Operating Aboard the Lady Lex

"Why don't you take a picture of our antenna up there above that Rising Sun?" Larry asked. "A kamikaze plane hit the Lex right there in 1942."

Larry Boudreau, W5LDB, was the host during my operation in the 2004 Texas QSO Party aboard the USS Lexington. We were standing on the busy gangway leading up from the beach to the entrance of the World War II aircraft carrier anchored in Corpus Christi Bay. The orange and white of the Rising Sun decal contrasted sharply with the battleship grey steel of the superstructure and the clear, blue, sunny sky framing it.

Two long strings of nautical signaling flags snapped alongside the Hustler 5BTV bolted firmly high above the water line. I knelt down, pointed the camera up, waited for other tourists to pass, and snapped the picture. Saturday afternoon was ending nicely for me after a busy trip from Austin to Corpus Christi to attend a rock-and-roll festival on Friday night at the Bayfront and to operate the Texas QSO Party on Saturday from the Lady Lex.

As de facto Chief Roadie for my son's band, The Moment, I was quite excited by their being invited to play at the Bayfest Music Festival in my old hometown of Corpus Christi. It gave me a chance to visit old friends who, like me, received their Novice licenses in Corpus after enduring a six-week class at the local YMCA in 1962. Some were still active hams. I could see old haunts again some 20 years after my 20th high school reunion. As an added bonus, the visit afforded me the opportunity to operate the station aboard the USS Lexington for a few hours during the Texas QSO Party. As an avid contester and a proud Texan, the highlight of Saturday would be to give out Nueces County to the Deserving from the innards of the famous World War II aircraft carrier.

After the band received the invitation, I recalled an operating report a few months previous from a fellow member of the Central Texas DX and Contest Club (CTDXCC), Reid Hill, KC5YKX. I looked through my old e-mails and, sure enough, Reid had talked about operating from the Lady Lex in an earlier contest. I e-mailed him and asked about the possibility of operating the Texas QSO Party from there. He responded with an enthusiastic "Yes! and agreed to make arrangements.

As the time approached and my plans became firmer, I got down to details with Reid. What did I need to bring? What were the available times? What was the protocol for operating from such a famous site? What kind of rig did the station have? And, most important from my operating point of view, what kind of CW key jack did the station's FT-920 have, standard quarter-inch phone jack or a mini? Reid was unsure, as no one had operated CW from there before to his knowledge. So what's a dedicated CW man to do? Bring two paddles, of course, one with a standard phone plug and one with a mini-plug.

Shortly before I left Austin on Friday morning, Reid told me he would not be available to escort me to the ship on Saturday, since he would be operating "/mobile" during the QSO Party to activate some rare Texas counties. He left me in the graces of Larry, W5LDB, who proved to be a most friendly and knowledgeable Elmer. Larry regularly volunteered as a tour guide on the Lexington. He knew every inch of the ship and every fact about its history. I called Larry on Friday afternoon from the hotel and introduced myself. He said to meet him "at the Blue Angel pedestal at 9 o'clock" the next morning. He was scheduled to give a tour to a group of Boy Scouts then, and I could accompany them into the ship. When he had a break, he would take me up to the station.

"Say, Larry," I asked while we were on the phone, "what kind of CW key jack does the FT-920 have?" He said he didn't really know. So I left my hotel on the beach about five minutes from the Lex at 8:50 Saturday morning, lugging an old, black, crinkle-finish "Nye Viking" paddle in one hand and a shiny silver/grey "Hi-Mound Manipulator" in the other, each weighing in at about 3 pounds.

I walked the five minutes to the Blue Angel pedestal in front of the ship. Larry greeted me and immediately made me feel welcome as we walked toward the gangway. The Lex loomed to my left, a great ship with several aircraft permanently anchored on the flight deck and flags whipping in the wind.

The USS Lexington, often referred to as the Lady Lex, is an ESSEX class aircraft carrier commissioned in 1943. She now proudly serves as a flagship of the Historic Naval Ships Association and as a living museum and educational facility. The Lex served in active duty with the US Navy for 48 years, longer than any other carrier, and was the last carrier built in World War II to be decommissioned. She holds records for the longest service and the most aircraft launched and recovered of any aircraft carrier in the world. She also was the first Navy ship to put to sea with female crewmembers.

Active in every major Naval campaign in the Western Pacific from Tarawa to Tokyo, the Lexington served as the flagship of Fast Carrier Task Force 58 commanded by Admiral Marc Mitscher. Admiral Mitscher established the aircraft carrier task force as the 20th century's predominant naval weapon system while aboard the Lexington. Although hit twice by enemy fire, she and her crew of up to 1,550 men and women are credited with destroying over one thousand Japanese aircraft and sinking over a million tons of enemy shipping. The Lex was indeed a mighty opponent.

After being modernized in the 1950s, the Lexington was recommissioned as a training carrier. Almost every Naval aviator who received the prestigious "Wings of Gold" after that time qualified on her decks. Part of the modernization modified the original flight deck to accommodate jet aircraft. As built, the flight deck was a simple rectangle measuring 910' long by 142 feet wide that accommodated high-speed catapult launches, arrested landings, air operations, and aircraft refueling. Jet aircraft, however, needed a separate landing and takeoff area. So another rectangle was built into and placed at an angle that merged into the regular flight deck. This "broken finger" feature has been incorporated into all modern carriers and is now a familiar sight in pictures of them. I had always wondered about that peculiar shape.

The Lady Lex is also called the Blue Ghost, a nickname given to her by the Japanese propagandist Tokyo Rose because she never wore the typical camouflage paint that all other US aircraft carriers did. She maintains that tradition even now. Anchored just offshore of North Beach in Corpus Christi, she is lit at night with great blue floodlights from shore. She seems to float in the air, shimmering in pale light reflected from the water, hanging just a few tens of feet from the beach.

Standing in front of her or looking at her from a hotel room balcony at night, all lit up in soft blue, reflections of waves and ripples trailing fingers across her hull, I found it hard to imagine how self-contained and powerful the Lady Lex actually was, how fierce she might have been in battle. A few statistics, however, suggest the realities of this old fighter.

The Lexington is massive. She displaces 42,000 tons from a structure that is 142' wide on the flight deck, 889 feet long at the waterline, 910 feet long on the flight deck, and 82 feet in height from keel to flight deck, or, about eight stories of skyscraper. Sixteen decks from Double Bottom to Pilot House are crammed in that space. A 160 meter Beverage almost two full wavelengths long on the flight deck would hardly be noticed.

She was powerful. In the ship's power plant, four Westinghouse steam turbine engines generated 150,000 horsepower and turned four propellers that drove the ship at up to 33 knots. She could maintain that maximum speed for a range of 4131 miles. Each propeller is 16 feet tall, or, about the height of a quarter wave 20 meter vertical. How about that for your Field Day generator?

She was independent. The ship carried 1.5 million gallons of ship fuel and 440,000 gallons of aviation fuel. That translates to months at sea and hundreds of missions. Or months of continuous DXpeditioning to every remote island in the Western Pacific and Pacific Rim.

She is roomy. The hangar deck covers 40,000 square feet and measures 654 long by 70 feet wide by 17.5 feet high. During the war, up to 60 aircraft at a time could be stored, maintained, re-fueled, and re-armed there. Once ready for combat, the aircraft rode elevators up to a flight deck that covered another 90,000 square feet of landing and take-off area. The flight deck is longer than three football fields placed end to end from bow to stern.

She was as steady as a DX-100 on a concrete table. Once in port, the Lex dropped two anchors weighing 15 tons. If you are into "boat anchors" (pun intended), think of picking up 250 DX-100s at once. If you're into modern equipment, imagine 1200 Kenwood TS-870Ss in a thick steel box. That's the weight of the anchors.

After being decommissioned in 1991, the Lexington sailed to Corpus Christi as her final duty station, was cleaned and refurbished, and then opened as a living museum on Corpus Christi Beach on October 14, 1992. It is a very popular tourist attraction, as evidenced by Larry and I waiting frequently for people to pass by us through small halls and doorways as we made our way to the ham station buried somewhere in the labyrinth of pipes, cabling, chains, ladders, confusing "Navy-talk" signs, and water-tight doors. I began to think of bread crumbs and string but doggedly followed Larry through one opening after another. Personal navigation inside a large ship is not intuitive.

As we passed by each new piece of steel, I cradled both keyer paddles against my stomach to protect them. The Nye and the Hi-Mound clanked against each other as I went up the final ladder and through another water-tight door to the ham room. There it was, the FT-920 with -- I leaned over to see the back of it -- a quarter inch jack for the paddle. Setting aside the Hi-Mound, I unwound the plug cord from the around the base of the Nye Viking, plugged it in, and set the black base to the left of the notepad already placed there for my operation. Larry was first class.

"dits" and "dahs" came out as single tones of equal length. I jockeyed the plug a little bit and tried again but finally gave in and picked up the manual Larry had discretely laid on top of the rig. After reading the section on CW and fiddling with the three CW/keyer switches on the front panel and a tiny switch on the back next to the key jack, it worked!

Ahhh, a beautiful string of dits and dahs sang out. The rig keyed. A hundred watts showed on the wattmeter. Stations poured in around 7035 kHz. Now I was ready. Larry took my picture at the rig just before I sent my first "CQ TQP" and then left to resume his volunteer duties on the Lex.

I sent my first CQ at 1426 UTC on 40 meter CW and worked my best friend, Gary, W5UDV, back in Austin (that is to say, TRAV) for my first contact. Then it was N4AF in Alabama, then contest stalwart K5YAA in Oklahoma and then I was off working one station after another.

I was so excited that I used the wrong prefix for the first few contacts, signing K5LEX instead of W5LEX. (I have since contacted each station and advised them to correct their log and QSL information.) As the contest began to build after starting at 1400 UTC, the lack of CW filtering on the '920 became evident but I dialed in the DSP. It helped a little and I continued to work. The Hustler 5BTV mounted on the superstructure was performing well. One signal after another poured into the little shack in the middle of the great carrier.

At 1518 I switched to 15 meters to give some non-Texas stations a Nueces County QSO but only managed one contact. Even W4ZEI from Virginia was weak and watery, so I switched to 20 meters right after working him. It was better there, and I got into a nice rhythm with the QSOs. All but two of the stations worked were located outside Texas. I continued on 20 for the rest of my CW operation.

My original goal was to make an equal number of CW and SSB contacts and then analyze that to determine what band/mode combinations were most effective in terms of multipliers for next year's contest. I had another commitment that Saturday afternoon and could spare about three hours of operating time, so when I reached 65 CW contacts at 1611 UTC, I planned to switch to SSB, starting first on 40, then going to 20 later in the morning and staying there until sometime after noon when absorption began to take its toll or I got my 65 contacts, whichever came first.

As I was switching to SSB, Larry came in again, this time bringing a fresh soda and a cold bottle of water. His timing could not have been better. I hadn't had a drink since leaving the hotel that morning and talking contest-style was sure to dry me out. We chatted for a few minutes about how it was going, and then he left again.

My first SSB QSO was at 1618 UTC with W5BL on 40 meters. Now it was full words: RED RIVER, then KD5MMM in CALDWELL, and then one after the other. Pileups were much bigger on SSB than on CW, and, of course, the rate picked up rapidly. It took me only about an hour to make 65 SSB QSOs on 40 and 20 meters. My last contact was at 1726 UTC with fellow club member NX5M in Burleson County.

Larry came in again just as I reached my 65 CW+65 SSB contacts. He brought along a young ham, probably about as young as I was back in 1962. We talked to him about contesting. To show the variety of operations on the bands, I dialed in the Maritime Mobile Service Net (MMSN) on 14.300 and we listened for a few minutes. His eyes widened as he listened intently to all the states and Caribbean countries calling in to net control.

Larry broke out the hand key/code oscillator set and the young man sent a few dits and dahs as he listened to the net control station organizing check-ins and getting fills very efficiently and professionally. I always think new hams should be made aware of good models for operating courtesy and efficiency, and the net control operators on the MMSN are always very good models, in my opinion.

After a while, Larry gave us a tour of the other areas in the radio shack. Stepping over the raised bottom of another water-tight door, we came to a room filled with donated equipment. A Collins 75A-4 rested on the floor, waiting to be cleaned and used again. An old Signal Slicer, a Drake TR-4C, several receivers, power supplies, military communication sets, and test equipment of various types and years were stacked on shelves and on the floor. Larry explained that the ham club in Corpus Christi was working on setting up several vintage stations in the various rooms and cubbyholes of the radio shack, and said they were always looking for donations.

I told him that someone in one of my QSOs remarked that he was restoring some old Naval communications equipment and wanted to donate it somewhere. Larry looked disappointed when I couldn't recall who that might have been, and I felt guilty for not writing down that particular note. So if you are that fellow and if you are reading this, please contact Larry as soon as possible. That would assuage my soul greatly, and maybe I would be welcomed back to the Lex. Help me out!

After looking at QSLs sent to the Lex and marveling at various certificates the Lex received from participating in various Historic Naval Ships Association operating events, I had to go to my next commitment. I picked up my two key paddles, said goodbye to the young man still practicing his dits and dahs on the hand key/oscillator while listening to 20 meters, and followed Larry again through the labyrinth of the ship.

We were outside now on the gangway, walking down the ramp. I noticed numerous long poles jutting out from the side of the ship like feelers of a giant insect. I had always thought they were some sort of sensors telling the pilot when they got too close to a dock. But looking at them up close, I had a feeling they were something else. I asked Larry what they were. He explained that they were actually high-frequency antennas that were lowered to a horizontal position during flight operations and raised to vertical when needed for ship-to-ship communications and fleet broadcasts. He then pointed to an obvious yellow-and-black sign which explained exactly that. With my last two shots, I took a picture of the sign and of one of the antennas, and immediately fantasized of phased verticals above salt water all the way back to the hotel.

After returning to Austin, I tallied my results from the contest. In three hours, I worked 130 QSOs in 54 Texas counties, 35 states, and 3 VE provinces for a total of 92 multipliers. With QSO points split between CW and SSB operation, my total contest score was just less than 30,000 points. That was not too bad a score for a short time at an unfamiliar rig.

The band-mode comparison, shown below, suggests an operating strategy for increasing multipliers in a simple state QSO Party operation. Clearly, for a Texas station, with 254 Texas counties but only 50 states available as multipliers, 40M is the band of choice. But to get the state multipliers, 20M is the best band. Within that subset, 20 meter CW snagged more states than any other band or mode and 40 meter SSB yielded far more counties than any other band or mode.

As for future strategy, I should spend more time on 40 meter SSB than elsewhere if I was concentrating on multipliers, and hit 20 meter CW in the morning and evening for about half the time I spent on 40 meters. So, the chart indicates the dilemma for all contesters. In any contest, we all have exactly the same amount of time from start to finish. What we do with that time largely determines our score. Allocating that time creates a band plan.

I immediately began to think of next year. Let's see now. I could bring a memory keyer and log with some contest software instead of by hand on paper. I could make a band plan, a real band plan. Maybe I could wangle a spare CW filter or two for the '920 from someone. Those were some real possibilities.

So with these improvements in mind, I jumped to the end of the imaginary contest a year ahead, and figured my potential score like many contesters do when they review their results and wonder afterwards why they left a band so soon or stayed on it too long. Hmmm, let's see now. If I averaged 43 QSOs per hour as I did in this operation and had, say, four hours of "off time", then that would be 43 QSOs per hour times 20 hours, or -- I reached for the calculator -- 860 QSOs. With an average point value per QSO of 230 in the present contest, my score next year would be 197,800 points. Say, operating at 90% efficiency away from my familiar home station, my score would be around 178,020 points. Hey, let's go! I'm ready. Do we have to wait another year?

Wow! I thought I had better start moving things around in my shack to make room for the trophy. I was #1 overall in the QRP section of the Texas QSO Party in 2002 and received a really beautiful trophy. The fellows at the Northwest Amateur Radio Society in Houston do a wonderful job of putting on this contest and administering the results. I wouldn't mind another nice trophy. Hint, hint.

But as any contester knows, no matter what their level of experience may be, there's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip when it comes to the planning and then the doing. I may not be able to make it down there down again next year. Maybe some other operator will snag the station ahead of me. Perhaps I'll be sick and drop down to 80% efficiency. The sun may have no visible sunspots and wipe out 20. No matter what happens, though, I'll know one thing for sure. The '920 does have a quarter-inch jack for the key. I can leave the Hi-Mound Manipulator at home, and use that one free hand to help me avoid banging into the steel embrace of the Lady Lex.

I would like to thank Reid Hill, KC5YKX, for arranging my operation on the legendary carrier and Larry Boudreau, W5LDB, for hosting me in such a gracious manner and making me feel right at home. The South Texas Amateur Radio Club,⁴ the caretaker for operations on the Lexington , is lucky to count them as members.

1. The Historical Naval Ships Association (HNSA) maintains information on about 150 ships managed by private, city, state, and federal organizations located in 12 countries. To tour their Web site is to tour an international history of naval technology dating from 1775 to the present time.

2. The Guide to the USS Lexington, published by the USS Lexington Museum On The Bay, a non-profit organization responsible for maintaining the ship as a museum, lists the displacement as 42,000 tons. The HNSA lists it as 30,000 tons.

3. The Guide to the USS Lexington states the capacity as 60 aircraft while the HNSA lists capacity as 90 aircraft.

Interesting. I know the preceding generation Lexington went down at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May of '42. I didn't know they built a replacement for that vessel so quickly. Good going, Navy.

Ditto Denver Ditdat - thanks for posting this.
Spent a whole day touring the Lex - it's well worth the visit.
Also, if you're into aviation engines it's got some great displays in the hangar deck, some whole and some cut-away for viewing internals.
And a wide variety of aircraft on the flight deck.

My last mission in the Army was to fly a CH-47 out of Fort Hood to the Lex in the Gulf of Mexico. Returning one of the training aircraft that had sucked in a bird during training. Here's a pic of the approach taken from the cockpit with the aircraft on the hook beneath us.

"....preceding generation Lexington went down at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May of '42. I didn't know they built a replacement for that vessel so quickly."

A carrier (USS Cabot) was already nearing completion when the Lex went down - a campaign was mounted to change the name to Lexington, and there you have it........

You remember correctly. It was always a rush to take a catapult shot off the Lex - relatively short stroke, and if your aircraft was heavy, it really caged your eyeballs.

Does anybody still ham radio? Are they just real old men?

There are still some youngsters out there, but it seems that most technically inclined kids are attracted to computers and the net rather than radio these days.

As for "old men", I guess that depends upon your definition of old. I was first licensed at 22 in 1983 and just turned 45. When I was in high school that would have almost qualified as ancient, but the mid-40s don't seem quite so crusty from my present perspective. ;-)

A couple months ago I "talked" (via Morse code) with an 87 year old gent who had been active in the hobby since 1930. I have also had QSOs (conversations) with hams as young as 12. The trend is definitely towards the former rather than the latter, though, just as in many other hobbies. If I had to guesstimate an average age based upon the hams I know, I'd put it somewhere around 50.

Lady Lex has over 550,000 traps to her credit. 23 of 'em are mine !!!! Made my first trap on her.... I made 4 attempts before I had the guts to "Chop It" Man that was one short looking SOB Call Sign Victory 21

As for "old men", I guess that depends upon your definition of old. I was first licensed at 22 in 1983 and just turned 45.

I was licensed in 1979 and graduated from high school in 1983. I just joined QCWA for the fun of it. But I don't consider myself old yet either!

Made my first trap on her.... I made 4 attempts before I had the guts to "Chop It" Man that was one short looking SOB.

I can understand why it took 4 attempts. I got to hand to you guys, it takes a lot of guts to land on a carrier. It looked like a postage stamp to me and I was only flying a helicopter. The only problem I had was in setting the load on the deck, the exhaust from the ship was filling the cockpit and my eyes were watering while I was trying to get the load down.

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