Birth of the Blue Missile

Captin
you asked a question, here's where it really starts to get interesting
Andrew

Because of the next sequence of events, let me digress here for a moment. You will need this to make sense of it:

When I was born I was given up for adoption by my natural mother and adopted by a reformed Jewish family in Roslyn, Long Island, New York. As I was growing up we rarely attended temple except for the high holy days. My father Stanley, however, did want me to get Bar-Mitzvaed, which is the Jewish ceremony celebrating the age of accountability, or “becoming a man”. The Catholics call it Conformation. When he gave me the books used in Hebrew school, which were the Torah, Hof-Torah (the book of the prophets) and the Hebrew language Texts, he told me “I don’t know all that is in these, but believe what ever you read in them.” While we were studying in the book of Isaiah, we came to the scripture that foretells of the coming Messiah (Isaiah 7:14), where it says; “Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign; Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” I raised my hand and said “Rabbi, didn’t that already happen? What about Jesus? (I had heard about Him from our backdoor neighbor, Victor Knapp who was a Catholic). The Rabbi replied to me, “We don’t discuss Him here.” It was at that time, that I knew something wasn’t right; he acted as if he was hiding something or was not telling the truth. So the seeds of salvation were sown but didn’t get watered for many years.

Now back to the story:
One day during the summer of ’74, after doing mushrooms and getting well adjusted we were sitting at TK’s kitchen table. The mushrooms had basically worn off and we got to discussing spiritual things. TK asked if I had ever heard about Jesus. I told him that I had heard of Jesus, but I knew nothing much more about Him or the Bible. TK then told me the good news that Jesus was sent as the Messiah, told me to go buy a King James Bible, and read about all that He had done, for myself. I took his advice, starting in Genesis and read until I got to Isaiah 7:14. It was then that I realized that I was still in the old testament. All of the old feelings from Hebrew school came flooding back and all of a sudden it all made sense.
I got on the phone and called TK in tears and told him that I believed that Jesus WAS the Messiah and he said that because I had been willing to confess Him publicly from my heart that I was now saved. He said that I should skip to the New Testament and read about all that Jesus did for me, which I did.
It was during this time of discovering the good news that I was at a movie theater with Larry and Bob. We were sitting in the first row of the balcony looking over and leaning on the rail. All of a sudden I heard a voice say to me “I will send you into the wilderness to be tested like my son” I did not hear it with my natural ears but it sounded so real that I answered out loud, “God, I don’t want to be like Jesus!”, at which point Larry and Bob turned to me and asked, what’s the matter? I asked them if they had heard what I had heard, which of course they had not.


Having forgotten all about that incident, later on that year I found my way to what was called a ‘Friday night Break’. The best way to describe it is, it was a tailgate party for CB users, Lots of food and lots of beer, and lots of neat cars. There were about fifty people at these gatherings.

There were a lot of characters among the group. One of note was “Shaker” (his handle) He had a 1960s delivery van that looked like today’s SUVs. I’m not sure what make; it had rounded corners to the top and dual door at the back, with regular driver/passenger doors at the front. It had a 1/8th wave solid metal antenna on the roof, half a dozen car batteries bolted to the floor on the inside. It also had twin alternators to charge the batteries and power the 1000watt linear amplifier he used to boost the power of his CB. He regularly talked ‘Skip’ to California and could light up entire storefronts and florescent signage by the street when he key’d up the mic. They called him shaker because when he keyd up, your radio and anything near it would shake because of the volume he broadcasted at. He had to be careful where he parked so as not to give away his position because the FCC was regularly looking for him. Yes, in those days the FCC had mobile triangulating rigs and were forever trying to bust amp runners.

There was also a guy who shall remain nameless that worked for the ‘Company’, who had a regular looking radio in the dash of his truck, and a strange short antenna on his roof. Remember this was the mid seventy’s. One day he said you want to see something? With TJ (You’ll meet him in a moment) looking on grinning and from ear to ear, he got into his truck and turned on the radio. Nothing special just AM garbage. He then said do you see that microwave tower? Listen to this. He then pushed two of the buttons at once and dialed in the tower. We were then listening to a telephone conversation where a couple of ladies were talking about a recipe of some sort! He moved the dial a little and we were listening to another conversation. I looked at him and said nothing; he then punched a single button and put the radio back on the AM band. And you thought ‘Q’ didn’t exist and big brother really wasn’t listening!

My research and modify gene kicked in about that time and I was not satisfied with the measly four watts allowed by law. I didn’t want to run a linear but there still had to be a better way. I did some research on how antennas work and what makes them efficient. Base style antennas called ground planes are among the most efficient and use the electrical ground part of their design to bounce the signal off of. There are also what we called beaming affairs or a set of ‘beams’ based on the same concept but with three vertical parts that favored one side with the ground plane being more efficient on that side than the other two. You would rotate the entire antenna remotely from your base location electrically (in many cases your Bar co Lounger) to favor the direction you wanted to transmit in. So I took that concept and designed a mobile set of ‘beams’ using two ¼ wave fiberglass whips and the trunk-mounted center antenna. I lengthened the trunk-mounted antenna’s stainless steel part above the load and wrapped the whips with lead foil tape from their base to an elevation just above the top of the trunk antenna. This had the effect of forcing the signal to the tips and not transmitting back into the center antenna, which would have created a problem called a high standing wave ratio (high SWRs). When I was done everyone I talked to swore I was running a linear of twenty watts or so. That was the way the Duster was set up from then on.

more later guys