Overview
To an outsider, the world of ham radio is one of basement transmitters, clunky microphones, Morse code, and crackly, possibly clandestine, worldwide communications, a world both mysterious and geeky. But the real story is a lot more interesting: indeed, there are more than two million operators worldwide, including people like Walter Cronkite and Priscilla Presley. Gandhi had a ham radio, as do Marlon Brando and Juan Carlos, king of Spain.Hello World takes us on a seventy-year odyssey through the world of ham radio. From 1927 until his death in 2001, operator Jerry Powell transmitted radio signals from his bedroom in Hackensack, New Jersey, touring the worlds most remote locations and communicating with people from Greenland to occupied Japan. Once he made contact with a fellow ham operator, he exchanged postcards known as QSLs cards with them. For seven decades, Powell collected hundreds of these cards, documenting his fascinating career in amateur radio and providing a dazzling graphic inventory of people and places far flung.
This book is both an introduction to the fascinating world of ham and a visual feast for anyone interested in the universal language of graphic design.
Synopsis
In the 1970s, Henry Horenstein was a young photographer who shot album covers for Rounder Records. In his off-hours, he immersed himself in country music at the show venues, music parks, and the rural saloons that coursed with the music and its rough-and-tumble lifestyle, otherwise known as honky tonks. With over 100 incomparable duotone photographs, Honky Tonk captures the heart of the country music experience during a period of transition, as the friendly familiarity of the scene -- from the huge hall of the Grand Ole Opry to the family vacation camps -- took on a more commercial polish. Disarming portraits of legends such as Bill Monroe, Dolly Parton, and Waylon Jennings brush up against shots of the workaday fans who kept the scene alive. Offering an intimate glimpse into country music as it was performed and enjoyed, these photographs capture a true slice of American life where artists and fans converged to enjoy music and strut their stuff.
The New Yorker
"CQ, CQ, CQ, this is W2OJW, calling CQ. Whiskey Two Oscar Juliet Whiskey in Hackensack, New Jersey, standing by for a call.” For seventy-four years, before his “key went silent,” in 2001, this was the nightly appeal of Jerry Powell, an aeronautical engineer, amateur trombonist, and avid ham-radio operator. Powell’s devotion to vacuum tubes, multiband yagis, parallel RLC circuits, and midnight conversations with fellow-hams from Moscow to Montevideo is celebrated by Danny Gregory and Paul Sahre in the colorful Hello World: A Life in Ham. Hams, as Gregory and Sahre discovered, "come in all shapes and sizes and live all over the world." Although ham radio is generally considered an arcane pastime reserved for microhenry-obsessed nerds, recent estimates put the number of worldwide hams at more than two million, including such devoted practitioners as Marlon Brando (ham call sign FO5GJ), Donny Osmond (WD4SKT), George Pataki (K2ZCZ), and King Juan Carlos of Spain (EA0JC).
The first hams, or narrowcasters, pop up in Edward D. Miller's Emergency Broadcasting, a rumination on the nature and meaning of early radio. Miller, who likens radio in the nineteen-thirties to the Internet in its first decade, gives us the untamed era of Herbert Morrison's broadcast of the Hindenburg disaster and Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds." In those days, voices in the ether inspired utopian visions, prompting Collier's to assert that radio would create a "strong and well-knit people" It"s a notion that today's hams -- ensconced in the purple glow of their transmitters -- continue to broadcast.
(Mark Rozzo)Editorials
The New Yorker
"CQ, CQ, CQ, this is W2OJW, calling CQ. Whiskey Two Oscar Juliet Whiskey in Hackensack, New Jersey, standing by for a call.” For seventy-four years, before his “key went silent,” in 2001, this was the nightly appeal of Jerry Powell, an aeronautical engineer, amateur trombonist, and avid ham-radio operator. Powell’s devotion to vacuum tubes, multiband yagis, parallel RLC circuits, and midnight conversations with fellow-hams from Moscow to Montevideo is celebrated by Danny Gregory and Paul Sahre in the colorful Hello World: A Life in Ham. Hams, as Gregory and Sahre discovered, "come in all shapes and sizes and live all over the world." Although ham radio is generally considered an arcane pastime reserved for microhenry-obsessed nerds, recent estimates put the number of worldwide hams at more than two million, including such devoted practitioners as Marlon Brando (ham call sign FO5GJ), Donny Osmond (WD4SKT), George Pataki (K2ZCZ), and King Juan Carlos of Spain (EA0JC).The first hams, or narrowcasters, pop up in Edward D. Miller's Emergency Broadcasting, a rumination on the nature and meaning of early radio. Miller, who likens radio in the nineteen-thirties to the Internet in its first decade, gives us the untamed era of Herbert Morrison's broadcast of the Hindenburg disaster and Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds." In those days, voices in the ether inspired utopian visions, prompting Collier's to assert that radio would create a "strong and well-knit people" It"s a notion that today's hams -- ensconced in the purple glow of their transmitters -- continue to broadcast.
(Mark Rozzo)