1332

My father was a nerd for numbers. That's not to say that he grew up and became a super scientist. I didn't spend my days being carted from math conference to math conference. Honestly, I spent my youth being dragged from radio shack to old military surplus as my father pursued a hobby that most considered insane.

Some of the most brilliant were considered insane at the time of their epiphany. And I think that was probably the case for my father. For those that listened to him, they gave him that pity nod. The one that said I'm listening but deep inside I think your cheese has slipped off its cracker.

As a child, I couldn't understand what he was doing either. It wasn't until his insane little obsession came to life that I understood what it meant to him.

What was his obsession?

A simple number. 133,225. Or more specifically for him, it was 1,332.25 Hz.

My dad had this crazy idea that the number was a gateway to something larger on a research scale.

What happened to start his obsession with this number? Ham Radio.

My father spent his time as a kid playing with radios. He built radios across all spectrums. He had his ham identifier and antenna but he also built pirate radios. He loved to listen to spectrums that he wasn't supposed to.

And this was back before encryption software was built into transmitters.

In the 60's and '70s encryption wasn't that common. Most transmissions were open and exposed. That's why the Nazis had things like the enigma machine. It was why we used Navajo code talkers. The airwaves were open and the transmissions were available to pirate for anyone with the brains, abilities, and antenna strong enough. It was the wild west of transmissions.

My father was smart enough to build receivers but not transmitters. He would sit, with his big can earphones on, and listen to patterns, speech, or anything else that caught his attention. He would watch his oscilloscopes for odd patterns. He was fascinated by what he was finding.

As a teenager, he happened to be sitting at his console when he got a transmission across the 1.33225 GHz frequency. Nasa was still in its infancy, we were fighting the communists to be first into space back then. The space race was huge, and things like the Arecibo Station were still more than a decade away.

On his scope, he spied a pattern that piqued his interest. It wasn't that it was exactly uniform. It was more that it wasn't completely uniform. It was like static but more organized.

This repeating pattern was enough to drive him from his pre-teens through his adulthood.

He eventually graduated high school and got a job as a radio station engineer. He kept the local stations running and transmitting. And he was good at it too. Why didn't he become a space engineer? Dyslexia.

In a cosmic twist of fate, my father couldn't keep a number straight in his head to save his life.

He read his books sideways. He always wrote in odd directions. He developed patterns to associate numbers with shapes and colors so that he could do the math needed for electronics. When he went to college, they didn't have the fancy calculators that we have now. If he was born 25 years later he might have been a brilliant spectrum scientist.

A sick twist of fate and time needed him in the late 60s to find this spectrum. That same sick twisted twist of fate kept him from the heights he might have achieved otherwise.

As he aged computers developed faster and faster. They become more open and accessible. And people at home could now have access to the power that previously resided at research institutes. My father learned how to use his knowledge to patch them together and amplify their power.

When the first 186 computers came out he was bridging processors to build up speeds to something he could use.

He needed a way to slow down this signal and look at it. He wasn't sure it was a signal but his eyes and ears could no longer pick out the pattern as they used to. It wasn't until processors hit the 1 GHz range that my father finally got what he needed.

Using a pc he recorded a full 24 hours of signal in the highest digital frequency he could find.

When he slowed it down it became obvious to him that he was hearing something repeating on the patterns. A 24-hour pull just wasn't enough to get the full effect.

Nights and days spanned while my father played with different lengths of time to find that right signal repeat. His first breakthrough came at the 27-hour recording. It was at this point that he got what he thought was a fully built signal.

More time passed while he started recording in segments of 27 hours. First, he did 54 hours. Then he recorded for an 81-hour recording. Then 5 days' worth of recordings. He would break the signals down and verify that the 27-hour segments were identical. Only when he did his 5-day recording and frequency map did he believe that he finally had it. A full wave map.

He started looking at his recordings for patterns in patterns. Every 27 hours he would make a new recording and compare it back to what he considered his master file. He would take the master and compare it to the newest broadcast to verify it was similar.

When he would present his pattern to scientists they would dismiss it as a function of the human brain hunting for patterns where there were none. It was white noise. They would assure him that he was chasing a white rabbit. If there were a frequency it would have been found by them well before now.

He took the pattern to the FBI and CIA. They researched it as a communist broadcast and eventually came to the same conclusion.

It was just a freaky pattern of static brought on by luck.

No one believed anything he said. So, his search remained a boy's hobby and fascination. A lifetime's worth of work for one man.

Eventually, my father got the idea that maybe the pattern wasn't 1 dimensional. He wondered if there were patterns in the transmission. Being a radio engineer, he knew that most transmissions were a sin wave moving up and down. We used variations in the waveform to create sounds. But what if you created a way to move on the X-axis as well as the Y-axis? Could you transmit two forms of information?

The thought had been pushed by previous scientists. Eventually, multi-axial transmitters were developed and electromagnetic signals could be transmitted transverse and longitudinal. And with that advent, my father got a boost. He patched together another money to buy the parts to build his own pirate multi-axial antenna.

Now in my father's life, this is about the time that he met my mother. She worked at the local radio shack and was particularly enamored with my father's persistence. He was charming, he was smart, and he was successful at his job. And to be honest he wasn't what you envision when you picture a nerd in your head. He had a chiseled face and a slim physique. His hair also had an enormous number of curls in it that gave his hair volume and bounce.

It wasn't long after meeting that the two developed a stronger set of feelings and I was created shortly after. My father moved out of his bachelor's one-bedroom house and moved out of town. My mother wanted a safer place for me to play and grow up around nature. My father wanted to be away from the interference and background noise that a city created constantly. The fact that the unincorporated sections of the county couldn't complain about a larger antenna didn't hurt either. Mom was free to raise me on our mini-farm. Dad was free to finally expand his antenna into the size he wanted.

So the move happened weeks before I was born. And the first 2 years of my life were the first event to put a dent in my dad's progress toward the signal. When he laid eyes on me he put the signal to the side and put his all into raising me.

And my childhood was happy.

We had dogs, chickens, a garden, and go-karts, and then slowly we had two dishes and an antenna. I mean whose childhood doesn't need two 12-foot parabolic antennas next to your swing set? And that was how I was introduced to my dad's hobby.

Mom put me in Judo while my dad helped me get my first transmitters license at 12 years old. I had my own Ham transmitter in my room when I was in middle school. And then my father and I started to discuss signals. He wouldn't let me pirate signals like he used to. Signal technology had moved and encryption was now a thing. Breaking those encryptions was difficult and highly illegal. And my father always joked that he didn't want to have to visit me in Leavenworth prison in Kansas. It wasn't until I got older that I realized what he meant.

While I was young my father finally finished and took his first multiaxial recording. His home pc wasn't strong enough to do both frequencies at once. After he made his first recording it took him several years to patch together a computer fast enough to process both signals side by side so that they could be merged into one large picture. It was a huge amount of data.

When he finally got his processing power up to snuff he got his first view of the partial signal.

When he viewed 1.33225 GHz on the X and Y axis it was obvious to him that the pattern was moving. His first job was to find out if he was seeing two signals or the same signal on two axes.

So he mapped out both.

Was it two signals or one signal going both ways? Slowly over time, the signal was diminishing. Dad had his signal, but it was getting harder to hear at certain times of the year. This only gave dad the firm belief that it wasn't something being transmitted on earth.

He wondered if it wasn't something military instead.

Dad was certain that both of these signals were one signal. He might have been seeing two signals riding the same frequency.

It happened more as time passed.

But his instinct told him this was one complete signal. He was certain that the frequencies were tied to each other somehow.

Dad's divine inspiration came from me. It was a completely innocent idea also. One day at breakfast on a Saturday morning the two of us were enjoying breakfast.

Dad liked to make eggs and English muffins on the weekends at least once for me and mom. Mom wouldn't sit in the room with us. We would talk about guy things and it drove her little nuts.

So mom would take her breakfast from my father, kiss him on the cheek, and then go sit out on the rear porch in the screened-in area and enjoy the morning. Mom made her money in sales now. She worked in corporate sales now and she needed the break from "nerd talk" as she called it.

Dad was trying to explain to me what he was after. He never really gave me too much information about his project. He just always said he had been chasing a signal since he was not much older than me. He was certain that the signal had been broadcasting in two axes for all this time. He just wanted to understand how. He still couldn't find anything in the signal that he could map out as any kind of usable information. He just really wanted to solve the mystery. He was sure if he could solve the mystery he could publish it.

He always had dreams of being a scientist. He always said that some of the best inventors never had degrees in what they created. Tesla and Edison were geniuses, they didn't have a degree in the first radio waves when they pioneered them and created the first radios.

I accidentally asked my dad what would this signal look like if it was one signal. How does an X and Y signal look when they transmit together?

IF they are one signal are they shaped like two waves intersecting or do they look more like a slinky that is growing and shrinking as it travels?

My father laughed at me and tussled my hair. It wasn't until that night when my father was taking a shower that the image of a slinky first cemented itself in his brain. His epiphany was brought on by his young son.

Dad spent the next few weeks trying to figure out how to blend the signals in 3 dimensions using time. He figured if he could blend them across the X, Y, and Z he would be able to see the signal as one large spiral instead of as a series of independent lines.

Again, technology was the hindrance. Nothing was designed to transmit on all 3 axes at this time. Dad had to brainstorm. Days and weeks dragged on while this problem nagged in the back of my dad's brain. When he was at work he wondered how to solve the problem. Everywhere he went this problem ached in the back of his head like a sprained ankle. The thought would go away and then spring right back into his mind again.

It was the introduction of the gravity wave-particle receiver in Alaska that gave my dad his first answer. The gravity wave sensor was created by using nearly identical machines across great distances to watch waves in the gravitational field. They used it to verify the first gravity wave that intersected the earth from outer space. It was a monumental occasion for someone like my father who lived for transmissions.

And then it occurred to him. What if he could record the signals from far enough away to measure variances in time across the transmissions?