The Amateurs

Larry Mueller, a research engineer at the Burroughs business machines company in Detroit, has a puppet at home named Mickey. His friend John Mayer, general manager of a small Detroit electronics firm, has a three-year-old son named David. Their homes are some miles apart, but on certain completely unpredictable emergency evenings, only Mickey can make David agree to go to bed. On those evenings, John Mayer takes his son down to the basement, turns on his ham TV equipment and tunes in Mickey. Before long the puppet has persuaded the kid to hit the sack.

Mueller was among the first, but he and Mayer are by no means the only, ham television broadcasters in the country. There are about 200 of them scattered about, although most are concentrated in Detroit, Toledo and Columbus. These amateur NBCs even have their own trade journal, the Amateur TV Experimenter. It is less than a year old, with 500 subscribers now and an average of ten new ones coming in each day.

A commercial TV camera and dolly can cost as much as $40,000, but the hams can build their own simpler ones for as little as $75. Many of them are using small cameras that the Air Force once used as part of the guidance system on drone bombers--available as surplus material for $100 to $200 apiece. Towers or high antennas are also needed, and before they are ready to broadcast, many TV hams spend as much as $3,000 incorporating such zazzy features as wide-angle lenses. All of them are also ham radio operators by necessity, to supply the audio. And their shacks--the hams' word for any space containing their equipment --are loaded with dial-studded cabinets, control panels, cameras and receiving sets. Ham TV is assigned a limited range in the ultra-high frequencies, but ordinary TV sets can be modified to receive the ham signals.

Television amateurs spend much time panning around their shacks and bragging about their equipment. They also give their audiences lingering shots of the supine fecundities of pinup girls. The squarer ones show off their wives, who used to hang around the shacks in curlers during the old radio days but now sit at their dressing tables for hours before joining their ingenious husbands on TV. Hams are not permitted to present entertainment, but they do show home movies and bring on relatives who play the harmonica, much as Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan do. One San Francisco ham likes to take his camera out in the street and show his air pals what is going on in the neighborhood.

Until recently most broadcasts have been limited to short distances, since the FCC permitted ham stations to operate only on 50 watts. This year they have raised it to 1,000 watts (WNBC New York operates on 10,000 watts). Under certain weather conditions, however, remarkable things happen. Larry Mueller once made visual contact with a fellow in Fort Recovery Ohio, 170 miles away.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.