Greetings. I guess this a good a place as any to do an introduction. I joined the Mr. Carlson’s Patreon page and the next logical thing was to sign up here.
I’m a returning ham after 15 or so year hiatus and wanting to get my first xcvr back up & running – a Heathkit SB-102. I’ll post more on that in the Ham Radio section. My radio interest goes back to a Hallicrafters S-38. A little bit of story time as to how I got interested in shortwave radios/communication receivers and ham radio…
The radio belonged to my father, he purchased as a birthday present for himself when he was 13 in 1954. My dad used it for sometime, then lost interest. He never became a ham but kept the radio in storage. When I was younger, early 1970s thereabout, I was getting into things and discovered this radio, buried back in a closet shelf in our house. I asked my dad about it and he said it was his and it wasn’t working correctly. After some more pestering that went on for a few months, he got the radio fixed and showed me how to use it all the while extolling the virtues of Hallicrafters – hence my mind being polluted with the Hallicrafters brand – almost to this day.
What I needed to get radio really going was an antenna. I was told that a short length of wire; worked well, so I thought that a long length of wire would work really well!
My bedroom was on the second story of the house, so after I scrounged up a spool of copper wire from somewhere – probably Radio Shack, I kid you not, I ran it out my window out to a tree about 65 feet in front of the house. I seem to remember getting yelled at by my mother about “putting holes in the screens”, but since the damage was done and I was getting some pretty good reception, there wasn’t much to discuss.
Much like most kids of the 1930s through the 1950s, I listened to the radio. Many a night was spent listening to WWV, undiscernible ham operators (SSB), broadcasts from distant lands, numbers stations (that at the time, I didn’t know what they were – nor did anybody I knew!), the CBS Radio Mystery Theater and other radio shows of that old time variety.
How I managed not to electrocute myself with is thing is another of life’s mysteries…
Many years later I would get my amateur radio license.