Russell senior loves to ham it up

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This article was published 16/04/2012 (4902 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

RUSSELL — John Braendle considers himself an old ham.

“I’m a too old ham,” said the 95-year-old amateur radio operator, more commonly known as a ham radio enthusiast.

The passion for radio and electronics started when Braendle was just a kid and he picked up on the fact that every time the buzzer went off at the store in Binscarth it made a noise on the radio if it was tuned to a certain channel.

“I was just interested in radio for some reason,” Braendle said.

Braendle experimented sending and receiving Morse code to his friends when he was just 10-years-old, but it wasn’t until he joined the military, sitting in the bowels of a submarine as part of the Royal Canadian Navy that he knew radio would play a big part of his life.

“You couldn’t do much transmitting because radio silence was so important for the submarines to use directional finders to locate where the signal was coming from, but we did a lot of listening,” Braendle said.

When he returned home from the war, Braendle applied and received his amateur radio licence — complete with his call sign VE4JB. The call sign, which is used to identify ham radio operators, is as much his name as his given name. The license plate on his vehicle is VE4JB and he frequently refers to some of his best friends by their call sign rather than their given names.

“You get to know people after a while and gradually you begin to talk about family, friends, and things of that nature,” Braendle said.

Times have certainly changed since the early days of ham radio. Braendle, who used to have an entire room dedicated to his radio operations, now has a small radio and computer on a desk just steps away from his kitchen table. Gone are the 60-foot antennas he used to have to set up outside around his house, replaced by a small antenna on the corner of his home in Russell.

“Our mom would always say we didn’t have trees, we had antennas,” said his daughter, Corinne Groff, with a laugh as she reflected on her father’s passion.

The love of electronics didn’t stop at radios either. Braendle owned a television set more than a year before there were any channels available. He may have also been the first to own a working TV in all of Western Canada, Groff said, although it wasn’t a seamless transition to moving pictures as Braendle was first trying to tune a Minot channel that was on a closed circuit.

“Minot was promoting their channel and I spent a good bit of time playing around with that tower (trying to get the signal) and it wasn’t until mid-summer that I found out that they weren’t opening until the fall,” Braendle said with a chuckle. “I got the signal instantaneously when they finally went on the air … All of a sudden there was a picture of a bunch of cowboys on horses galloping through a snow storm.”

With a working TV in Binscarth in ‘54, Braendle said people from around town used to come to his electronics shop just to catch a peek of the revolutionary technology.

Through it all Braendle has kept up with all of the new technology. He now buys equipment on eBay and uses his computer to translate Morse code from his radio. And although he doesn’t have a profile on Facebook, he can take some solace in knowing he was part of the original network, communicating to hundreds of people from around the world on his ham radio.

» ctweed@brandonsun.com