well, Pat, That might be the case, too, but Zoomtext Xtra got it right  The 
contact lead me to believe it had a hump on it's back  I keep associating 
with words as I did with "camel" and try to remember the meaning of 
dromidary and how it's different from a regular camel.  There is or was a 
cake flour with that name and a cigarette called camel.  Noted in re-reading 
that suquence of tickets was not complete.
Thanks!
Bob


-----Original Message----- 
From: Pat Byrne
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 8:34 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Old Days

Bob,
JAWS made it sound like you had a contact with a canibal!  JFW is
full of surprises!
Pat, K9JAUAt 10:52 AM 1/26/2016, you wrote:
>I started out with borrowed equipment from The Maryland School For The 
>Blind
>in 1973, just a 2 band CW Heathkit, 100 feet of copper wire, and key.  Even
>though I was in my early 30s, my mother kept her promise and bought me a
>Kenwood 520S.  The store wouldn't sell her a microphone because I still had
>a novice ticket.  Got Tech and General shortly thereafter and General about
>a year after.  One of my most interesting contacts was a SSB QSO with a
>school for the blind in Israel. It was on 20 meters and a bunch of LIDS who
>kept telling us that we were in the DX portion of the band.
>
>Another contact on 20 was with a camel mobile in Quait.  He had an HT
>interfaced with his base station back at the motel.
>
>73:
>Bob Martin
>Baltimore
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Richard B. McDonald
>Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 11:01 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Old Days
>
>Phil,
>
>Glorious!
>
>73,
>Richard KK6MRH
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: For blind ham radio operators [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>On Behalf Of Phil Scovell
>Sent: Monday, January 25, 2016 8:56 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Old Days
>
>I had received my novice call about 3 weeks before the Nebraska school for
>the blind let out for summer vacation.  I couldn't wait to spend my whole
>summer on the air.  I had a DX 20, which later, even with a brand new tube,
>put out 9.5 watts, and a BC348 receiver that only tuned 160 through 20
>meters.  My antenna was a 100 foot long wire that ran from a window about 
>30
>feet off the ground, out to a tree at the end of the 4-plex we were 
>renting.
>
>I used no tuner.  At first, I only had the long wired connected to a knife
>switch.  One side had my antenna and the other side was ground shielding
>that dropped down 30 feet from the window to a short ground rod.  So,
>whenever I went off the air, I pulled up the window, threw the knife switch
>over, and the antenna was grounded.  I didn't have any coax at the time so 
>I
>used bear wire to connect the transmitter from the knife switch to the 
>SO239
>on the back of the rig.  I had no relay.  In the fall, I got a Viking 
>Ranger
>1 and 80 and 40 meter inverted v put up and I even got a very very noisy 
>dal
>key relay to switch the antenna when I switched in and out of transmit or
>receive.  my little DX20, however, held it's own back during those novice
>days.  It was mid summer when I, in earnest, began studying for the general
>class exam.  My Elmer, and tutor, taught me one on one for several weeks on
>Sunday afternoons, or sometimes on a Saturday, and then gave me the novice
>test.  The FCC out of Kansas City came once every 3 months to Omaha to give
>the general and extra class exams so I deliberately missed the one in the
>summer so I could have more time to study.  Back then, somehow the general
>class manual was recorded on vinyl records and I began listening to them
>over and over again.  When the FCC examiner came in October, I had not only
>half way memorized the general class manual but I went and spends some one
>on one lessons from my Elmer until he finally announced I was ready to take
>the test.  This would give me a second chance, if I flunked the first one,
>since the examiner would be back in Omaha one more time before my 1-year
>novice class license expired permanently.  My mom dropped a friend of mine,
>and I, off at the building downtown where I would take the test.  My friend
>was in his early twenties and was in the college my mom worked for at the
>time.  He was my reader for the day.  I was still just 14 years old.  The
>examiner asked me to wait till all the other guys had taken both the 13 WPM
>code test, or 20 WPM for the two guys going for the extra, so about an hour
>later, there were perhaps 12 to 15 guys there, I sat down at a table and 
>put
>on my headphones.  My friend wrote down whatever I said as I copied the 
>code
>and then an old brass pounder was slid in front of me and I was tested for
>sending 13 words per minute.  I passed both.  My friend then read the test
>to me.  The examiner told me to skip anything with diagrams and if I needed
>any of those later, he would test me on those, too.  As it turned out, I
>missed enough that I had to explain 3 diagrams to pass.  He had my friend
>write them down as I dictated  the circuits to him and after the examiner
>read them over, he said, "You passed."  By the way, back then, you could
>take the Extra class, I believe it was a 100 question written test, but it
>gave you no new privileges.  Going back to the summer before I took the
>general, I was up on the third floor of the brick house we were renting.
>The finished off attic had no heat or air conditioning but being a brick
>house, it wasn't half bad.  Although the winters were freezing up there.
>Without an electric blanket cranked up as high as it would go, I would have
>frozen solid up there during the winter.  As I lay on my back on my bed,
>listening to the general class material being played on my talking book
>machine, I sucked on a cheery flavored sucker.  I heard foot steps on the
>stairway.  I sighed, my mom, or most likely, my little sister, were coming
>up to bug me again and hear I was trying to deeply absorbed the manual.  I
>waited until I heard the steps stop at the top of the stairs.  Pulling out
>my sucker, I said, "Now what?"  Tex, a ham friend I came to know quite well
>by working him on 80 meters, said, "What do you mean, what now," and he
>busted out laughing.  I was embarrassed, to say the least, and tried to
>blame it on my mom and sister bugging me while I was trying to study.  I
>shut the record off and Tex came over and looked at the record as it spun 
>to
>a stop.  "So this is how you are preparing for the General, hay?"  Tex was
>in his 40s and worked for Western Electric in Omaha.  I had first heard his
>CQ on the 80 meter novice band.  It would have had to have been on 3703 or
>3725 or on 3747 because those were the only crystals I had at the time. 
>Tex
>was sending horrible code with a bug but I called him any way.  As the QSO
>progressed, I suggested that if he would throw that bug away and pull out a
>regular hand key, we could have a nice qso together.  He did so and he
>brought it up nearly every time I saw him about how I asked him to toss his
>bug away and get a good hand key so we could talk.  By the way, his hand 
>key
>sending was great.  I had a bug, too, but didn't use it for slower contacts
>and Tex was a new ham, too.  His call was, before he died in a motorcycle
>crash, W A 0 Old Milk Bottle.  Tex came over and took me with him to World
>Radio across the Missouri River into Council Bluffs where WRL was at that
>time.  I got a coil base loaded vertical and I forget what Tex was there
>for.  Anyhow, we came home, he helped me put the vertical up but making
>comparisons on the air between that and my long wire proved there were no
>differences.  Over the years, I have made a lot more friends over the radio
>than I ever dreamed was possible.  It is still a fun hobby some 50 plus
>years later.  Well, this pleasant old memory recently came to mind so I
>thought I'd share it.
>
>Phil.
>K0NX