Eliot Mayer
Engineer, Radio Amateur, Musician, UU
W1MJ
The New Ham Band (NHB) disbanded after our 1979 performance in Cummington. Out of the ashes rose a subset of NHB, The Hamtones. I while back, I digitized a tape of our original song, "The Ballad of Oscar 9". In February 2026, I found cassette tapes for two Hamtones performances, both at ham radio related events. The Hamtones were:
Rick "Bones" Palm, K1CE - Guitar
Eliot Mayer, W1MJ - Guitar, Vocals
Allan Bacon, K1BA - Organ, Tambourine, Sound
"OSCAR is an acronym for Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio. This song is about the satellite that would have been OSCAR 9 if the European Space Agenncy's rocket had not failed, leaving poor OSCAR at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
"Traffic Handlers" refers to amateur radio operators who relay messages around the country via the National Traffic System. EMRI was the combined Eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island sections of the system. I was active in NTS for many years.
Two years after The New Ham Band’s performance at the NOBARC Hamfest in Cummington, MA, The Hamtones returned to the proverbial scene of the crime.