Every April in recent memory QST, the amateur radio magazine published by the American Radio Relay League, has published a foolish technical article – something that sounds plausible but is a technical fallacy.

Years ago when my cohort was in what is now called middle school, this bogus article described a short vertical antenna which would nonetheless operate effectively on the low bands because it was capacitively loaded. One well-known EMC consultant, who admittedly was an electronic toddler then, made one of these antennas and tried to use it. To his credit he considers this a good joke on him and tells the story with humor to anyone who will listen. The capacitive load was a toilet float. This ancient and honorable mechanism invented by Crapper to turn the water off when the tank was full had a spherical metal can, the float, on the end of an arm connected to a water valve.

The article went on and on about about how capacitive loading was used by Marconi to make antennas that, although short, worked well because of the capacitive load. It carefully explained why a sphere had more capacity than any other shape. All true but irrelevant. The author neglected to say that to be of any real use the radius of the sphere had to be at least a tenth of a wavelength – eight meters for the lowest, a meter and a half for the highest ham band open to the Novice in those days. Having sucked the technically naive in the coup-de-gras was the toilet float displayed prominently on the top of the antenna.

Some years later the April article was a description and technical discussion of the power sucker. The idea of the power sucker was that you could use it to entrap, then dissipate as heat, a radio signal on the ham band. In this way you could produce a clear channel for your own transmission. As I remember it, the power sucker was a directional antenna connected to a high Q circuit with a resistor in series which, of course, dissipated the signal as heat. There was also, as I remember it, an active component to the power sucker which brought the received signal and re-ratcheted it out of phase.

These bogus April Fool technical articles in QST became so clever that they had to be flagged as humor to keep the hoaxed from revolting against the publisher. In fact, of course, the bogus articles were often fallacies because the technique described was at the time technically impossible.

To my great surprise I read the other day in NASA Tech Briefs a description of a power sucker, but it isn’t April and these guys were serious. The idea is to listen, then transmit out of phase the signals you hear, using a computer to adjust things from nanosecond to nanosecond so that in the vicinity of the transmitting antenna the fields cancel. A quiet space without a shielded room. Shades of the spooky crystal set.

The spooky crystal set, although not an April hoax, was ignored by the electronic wizards in the know. In QST in the early days, when vacuum tubes were called valves and were best used as audio amplifiers because they didn’t work very well above a few hundred kilocycles, there was an article by a not-to-be-believed experimenter. This fellow had decided to cut out the middle man (expensive audio transformer) between his audion and his detector, cat’s whisker and galena. To do this he put the crystal detector in the grid circuit of the tube, and the grid bias voltage appeared partly across the crystal. As everyone knows, this is silly. He reported that if the cat’s whisker were set very lightly on certain parts of the galena, the signal amplitude increased as if the rf were being amplified – ridiculous. Yeah, the technical gurus of the day had never heard of a point contact transistor nor a tunnel diode – whichever this was.