The Gunsmoke Attitude

The Gunsmoke Attitude

"The Gunsmoke Attitude
By John Wendt, WA6BFH

Many of you may not remember a television program known as 'Gunsmoke'. When I was a 5-year-old kid it was the most popular program on TV.

It featured James Arnes as the marshal Matt Dillon, in a somewhat rough and tumble Kansas town.

Gunsmoke was a leading television program of its day, and in fact set the leading statistics for TV programming for a record number of seasons run. The program was not equaled for ratings by any other TV show until the mid-1970's "

Now you may wonder what all of this has to do with an article on a Ham radio web page, so fellow Hamsters I will tell you. I took down my old Yaesu FT-290 the other day and blew off the dust.

I had not used this radio in probably several years, as it had been relegated to my radio lab where I was using it a stable power oscillator of enough ummph to turn on the base of a transistor.

I fired it up on a local 2 Meter repeater after poking at the dipswitch on the internal CTCSS encoder. What I heard was reminiscent of the reasons that I had left 2 Meter FM.




73 fer nw,
Bob N5IET/AE

10X# 37210, FP#-1141, SMIRK#-5177
http://www.n5iet.com/
Code may be taking a back seat for now,
but the pioneering spirit that put the code
there in the first place is out front of it all.