The Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum is open Thursday evenings, but from September though April I bowl on Thursday nights, so never get to take advantage of that. We’ve finished for the year now, though, so yesterday, I walked down to the museum and put WA2HOM on the air for a couple of hours.
One of my first contacts was with Marco, IZ8LJZ. The contact itself was the standard DX contact, i.e. short and kind of boring, but when I looked him up on QRZ.Com, I found this photo below. What a lovely spot!
20m was open to Europe, so I made several more DX contacts before I left for the day. One of them was with Tom, G3HGE. We were both 599, and we had a not-so-normal DX contact, chatting for nearly 30 minutes.
Tom’s QRZ page said that he used to be a manufacturer of amateur radio gear, so earlier today, I Googled him. As it turns out, Tom was the man behind TW Electronics, a manufacturer of VHF gear from 1958 – 2000. There’s a nice history of the company on the TW website.
Now in his 80s, Tom now makes paddles and bugs. I don’t know if he’d like this comparison, but you might call him the “English Begali.” His latest creation, the TW Olympic shown below is a dual-lever bug that uses magnetic tension. He was using this bug for our QSO, and it sounded great. I’m already thinking that maybe I could get the XYL to put that on my Christmas list.
Mike K8XF says
I looked up the TW site and the paddle and bugs look great. I still dont understand the love for using a bug. The extra effort and work is un-necessary when you have a paddle and keyer. I think we talked about this before. Very few ops sound good using a bug….slapping a key does not impress me…HI…
Dan KB6NU says
I think the appeal is two-fold: it’s even more of a skill to use a bug than to use a paddle, and it’s a bit of history. I don’t mind working guys using bugs–unless their fist is so bad that you just can’t copy them. And, as you know, that can be said of some guys using paddles, too! :)