Spinning & GrinningI found out today that the primary designer of the off center fed antenna, also known as a Windom antenna was a member of the National Guard and a founder of an early version of the Army Amateur Radio System (AARS) back in 1923. The gentleman’s name is Loren G. Windom. His individual initiative helped push the development and success of the AARS.
I am closing in on the end of my research concerning the history of MARS, focusing on the early years when the organization was known as the Army Amateur Radio System (AARS). I choose this as a research topic because no one has ever written a thorough history of MARS.
Dr. Paul A. Scipione, AA2AV, wrote MARS: Calling Back To ‘The World’ From Vietnam (The History of Military Affiliate Radio Systems Operations During the Vietnam War) which was published back in 1994. This hard to find book was truly a labor of love for Dr. Scipione, who had served as a soldier and MARS operator during the Vietnam War. He conducted countless interviews with soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and civilians who were involved in MARS during the length of the US involvement in Vietnam. He also conducted some initial research concerning the early days of MARS, prior to WWII. The majority of his research concerning MARS early history was done at Fort Monmouth, NJ, the location of the US Army’s Signal Corps School from pre-World War I to post-World War II. His primary source was QST which reflects a very ARRL flavored version of the AARS history. Army MARS currently uses an abbreviated version of Scipione’s history on their website:
In November, 1925, the Army Amateur Radio System (AARS) was initiated by a few dedicated pioneers in the United States Army Signal Corps led by Capt. Thomas C. Rives. His original intention was to enlist the talents of volunteer Amateur Radio operators as a source to train Soldiers in the then new technology of radio as well as pursuing radio research and development to improve radio equipment within the Army. His efforts were very successful.
This organization continued until the United States entry into World War II, at which time radio Amateurs were denied the use of the air. Therefore, the activities of AARS, as it was known, were suspended until 1946 when, once again, AARS was allowed to go back on the air. During the years 1925 through 1942, the AARS functioned more or less as an extra curricular activity of the U. S. Army Signal Corps, its scope being necessarily limited by the meager budget of the pre-World War II depression years. The best available figures indicate that as of the 7th of December, 1941, there were approximately 60,000 FCC licensed Amateurs within the United States and its possessions. Some 5600 of those Amateurs were members of the AARS. About 20% of the pre-World War II AARS members eventually entered the service of their country either in the Army or in a civilian capacity. The U. S. Army recognized the great importance of reactivating the AARS to train vitally needed communications personnel at a relatively inexpensive direct cost to the U.S. government. Therefore, in 1946, the AARS was reactivated and functioned as such until the creation of the Military Amateur Radio System in 1948, later renamed the Military Affiliate Radio System (MARS) with Army MARS and the newly formed Air Force MARS reflecting the creation of the Air Force as a separate service. In early 1963, the Navy-Marine Corps MARS was established.
From my research: AARS was officially constituted in November 1925, although the seeds for the organization had been planted a few years earlier. Both the ARRL and the Signal Corps had different motives for the founding of AARS. The ARRL was looking to affiliate with a government organization in order to ensure the radio amateurs continued to have the freedom to use the airwaves. Coming out of WWI, the ARRL was blindsided by the US Navy when it initially made a grab at permanently taking control of the radio spectrum. The ARRL proved to be an effective lobby and successfully persuaded Congress to maintain the status quo of the Radio Act of 1912, which gave the radio amateur his on-air privileges. The next fight was against commercial interests as broadcast radio skyrocketed in popularity. The ARRL knew that by affiliating with the Army, they could clearly justify the radio amateur’s continued access to the ham bands.
In the early 1920s, the Signal Corps was attempting to stand up a near-global radio system which came to be known as the War Department Radio Net. The hub of the net was based out of the Washington D.C. area and the other major nodes were located in each one of the nine corps areas.
This net grew to include Alaska, Hawaii, the Panama Canal Zone, and the Philippine Islands. The Army lacked a large number of radio operators and soon faced budgetary and personnel cuts in the mid-1920s. Additionally, the Army was also looking at long term requirements. They realized the time required to draft and train the amount of radio operators that would be required for a major mobilization would be prohibitive. The Army viewed an affiliation with the ARRL and the American radio amateur as a possible solution to their short and long term manning issues.
While CPT Rives was stationed at Fort Monmouth during this period and a very active radio amateur, he was not the driving force behind the creation of AARS. The Army never saw the radio amateur as an asset to be used in helping with training at the Signal School. The Signal School was very progressive in its implementation of radio innovations and heavily leveraged the faculty at nearby MIT for technical assistance in addition to the school’s military staff.
Between 1925 and 1941, AARS was successful in training many amateur radio operators in Signal Corps procedure. Participation in AARS nets trained the radio amateurs in use of Army ciphers, how to pass message traffic, and net procedure. AARS members often provided aid during natural disasters, providing a link between local, state, and the national government. During the 1930s, AARS frequently teamed with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps to provide a radio link. The MARSGrams that became very familiar to soldiers during Vietnam can be traced back to the support provided members of the CCC sending messages back home. During the summer of 1941 as the US Army began its expansion for the coming war, AARS members operated directly from Army camps in order to pass messages from the soldiers back to their families.
While the Army had done an excellent job at training the AARS in Army communication procedures, it never was able to formally place the AARS members in any type of reserve status were they could be called up to active duty. No organized system was used to track membership and no plan was made to attempt to draft the AARS members into the Signal Corps. The AARS membership figure of 5600 is not accurate. Active membership during 1941 was at ~1200 with about 2000 inactive members.
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, AARS evaporated. Members were encouraged to join the Army and promised placement in the Signal Corps. Compliance with this request was not universal. Not immediately seeing a use for AARS in a civil defense roll was shortsighted. The AARS could have served as a basis upon which to build the Wartime Emergency Radio System (WERS). Instead, the organization was scraped and it was hoped that they would seek placement in the Army.
Radio amateurs served in the US military in large numbers, but the vast majority were never prior members of AARS. National Guard units had consistently leveraged the use of radio amateurs who were members of their units to perform radio communication functions. For those radio amateurs drafted into the Army, their placement in a radio position was not assured.
AARS, during its existence, was a truly valuable organization - not an extra-curricular activity for the Signal Corps. Had the Army better managed the program and personnel, they would have derived much more benefit from the organization while on a wartime footing.
In addition to using QST as a source, I also used The Signal Corps Bulletin which was the professional journal of the Signal Corps up until 1940. The Signal Corps Bulletin provided a great deal of insight from the Army perspective concerning AARS, their development, and interaction with the CCC, National Guard, and the rest of the Army.
I continue to write my paper and am hoping to have a solid draft by next Friday. I am going to take the history a bit further - to just after the reconstitution of AARS as MARS in 1949 and then follow MARS up to 1953. If you are trying to find me in the coming days, chances are I’ll be at the Fort Leavenworth library, swimming in my notes as I try to tell the story of MARS in about 50 pages.
The Signal Corps Bulletin was the professional journal of the US Army’s Signal Corps from 1920 to 1940. After the establishment of the War Department’s radio net, a section was included in the back were individual stations could make comments about their equipment, personnel transfers, and sometimes snipe at rival stations. Station WAR, located at Ft. Meyer, VA (near Washington D.C.) was net control for the net that reached all the way out to San Fransisco, Seattle, Alaska, Hawaii and even the Philippine Islands. The following is taken from a Bulletin from the late 20s which I found pretty amusing:
It is with great regret that I leave members of the radio station and take this means of expressing to each and every one my hearty appreciation of the many kind favors and good fellowship shown by all during my stay. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and for the New Year may you all be staff sergeants. I shall always hold a warm spot in my heart for the members of this outfit and if at any time one of you needs succor don’t call on me because I will probably be broke too.
Usually when leaving a station it has been my practice to donate my sign to some member of the station to filly able to hold up the traditions of this fine old sign so I hereby solemnly will bequeath my sign to A to operator TN as he has been wanting a good sign. The sign may only be accepted by TN on the following conditions: 1. That he will discontinue all prevarications. 2. Discontinue the practice of bumming cigarettes or smoking butts. 3. Will not try to get excused from duty through subterfuge such as a lame wrist or shoulder.
When I am again battling the bitter cold and nearly unconquerable obstacles of the primeval wilds of the northland and my tea is running low and I am completely out of whiskey I will be cheered and spurred on to greater efforts by the thought that I am an ex-member of the undefeatable gang at WAR. I am crying so much that I can not see to write more. Goodbye. - Avery
(Former operator WAR now en route to Alaska)
NOTE: a booze hister was defined back in those days (of Prohibition) as a drunkard.
Unfortunately my station looks a bit more like the one on the bottom rather than the top. I need to make a concerted effort this weekend to get things straight. It shouldn’t take long to get things in order, the hard part is just to get started.
I’m continuing my research of piecing together the history of MARS starting back from the early days of the Army Amateur Radio System (AARS). The process of research is as enjoyable as the information I’m digging up.
- Jeff, KE9V, had a post on his blog the other day that featured a humorous cartoon of different styles of keying and he sited it from a 1952 MARS Bulletin. The “MARS Bulletin” reference caught my eye, because I had not yet heard that there was such a bulletin. Additionally, the time frame of the bulletin in 1952 was near the time when MARS had been reincarnated from the ashes of the pre-WWII AARS. Jeff said he had got the picture from Dr. Kristen Haring’s book Ham Radio’s Technical Culture, published back in 2006.
I contacted Dr. Haring (she’s a professor at Auburn University) and asked if she could provide me any additional information on the MARS Bulletin. Dr. Haring told me that she had accessed the MARS Bulletin while conducting research at both the Library of Congress and Columbia University’s library. She also recommended a search tool called WorldCat to help locate copies of the MARS Bulletin nearby. WorldCat is a great tool (it would have been helpful to have had this earlier on in my research) and I was able to locate copies of the Bulletin at the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology located in nearby Kansas City (with the next closest source at Indiana University which is some distance away). The library here at Fort Leavenworth is top notch - its official title being the Combined Arms Research Library.
But I am sometimes surprised that they lack items like the MARS Bulletin. Tomorrow I will head down to Kansas City and see if the MARS Bulletin can help explain why MARS was resurrected after WWII and what was the military’s intended mission for the organization.
- Following another lead for QST, I found a letter to the editor in the October 1998 issue from a gentleman by the name of Robert Gabardy, K4TJ. In the letter, Mr. Gabardy explained how he was part of a team which formed to bring MARS back to life back in 1949 and explained how they arrived a the new name for the organization. I was able to contact the retired Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gabardy, who served in the US Army for a period of over 23 years and is a veteran of WWII. He was able to give me a bit more background and also agreed to respond to some additional questions that I am developing.
- My last hot lead comes from another QST letter to the editor from the June 1998 issue that had caused LTC Gabardy to write in. This letter was from George Hart, W1NJM, a former staff member of ARRL… but also a former member of the AARS and also an Army veteran of WWII. From what I can tell now, Mr. Hart is in a retirement facility in Connecticut. I am going to try to reach him tomorrow and see if I can conduct a telephone interview with him. He would be an amazing source of information into how AARS functioned. I am particular interested in trying to determine why the US Army failed to directly draw from the pool of trained AARS operators to fill the ranks of the Signal Corps after Pearl Harbor. Equally confusing is why the Army didn’t maintain the organization to continue to fulfill its domestic responsibilities of acting as an auxiliary communications network. Instead AARS disintegrated within hours after Pearl Harbor, but only to be replaced later by the Wartime Emergency Radio Service (WERS).
I am hoping tomorrow will be a productive research day.
I have not played around with EchoLink for a while. Reviewing my manual for the Kenwood TM-D710A that I have running my APRS traffic for my home weather station, I saw how the D710A can also simultaneously run an EchoLink node (with the additional PG-5H cables). Configuring the EchoLink software to work with the D710A is pretty simple and is covered in one of the Kenwood manuals for the rig that focuses on both APRS and EchoLink operation. I established my EchoLink station as a simplex “link”. That allows me to have the EchoLink node operational on a simplex VHF/UHF frequency and accessible by either HT from the house or from my mobile rig while I am driving in and around town. By using DTMF commands over the simplex link, I can bring the node up and down as well as connect to different EchoLink enabled repeaters and conferences. It is interesting to note that since I was last playing around with EchoLink, it seems there are a lot less nodes around. I’m guessing this can be attributed to the growing popularity of IRLP over EchoLink. If you are near an EchoLink repeater or have the software installed - give me a call at EchoLink Node #496698.
With a dual boot (Windows and Ubuntu linux) system, Ubuntu installs GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) which allows you to select which OS you want to boot with. The default is Ubuntu. However, sometimes you’ll have a system that you’d like to have default to Windows (like my wx-aprs computer).
The latest distribution of Ubuntu (9.10) has changed the way GRUB works and the Ubuntu wiki explains what you need to do if you want to change the default OS GRUB will select when going through the boot process.
An issue than has creeped up in some of the more recent distributions of Ubuntu is the use of the Password Keyring. While a great idea for security, it makes it a bit more difficult to remotely reboot an Ubuntu computer if it is using a wireless connection. Fortunately a solution was available…
From Dave’s Tech Blog:
I would have made the title of this post “How to remove the Keyring password manager in Ubuntu Linux” but that’s kinda long… Anyway, you might be wondering what the keyring password manager is. It is a built in feature of Ubuntu that remembers passwords for things like FTP account logins, Evolution Email accounts, your wireless network authentication passwords, etc., and locks them all behind a kind of Master Password of sorts. So for example, lets pretend that the password for your wireless network was 64 characters long and was just a bunch of random numbers and letters that you’d only be able to remember if you were some kind of freak savant mathematician. The keyring password manager would remember this for you, but will only allow the system to access and use that long password after you grant it access to the keyring.
As nice and handy as this might sound to security buffs, it’s struck me as a minor inconvenience. For starts, if I were to configure Ubuntu to automatically login to my account after I turn the computer on, I would then also be asked to type in my keyring password so it would connect to my wireless network. This becomes a bigger problem if, for instance, I were to connect to my computer remotely and had to reset it for some reason, like applying a recent kernel update. The snag there would be that after restarting, my computer would boot up, but since I’m not physically sitting in front of it, it would sit there waiting for me to enter a keyring password before it would reconnect to my wireless network, and I’d have to go home or ask someone else to type in the password for me.
So what I’ve always wanted to have happen is this:
* I start or restart the computer by remote (such as through SSH or VNC).
* After booting it automatically logs into my account and connects to my wireless network without asking for any passwords along the way so I can VNC right back into the system with no further trouble.
I’ve finally learned how to do this, and it’s stupid easy to do.
There is of course a few security drawbacks about doing this. For starts, if any person were to gain physical access to my machine they’d be able to connect to my wireless network without needing to enter a password. Then again, if someone I don’t trust has somehow gained physical access to my machine I might as well go ahead and consider it to be compromised.
Now, if the PC were in an office with a bunch of random co-workers always around, I’d be a lot more concerned. If that were the case, I’d have that puppy locked down with a power on password, disable booting from the CD-ROM/Ethernet/USB in the BIOS, perhaps have a GRUB password and be working with an encrypted HD partition, and of course auto-login would be disabled so I would be required to enter anywhere from 2 to 3 different passwords just to login to the system. But this thing is in my house behind two large dogs and a dead-bolt locked door, functioning as a server that requires a password for me to access it by via SSH or VNC anyway. So for this particular PC, I see little harm in opting out of using this security feature.
So here’s how you get rid of the keyring manager. Please note this will erase saved passwords you have so be sure you know or remember them before you make your computer forget them:
1. Open up your Home Folder by clicking Places>Home Folder
2. Press CTRL-H (or click View>Show Hidden Files)
3. Find a folder called .gnome2 (it has a period at the beginning of the name) and open it by double clicking on it
4. In side of the .gnome2 folder, there is another folder called keyrings. Open it up.
5. Delete any files you find within the keyrings folder
6. Restart the computer
After you restart and login (if you’re automatically logging in) you’ll probably be asked to enter your wireless networks WPA/WEP encryption key. After you type that password in, the keyring manager will appear to let you know that it would like to handle the storage of that password and lock it away with a new keyring password. The box looks like this:
Instead of typing in a new password, leave both boxes completely empty and click Create.
You’ll then be asked if you know what the hell you’re doing:
Go ahead and click Use Unsafe Storage.
WARNING: Doing this creates a new file in your ~/.gnome2/keyrings/ folder called default.keyring and it will now house passwords IN CLEAR TEXT and not in an encrypted form. So it is imperative that you are certain no untrustworthy persons can access your user account (either physically or by remote) or they will be able to easily open and read this file and obtain many passwords (for things such as FTP accounts, SSH, e-mail accounts, etc). Proceed with caution.
From here on all keyring stored passwords you enter will not safeguarded behind a master password or encryption. Whether or not you want to do this is entirely up to you. I personally have had enough of the keyring manager and consider it kind of annoying. But as I said before, you may have certain environmental factors that make having a master password over the rest of your passwords a good idea. Keep in mind that the keyring password manager has absolutely nothing to do with your administrative/root privilages password that has to be entered any time you want to apply updates, or add/remove software. You will still have to type your account password in for these actions, and that is something I am quite comfortable with. I’m just happy I don’t have to have to ask my girlfriend to type in a keyring password every time I want to restart the computer while I’m away from home.
Thanks Dave!
My Dell Mini 9 netbook had been limping along on the Ubuntu distribution that came with it - 8.04. This specific version put out by Dell had some flaws. Follow on distributions were rumored to be glitchy with the Dell Mini 9; problems with WiFi, the integrated webcam, and other nits. With 9.04, Ubuntu introduced the Netbook Remix. Ubuntu’s website says that, “a remix is a ‘respun’ version of Ubuntu built for a specific purpose. Although Canonical has encouraged community projects to use this terminology for some time, this is the first time that Canonical has used it. We are using it to differentiate from an ‘Edition’ which we consider a complete version with daily builds suitable for the average user with no additional work beyond installing the CD.”
I loaded the remix from a USB flash drive (the Dell Mini does not have a CD drive). Everything worked flawlessly. The initall WiFi connection is quicker, Skype works with the embedded webcam, and the menu driven layout of the remix is intuitive. The initial OS took up only a mere 2GBs worth of space on the Dell Mini’s solid state hard drive.
While I do not enjoy the small keyboard and screen, the Dell Mini is a great little netbook to take notes on in a classroom and makes for a light load when traveling. Perhaps a good companion for a QRP field operation?
I look forward to playing around with my revitalized Dell Mini.
After a week of cold temps here on the eastern edge of Kansas, it looks like we are finally going to see some relief and also bid farewell to all the snow that’s been hanging around.
Some initial high temps back around New Year’s Eve was able to melt a bit of the snow around my weather station perched way up on our roof. Then temps dropped and my wind vane froze pointing almost north (indicated by the solid red line at the top of the graph).
Some increased sunlight and rising temps finally freed the vane. Probably next will get some melting snow making the rain collector indicate some rainfall.
My Davis Vantage Pro2 weather station is going to need a good spring cleaning, replacing the on-board battery, cleaning off the solar panel that helps with power, and cleaning out the rain collector.
So far, so good with my new weather station >dedicated< computer setup. The computer has been puttering away without issue. I do still need to hook up the UPS to keep both the computer and radio alive should the AC power get interrupted.
