Phil,

That was quite a story about the Monkey!

Jim
WA5VYL



-----Original Message----- 
From: Phil Scovell
Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2014 6:04 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Speaking of turning rotors by hand

I used to hang out on 15 most of the time in my teenage years.  We had a
group of guys, both DX and stateside, on 21.420 and a neighbor of mine, a
mile away, told me about it and he and another friend, they both had MD and
were in wheelchairs, used to play chess as we all sat and chatted throughout
the day; sometimes for 8 to 12 hours.  Back then, we still own the Canal
Zone which used the KZ5 prefix instead of the Panama prefix of HP to
designate as a different country.  Now, of course, since one of our
presidents gave the Panama Canal away to be owned by Panama and guarded by
the Chinese, HP is their main prefix.  I said that to say this.  We had
several KZ5 people on that frequency and one was a math teacher on a
military base within the Canal Zone boundaries the U S maintained.  I was
doing very poorly in my first year of Algebra and this guy told me to bring
my homework home and to get on frequency right after school so we could
talk.  We also chatted on Saturdays and Sundays in our ever widening group.
He helped me by talking me through the calculations and tutoring me which
helped me get a much better grade than an F or D that I was going to get.
Anyhow, one of the guys on their almost daily, was HC2WN and I think his
name was chuck.  That call was from Ecuador in South America.  He told us
one day he was hunting DX by calling CQ on 15 meter sideband and an African
station called him with a big signal since he was beaming toward Africa
anyway.  They visited for a long time and then he realized the band was
going out to the Pacific because the African, I think it was South Africa he
was working, got weaker and weaker.  So Chuck signed out with him before
they lost contact.  As he turned down the radio, he glanced out the window
in front of his operating desk because he saw movement.  He had no rotor but
he had a TH6 yagi, 6 element triband beam, up at about 50 feet, and he had
nylon fishing string tied to the end of the boom so he could step out his
ham shack door, grab the string wrapped around a nail sticking out of the
frame of his doorway, give the string a tug, and rotate his beam.  He jumped
up, ran out the door, and started yelling at the monkey who had found the
string and was rotating his antenna all over the place.  Chuck said this
same monkey kept coming up to their clothes line where his wife hung their
laundry and kept pulling out the clothes pins and watching the newly washed
laundry fall to the ground.  This day, the monkey saw the fishing string
instead and started pulling on it and chattering like crazy with laughter,
monkey laughter that is, as the big antenna over his head slowly turned this
way and that.  Chuck ran him off and out of the yard but he always kept his
eye on the fishing line after that.  The cost of big rotors, even used ones,
is getting rediculous so maybe the armstrong method might work, unless, of
course, you have monkies in your backyard.

Phil.
K0NX