Ticking Along Two

Fate and luck can play some funny tricks. A few weeks ago I put up a post titled Ticking Along where I highlighted some small communication center clocks that only rarely pop up on eBay. How rare? A few years between sightings, at least. Or so I thought.

Within a day of putting up my post, I was surprised to get a hit on one of my eBay searches for a Franklin comms center clock. It was used, but the seller stated that it ran. The price was good (he accepted a low-ish offer), and it was mine. It arrived a few days ago and is in pretty good shape. If there hadn't been any scratches on the plastic crystal, I would have thought it was brand new. 

The clock runs fine, as good as its two siblings (it uses a Kienzle movement from Germany, like the other Franklin clock), and some plastic polish took care of most of the scratches and haze on the crystal. I'm tickled pink to have three good examples of these clocks. I think I can stop searching now... but I won't 😄.

The new clock is in the center. In front is a 42mm Seiko solar quartz wristwatch movement
that also does duty as a station clock. The Seiko is, hands down, one of the most consistently
accurate movements I own - +/- 1 second per month.

My communications center clock obsession started years ago, and I wrote about in a 2022 post titled Message Center Clocks. The US message center clocks I highlight in that post are actually fairly common, and several can be found on eBay on any given day. Since the Army was buying these right up into the 1970's, they are not particularly rare. But they are large - 6" & 8" dial faces - and as they use mechanical movements, they need regular service and adjustment.

At the opposite end are the brilliantly designed and executed German WWII-era communication center clocks. I'd argue that these smaller clocks were better suited to a mobile communications setup - they were easy to pack away, could stand by themselves or be hung on a wall, and the clock movements didn't require a key - there was a large winding wheel on the back of the movement. Interestingly, a lot of the movements for these clocks were manufactured by Keinzle, the same company that made the quartz movements in my clocks.

This design was so successful that it stayed on production well beyond WWII, and the newly constituted West German army & air force started buying them again in the 1950s.

If some enterprising manufacturer started making copies of this clock, but with a quartz movement, I'd be first in-line yelling, "Take my money!"

W8BYH out

Ticking Along

We're back to clocks, and time. While I've slowed down (just a wee bit) on accumulating clocks and watches and assorted timing devices. my fascination with time is still strong. The past week I had two clock-related issues converge, and I thought I'd show you what's going on.

First, batteries. Huh? What do batteries have to do with a clock? Everything. All time keeping devices need power. Whether it's a hand-wound mainspring in a ridiculously overpriced Rolex, or the solar charged batteries that power the atomic clocks on a GPS satellites, they all need some form of power. For most quartz watches, the small button batteries they use provide a lot of power density and can run your wristwatch for years. For larger wall or mantle clocks, it's usually the plain old 1.5 volt AA battery. The AA battery has the capacity to power a modern quartz movement for over a year. That's where my problem started. I've got larger (8") desk and mantle clocks scattered around the areas of my house that I spend a lot of time in - my ham radio shack, my computer room, etc. Since my XYL doesn't share my affinity for timepieces, especially ones that look like they were just ripped off the bulkhead of a WWII battleship, I keep them out of the common spaces of our house. 

I have two Chelsea quartz clocks sitting almost side-by-side down in my computer room. One is intended to go into my shack, but I'm doing some re-configuring down there, so I placed it next to it's brother. They have different faces, but the movements in both are the same - a pretty good US-made quartz movement that Chelsea has used for years.

With these two clocks side-by side, I can take both in with a single glance. Yesterday I noted one was running 5 minutes slow. Hmmm... must be time for a battery change. I popped the clock open, looked at the movement, and let out a stream of words my grandkids should never hear. The alkaline AA was leaking. Not a lot, but enough to cause some minor corrosion on the contacts. I'm surprised it was still providing enough voltage to keep the clock running; I must have caught it early in its failure cycle. Alkaline batteries have been on the market for over 60 years. Why the hell can't the manufacturers figure out how to make them so they don't leak?

Two Chelsea 6"Patriot clocks. Same quartz movements, different faces.
These are intended to 'hearken back' to the mechanical clocks Chelsea made by the
thousands during WWII for the Army & Navy.
The clock on the left suffered the leaky battery, but both are running on lithium cells now.
So far they are staying in pretty good sync (focus on the minute hand, not the second hand).
Yeah, I know, I need to dust...

Many of the clocks I own are not expensive, but were hard to find. This includes several 24 hour wall clocks made for the US military, and small 3" or 4" diameter military  communication center clocks. The latter show up very rarely on auction sites like eBay. In fact, it's far easier to find a good condition WWII era mechanical communications center clock or Navy deck clock made by Chelsea or Seth Thomas, than it is to find these small communications center clocks with quartz movements. So, it's worth the effort it to take care of them. These make pretty neat ham shack clocks. They are true Army surplus, and were designed during the Cold War for use in mobile communications vans, bolted to a bulkhead. Plus, with clock faces between 3 1/2" & 4", they are an ideal size to sit on a desk next to a radio.

The Franklin clock (right) is all plastic with a simple friction fit housing.
The Timecrafters (left) is a very sturdy and complex aluminum housing and mount.
Franklin is still in business, but Timecrafters is long gone, and there's no info
about the company on the web. I suspect it was connected in some way to Timex

It's interesting that these two clocks carry the same National Stock Number  (NSN), but their cases are completely different designs. The Franklin is all plastic, with a simple friction fit mount. The Timecrafters is a delightfully Rube Goldberg-ish contraptions that includes a machined twist-fit mount with a spring loaded keeper, and a small aluminum billet that holds the AA battery in-place when the clock is bouncing around in the back of a comms van. It also has instructions on the mount that aren't just stickers, they are curved, stamped aluminum pieces with what looks to be silk-screened text. Well designed, well executed, and probably overkill for the intended purpose, but who cares. I love it! Both clocks utilize German made movements, and both keep excellent time. I've run the Franklin for almost a year, and it keeps time to within 2 seconds per month. 

The Timecrafter's off its base. Note the details on the base, including the brass spring loaded detent
for locking the clock to the base, and the aluminum billet that holds the AA battery in place. 
Unnecessarily but delightfully over-built!

The Timecrafters movement. This is the only quartz clock movement I've seen that incorporates
a 'hack' feature - the Stop - Start switch. I wish other quartz movement manufacturers
incorporated this in their movements

What about the wooden stands these two clocks are mounted to? They are just appropriately sized bookends I got off of Amazon. They look good and work well as clock stands. 

I'll wrap this up by answering the question many of you may have - do they glow? Why yes, they do! Each of these clocks have hands and numerals that have been painted with lume. I'm assuming it's not radioactive, since these fade out fairly quickly after being exposed to light. But the fact that 40 year old clocks can still glow is neat.

What's next? Well, I'd like to find at least one spare, either a Franklin or Timecrafters. Each of these are the only ones I've ever seen come up for auction on eBay, so I'll continue to haunt the auction sites and on-line dealers to see if I can score at least one more. If anyone out there knows where I can find one of these, or a similar design, I'd love to hear from you!

W8BYH out

Thinking Outside The Box

Pet peeve time.

Ham radio is in love with the go-box. You can't attend a hamfest or club meeting without seeing presentations on, or hearing discussions about, go-boxes; what goes in them, how they are built, how to power them, how to connect to them, etc. Suffice to say, ham radio is go-box batty. Proof? Just Google 'ham radio go box'. 

The go-box concept is good, but it can be limiting in both capabilities and scope. Just the mindset that all your capability has to fit into a single box, and if it doesn't fit, then you don't need it, is a silly way to approach a problem. 

I haven't seen too many go-boxes that were built to meet a specific mission or requirement. For example, I once asked a person demonstrating his go-box why he included a VHF packet modem. He admitted there wasn't a clear need for it - it was there 'just in case'. This in a region that hasn't seen any public service related packet activity for over 15 years.

I don't want to disparage the concept of the go-box, but the 'box' mentality and the lack of a requirements-based approach seems to lead to a lot of implementations that look like solutions in search of a problem.

Let's think beyond the go-box and instead think about the concept of a mission-focused communications hub or, as we used to call them in the Army, a 'comms center'. A comms center is just a place - a table, a room, a shelter, a tent. Heck, it can be the tailgate of a pickup truck. But it is the place at which you build out a communications hub in support of an event or incident, and build it out tailored to the mission requirements.

A comm center can be anywhere, even in a sandbagged bunker

I use the term 'mission focus' a lot, and it really is the key to the comms center concept. You build capability to meet a specified mission. Let's use a county-level ARES group as an example. Do a mission analysis and ask yourself (and your EMA) these questions: 

• What are your served agencies? 
• What are the missions of these served agencies? 
• What communications capabilities do they need to meet their missions? 
• What are their organic communications capabilities?  
• What are they lacking? 

The answer to 'What are they lacking?' is what should drive your mission focus. Once you identify and understand that gap, and build capabilities to close it, you are on the path to establishing a formal comms center.

The comms center concept is also fluid. In the Army, I've been in situations where the comms center started out as just a single VHF radio mounted in a truck, a map board and a message log. Over time it morphed into a dedicated shelter with multi-channel voice and digital HF and VHF capabilities, a landline switchboard and a SATCOM link. What all this gear wasn't, was stuffed into a single box. That was impractical and unwieldly; each communications system required more elbow room than a boxed enclosure could offer.

Far-fetched for a civilian operation? Not at all. With growing reliance on systems like Winlink and other HF-based digital tools like JS8CALL, Fldigi, VarAC, and use of internet-linked VHF voice and data modes like DSTAR, C4FM, DMR and Echolink, the technology stack in a civilian comms center can easily match that found in military units. And let's not forget the vulnerability of terrestrial-based internet. There's a reason a Starlink package is a standard part of many civilian communications centers.

But a comms center isn't really about comms equipment. The job of the comms center is moving information, and the synchronization of communications across systems, agencies and departments. With this in mind, a comms center's key functions include:

• Establishing and maintaining communications support as directed by the event director, incident commander or incident communications leader
• Maintaining the event/incident radio log
• Conducting an overall 'radio watch'; ensuring all comms systems are up, operating and proactively monitored
• Interfacing communications systems. For example, establishing radio-wire interfaces, making sure information received via radio is 'hopped' to the appropriate systems like WebEOC, internal chat systems, status boards, etc.
• On-boarding new personnel, departments or agencies that show up to support the incident, making sure their organic communications systems are integrated into the communications architecture
• Radio set-up and programming
• Troubleshooting communications issues

So... while a go-box can serve as a component of a comms center, it should never be considered an all-encompassing solution. For this reason I'm not a big fan of the 'box' solution. It seems to impose conceptual restrictions, trying to force the mission requirements to fit the box, not the other way around.

So let's stop focusing on go-boxes and instead focus on flexible, mission focused comms centers. Start thinking outside the box.

W8BYH out