History and Comments about Chiburban Mobileers

I would guess that the Mobileers began in '57 or '58. I think that Burt, K9GSK from Tinley Park and a couple of others met in a forest preserve one Sunday afternoon, and the rest, as they say, is history. The original meetings were held in the Tinley Park municipal building, I think, and eventually moved in to Chicago at a V F W post at 99th and Western. Many relocation after that, and in the beginning the meetings were monthly.

Lots of transmitter hunts on Saturday nights. We were run out of a lot of places!! The Blue Island police got tired of us; one night a Robins cop told us to get the f... out of his town or he would take all of our a.....s to jail!! We obliged!! One night we all got really covered with mud helping to push/pull a would-be hunter out of the mud!! One night Gary Thelan, K9CYU pulled in along the SAG Canal and drove over a sleeping drunk lady!! She was parallel to the car - his tires went either side of her. The police knew her and were tougher on her than on us. The first Gary knew of it was that this woman came out from under his car and wanted to get inside with him!!

There, outside of the Elmac transmitters a couple of 'standard' mobile rigs. The 6AQ5 choke modulated by a 6AQ5 ran about ten watts and wasn't too hard on the battery. The big brother to that rig substituted 2E26s for final and mod. Xformer coupled carbon mike to grid speech; triode xtal oscillator to final. Simple stuff - did a good job. Lots of detuned car receivers. Most would tune up to 1850 or so - in late fifties the band went from 1800 to 1825. Enough room to maybe hold 3 QSOs. 1975 to 2000 was the West Coast allocation.

The mobile antenna was an art form. Ideally you got the coil at or just above the roof line. The coil should be as large in diameter and length as the fender would stand: Wire size as big as practical, and the whip above the coil as long as you had the guts to do!! A capacity hat, at right angle to the whip and just above the loading coil helped. They were ugly as hell, but the bigger, the better. Master made a commercial coil; did a good job. There was a commercially available helical wound whip; Mark Heliwhip, I think that was really pretty and inefficient as hell!!

The big guns ran 50 watts; in the late fifties a lot of power supplies were WWII surplus dynamotors and a lot of cars still had generators. Some six volt electrical systems were still around. You sure didn't screw around tuning an antenna with the engine turned off!! We were all young then and thought it was fun to push start a friends car!!

It was a lot of fun. -- de Pat, K9JAU

Just got web page address, read history page, and it brought back a lot of memories. I feel very lucky to have been one of the original members ( was at first meeting held at firehouse) when a name was picked for club. Of course since moving, have lost touch with many old friends. Maybe this site will bring some back together again feel sorry for the people that didn't get to enjoy those GLORY days of radio. KJ4TM Bob Rochard ex K9SBL

kj4tm@mindspring.com

Hi Neil,
W9BZO was, in fact, the club call. Early sixties, maybe. Possibly someone would have an appropriate call book. The club did code practice from the WCGO transmitter/antenna site in Chicago Heights for several years during that time period. The engineer at the location helped isolate one of the towers for the purpose and there was a purpose built antenna tuner which resonated the setup for our purposes. The club got sig. reports from all over hell. The club call was used for some special service things - not sure how long we held W9BZO, but it might be fun to get it back.

Bob, (Tex) K9CYS, I think, was responsible for that effort. He had an Elmac setup which he dragged to the xmtr shack every Tuesday night. -Pat, K9JAU