the mic,
    "I'll come up and help both of you as soon as I see....
    who's at the door. "OVER"

                                                          

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     An elderly ham and his XYL were on a cruise and it was really stormy. They were standing on the back of the boat watching the moon, when a wave came up and washed the old woman overboard. They searched for days and couldn't find her, so the captain sent the old ham back to shore with the promise that he would notify him as soon as they found something. Three weeks went by and finally the old man got a fax from the boat. It read:
    "Sir, sorry to inform you, we found your wife dead at the bottom of the ocean. We hauled her up to the deck and attached to her posterior was an oyster and in it was a pearl worth $50,000 . .please advise"
    The old man faxed back:
    "Send me the pearl and re-bait the trap!"

                                                                              

     

    FAMOUS HAM RADIO MOVIES

    Pileup On The Orient Express
    Gone With The Wind -- A Yagi Story
    Dxpedition To Skull Island By K1NG/KØNG
    Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Lid

    First BLØOD
    The Maltese Falklands
    To Live and Let Diode -- ØØ73
    CasaBlanker
    Citizen Band
    Key Largo

    HamaLot -- The Old DXer is at it again
    Silence Of The Hams - Starring Rachel Squelch
    Contact - Starring AL1IEN
    Zulu -- The Ultimate PileUp!!
    Fifth Element -- Story about a 4 element yagi starring Bruce Willis
    Custer's Last QSO -- He left the Sabers, Gatling Guns & HT's at the Fort!!!

    ZULU Dawn -- Durnford didn't do well either!!
    ZULU Dawn -- GrayLine Prequel

    M1SH MASH -- With RF Burns
    Gone With The Windom -- The Sequel
    Nightmare On Elmer Street -- With JA1SON

    VERTICAL!! Directed By Alfred Switchbox
    Name is James, Call is BØND -- Agent ØØ73


     

  • S.W.R. -- A term, applied to any part of the antenna system, which means: "Savings-to-Watt Ratio". Based on the inverse relationship of dollars in the bank and effective radiated power.
    Characteristic Impedance The usual reaction of your spouse when told about the proposed antenna system.
  • Traps -- Devices installed in antennas to collect rain-water, to keep it from running further down the antenna.
  • Wind Loading -- The measure of how much more awkward it gets to handle a big beam as you ascend the tower.
  • Balun -- (Pronounced: "balloon" by many). An anti-surveillance device, installed in coaxial lines at the antenna, to prevent nosy neighbors from eavesdropping on you through their TV sets.
  • Transmatch -- A device mistakenly believed to decrease S.W.R.. The premise is that this device allows you to load up into a mis-matched antenna. Unfortunately, it the cost of one that lowers your S.W.R.
  • House Bracket -- A device which secures the house and the tower together. It lets the tower do double-duty by holding up the house during severe windstorms.
  • Rotator Control Box -- A device which is designed to let you monitor antenna "windmilling"
  • Sloper -- A variation of the vertical, where high winds have affected thin-walled aluminum tubing used in the construction.
  • Inverted Vee -- A clever, but inferior, reverse adaptation of the true, "upright Vee", which allows the use of a single support instead of the usual two.
  • Dipole -- Another modification of the true "Vee", and used where it is not possible to get the center feed point close to the ground.
  • Ground Plane -- Usually, an array of 1/4-wavelength arms extending from the base of some verticals (or "slopers"). These arms are not recommended unless a rotator is also used, to take advantage of their directional features.
  • Directional Coupler -- A device inserted into the transmission line which monitors the environment outside the shack, by utilizing the antenna as a remote sensor. For example, when the antenna responds to weather conditions such as severe icing or heavy winds, the coupler will produce indications of these responses. A special directional coupler has even been designed, presumably, to tell you when BIRDs are sitting on your antenna!
  • Smith Chart -- An alias, to be used when you don't want people to know what chart you really used to design your antenna.
  • Long Path -- The direction you are told to aim your antenna, to work a rare DX station, as suggested by the other fellows in the pileup.
  • Element Spacing -- A critical antenna design factor which is optimized to place the tunable traps on a beam as far out of reach as possible, from the tower.
  • Diversity Effect -- A property in which the quad-type antenna far excels over the yagi-type antenna. It relates to the number of directions an antenna can collapse into, under heavy winds.
  • Selective Fading -- A quirk of propagation, whereby a signal arrives at a distant point by multipath, and where the different signal components arrive with varying phase relationships. This causes the signal to be "cancelled out" at some points. This wonderful effect helps eliminate some of the QRM from distant DX stations when you are trying to copy the pileup.
  • "Off the back of the Antenna" -- A technique used by more experienced DX-ers, where the antenna is pointed away from the station being contacted. This creates a challenge similar to running QRP.
  • QRP -- Restricting final input power to the transmitter to anything less than 500 watts, on 20 meters.
  • Speech Processor -- A "state of the art" device which permits one to communicate with as many others at the same time as possible. However, beginner operators need to learn how to use one properly, to expand the signal beyond a narrow, 3 KHz bandwidth.
  • "IMOKINCALLBK" -- An expression used in a CW QSO, to say: "you send me your QSL card first, turkey, and then I'll send you mine".
  • IRC -- An economic instrument, administered by the Postal Service, to control the balance-of-trade deficit.
  • Parasitic Element -- A person who takes lists for DX-stations.
  • LISTS -- A method of making DX contacts, where some self-appointed person takes a list "on the air" (aka: his buddies on 2-meters) of people who wish to "work" a person in some DX location. This makes it easy for hams who do not have the patience or time to learn real DX skills to get a quick, easy contact. In fact, if you can't hear the actual report from the foreign station, the list-controller will often help ("...OK, there, WB6xxx, did you hear Jose give you a '59' signal report?").
  • QSL Manager -- The station you worked in Juan De Nova tells you to send a "Green Stamp" to a ham in Germany who is called a "QSL Manager". It is his duty to send your card to a ham in California, who then (after holding it for 8 months) sends you a QSL card.
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