The AM Forum

I was thinking about waiting for my novice license to come in the mid 60s and set up my station. It was a Knight 360 and a Johnson Adventurer. Anyway I was putting up a dipole that ran from the window by the station to the tree.  I really worried for days about one thing. "Should the grounded end of the coax be close to the station or away from it. Eventually asked another ham, but it sticks in my head as an early learning experience, particularly when I see newcomers to the hobby as something. Anybody else want to share their early "learning experience(s)
Carl
/KPD

I did similar, Carl - assumed the 'hot' side should be the side in the clear, higher in the air if the aerial sloped, etc.

My biggest JN moment was likely right after my Novice ticket arrived, when I built my first aerial - a 40m dipole with solid strand insulated wire. I wondered if I needed to peel off all the insulation so the aerial would radiate properly. I knew that buildings, steel bridges, and other materials interfered with radio signals but had never given much thought to plastic or vinyl.

It makes for a good 'duh!' moment and chuckle or two whenever I remember it now, but at the time I was a bit embarrassed when I got the answer from a local OT.

Still have that dipole, too. Center insulator is a block of wood I gouged holes in with a screwdriver since I didn't have access to a drill.  ;D

I am now willing to admit that at the age of 9 I did try measuring my first roll of Radio Shack coax trying to figure out whether the rated 50 ohms was end to end or from shield to center conductor :( 

But that pales in comparison to my stupidity when I was 5 and accidentally tore the "do not remove under penalty of law" sticker from a mattress.  I crawled out from under the bed and carefully read the big black block letter warning.  For the next few days every time the doorbell rang I thought it was the mattress police coming to take me away.  Asking my 9 year old sister for advice wasn't very helpful either.  She gleefully advised me to either run away from home or hide in the attic.

I had an old Emerson ac/dc radio. The rectifier had an open filament but I wanted to see if the other tubes lit up, so I took a piece of solid wire and stripped the insulation off of both ends and used it to jump the socket. Some wave of stupidity must've came over me, and I touch the bare wire on one side and got zapped. Now I'm curious, and wonder if I would get zapped if I touch the other side, so I proceed to touch the other side of the wire and get zapped again. After that I realized that electricity flows through the whole wire, not just on one side or the other.

I decided to make a grid dip oscillator from the ARRrrL handbook.

Knowing that one side of the house power was grounded, I made sure that the incoming power wire was soldered properly to the lug strip. Plug it in, no osc, so I went trouble shooting. Never did get it to work properly. It ended getting tossed by my parents.

While doing some of the trouble shooting, I opened it back up, like I'd done several times before. Not really knowing anything, I'd futz around with it, unplug it, toss it on the shelf, and come back later. Sucks to be a 9 year old without a clue.

The power supply was separate from the RF section; one of the cheep 2 "U" kinda clam shell Al boxes. There was an umbilical cord connecting the power to the RF head. Oh, by the way, the house had the two prong receptacle, not the 3 prong like we have now. So when I separated the two pieces, one in the right hand, one in the left, I discovered the fundamental error in my execution of the design. To wit, the ‘ground’ part was now the ‘hot’ side of the line. Two hands across the 115 Volt line.

Today, I understand  much more about residential wiring, the Code and grounding. An like Allstate, the wisdom of the hand in the pocket.

Well, this happened in my pre teen days. I may have been 10 years old or so.  I was very interested in building speaker boxes out of old speakers I would get out of peoples trash from old radio's and TV's.  Well one day I was pulling my wagon down an alley in West Chester while visiting my grandparents, I saw this strange looking horn speaker.  I then found out it was made by Altec Lansing.  At the time I had no clue who Altec Lansing was, nor the quality of the horn.  Not knowing anything about cross over networks, I parallel it with another cone woofer.  Turned up the volume on the old tube amp and it did sound fantastic for about 5 seconds!  No more Altec Lansing horn.  Pop!!

Joe,  GMS

Funny stuff. The inner coax thing got me too. I always made sure it was on the higher leg.


Some more strange ideas:

1) In 1964 I was a new WN1 looking for a first contact on 3716 CW. After calling CQ for three days with no reply on my ground mounted Gotham vertical, (no radials) I figured it needed to be higher.

I mounted it 30' up in a tree about 200' from the house. (No radials)   Since I didn't want to climb the tree every time I wanted to change bands, I tried to convince my dad to buy 1,000' of coax so I could run five feed lines back to the shack.  I figured I could just hook them all up to the base coil and just pick the right coax I wanted from the shack.  Thank goodness he didn't go along with that insanity.



2)   Novices were required to use crystals only.  I figured I needed at least 90 crystals to cover the Novice bands. I was about to place an order with Corky at Hatry's until I saw a used Ranger on the shelf... :-)




3)   In 1966 I bought 170' of that steel telescoping 1.5" mast at Hatry's. According to the FCC regs, 170' was the height limit.  I thought I could put it all up in the backyard. 

Was about to carry it to the bus stop and drag it on until Corky offered me a ride in his station wagon.  The mast project was a total failure - another story for another time.

T

A picture just crossed my mind of you trying to carry 17 10-foot sections of steel tubing on to a bus.  :D

I quickly learned as a pre-JN working for old radios and parts as a shop rat at my friend's dad's TV and radio repair shop that you don't measure the current flow through a circuit by placing the ammeter test leads into the hot and neutral sides of an AC outlet.  Zap,lights out, and then a torrent of profuse profanity from Freddy Sauber the bench tech.  Fred was a ham, probably the first one I ever met in person, he had a K2 call back in the early 60s, I can't recall it now almost 50 years later, although I can still replay the incident in my mind's eye as if it were a You Tube video.  I believe the shop's RCA VTVM survived the incident without damage, at least I had it selected to the high est current range, and the heftiest shunt resistor.

I found out (at age 13) that a crystal mike could be used as a speaker, for about 10 seconds.  I used a 40M dipole, with an old broom stick as the center support and as the insulator, it was strapped to the chimney.    I fed it with balanced zip cord from an unbalanced pi-net Globe Chief 90.   It worked good anyway.

Like several of us, I also took pains to put the side of the dipole connected to the center conductor up higher.  ;D

My nemesis was microphones. Having leaned on a morse code buzzer set with paired wires that we eventually extended across the back yard to my neighbors (much to my dad's consternation when he ran into it mowing the lawn), we wanted to move on to voice communications. My sister had a set of toy princess phones, but she wouldn't give them up. But I had various microphones and headsets so we planned to build our own. I had some diagrams of how to connect a carbon mic up and use it with headphones to make a telephone like device. But the mics I had were crystal mikes mostly. And they didn't work in series with a battery the way the diagram showed.  ??? Much frustration ensued. it wasn't until much later that I realized there were different *kinds* of microphones.

Another project when I wanted to move 'up' from the T60 I had to "sideband". I couldn't afford an SSB transceiver like an HW101, so I looked for other ways. I hit upon the scheme of running a high power balanced modulator for DSB. Worked up a schematic for one using a pair of 807s or maybe 6146s and started drilling and blasting. Worked on it for a month or so, never got any RF out of it and finally gave up.

My first transmitter was a homebrewed 6V6 built on a couple of wooden straps - like the current pastime projects one.  Never did get out very well with that rig.  Second transmitter was a 807 xtal controlled rig. 

Finally, I graduated to an Eldico TR-1 using an 813 final.  Thought I'd made it.  I had a 135 80 meter dipole fed with 450 ohm open wire line.  One of my mentors came down to see the rig and he took out a pencil and drew out a VERY LONG  arc.  He got pretty excited about that - good thing he had a rubber eraser on the pencil. He drew it off the tank coil that also had 1500 volts DC.

Later on I added a link coupled tuner and I was in heaven with my strapping signal.  Today, I've slipped back into using a coax fed dipole.  You'ld think I would have learned after 60 years

Al

I found out why the voltage on the plate of a horizontal output tube is never listed on the schematic.

Later, I measured the filament voltage on a 1B3.

I did not have radio transmitters at the time and that was probably a good thing.

Back before any ham radio efforts, we used to build crystal sets.  They always needed a ground.  Usually a wire out the bedroom window, down the side of the house to a stake in the earth.   Worked well.  So, we got to wondering what were the special properties of "ground"?  Portable radios and car radios seemed to function without a connection to the earth.  Could there be some special earth-like material inside them to enable them to function?  We scooped up some soil from the garden, put it in a mason jar, stuck in a nail and made the connection.  Alas, our "portable crystal set" didn't want to work. !!  ???

I was about 9 or 10 and I though it would be neat if I took the speaker of an old floor standing radio and connected it to my small record player.  I didn't have any extra wire so I just used an AC extension cord with some bare wires shoved into the socket and "voila!", sound from across the room.

The next day I got home from school and turned on the record player, but there was no sound.  After a few minutes, my Mom asked what I was doing and I told her my little setup wouldn't work.  She said she had  needed the extension cord earlier in the day.  She told me she took the plug end and plugged it into the AC mains before disconnecting the other end (which was attached to the speaker).  She told me she heard a loud POP, but thought nothing of it. 

The search then began for another speaker.

73
Ted  W8IXY

I woke up early one Sunday morning when I was a pre JN (9?) and tried t hook up 2 speakers to an AM radio. I finally suceeded and wke up my parents to announce I had invented AM Stereo.  They seemed less excicted then I was..
Carl
/KPD

After putting up my first Novice dipole for 80M, I got used to working local WN1s, WN2s and  WN3s  on 3716 CW during the day and early evening.

By chance one night I woke up at 3AM and turned on the rig. I couldn't believe I was hearing WN4s, WN9s, WN0s, and even some  WN5s and WN7s !!!    It was winter and 80M was wide open. While working a string of "rare" ones, my father barged in. He was POed that I wasn't in bed and just yanked the AC cord out of the wall socket.  For the next day or so I worried I'd get an FCC citation for not properly signing off.  

I axed Corky about it and he said, "What if your power supply blew up?  - don't worry about it."

T

Great story

My fear of the FCC back in the JN days makes the NSA issue of today pale in comparison. Surely the FCC could waterboard, torture, or worse of all, confiscate your equipment or tell your parents. Journalists of today ave no comprehension of the governments' power :)
Carl
/KPD
 

Yep.

Yep, deux.

Great stories. I'm still laughing over Todd drilling holes through the wood by gouging them out with a screwdriver. That's exactly the same method I used during my early primitive building experiments.

I had a stupid little "AM broadcaster transmitter" as a 10 year-old that qualified as my very first transmitter. In addition to being able to make low power AM voice transmissions to no one in particular on the BCB it had a cheap morse code key that plugged into the front panel. The prongs for this code key were spaced exactly the same as an AC wall outlet. So... my little brother pulled it out of the transmitter and plugged it into the wall. My dad was downstairs trying to watch a ballgame when the fuse blew as my little brother hit the key. He went down to the basement and put a new fuse in and of course that fuse blew as soon as my little brother hit the key again. After replacing the fuse a couple more times my dad came roaring up the stairs to where my brothers and I were and stalked around like a Tyrannosaurus Rex looking for anything suspicious. After interrogating my older brother and I he spotted my little brother sitting there tapping away with the morse key plugged into the dead outlet. That was the end of that transmitter, it all went out to the trash, never to be seen again.

Yeah, that was a different kind of TVI complaint...

Rob W1AEX

Ah yes, power interruptions. After the 'transmitter setting the bedroom curtains on fire' event, when my shack was condemned to the basement for the duration, I happily spent many hours building and taking apart things down there. But my mom was still suspicious. On November 9th, 1965, when the lights went out, the first thing she did was throw open the cellar door and say "What did you do?? The lights are out in the whole neighborhood!!"
"Ma, it's not *me*"

Took a while to convince her but eventually she decided it wasn't my fault. Though she may still have her suspicions.

Then there was the time I tried to convince my dad that his TV antenna was  pointing the wrong way, that the small elements should aim at the station on the horizon. But he 'knew' that the arrow shape of the log periodic was to point the right direction....

Good thing it had a lousy F/B ratio.  ;D

I still break out in a cold sweat when I think about visiting the FCC office in Houston in 1960 to take my General.  It was a dark, scary place, smelling of cigar smoke, in what was even then a bad part of town.  The prospect of being sent to Gitmo is nothing by comparison.

But afterwards I was able to use the VFO I built from a Handbook design ... legally, and finally realized my dream of a receiver a bit better than a borrowed BC-455.  I guess my Dad decided I was serious about this ham radio thing.

My first radio adventure was a Philco cathedral set that I was allowed to play with at the age of maybe 6, in the basement.  One night, I forgot to turn it off.  In the middle of the night it started to smoke, and everyone thought the house was burning down, until the firemen that showed up to put out the "fire" figured out it was just an old radio releasing stored smoke.   

Grant NQ5T

My mom was a retired operator for Mountain Bell, and in the late 50's she noticed my proclivity for electronic things, so she arranged for me to spend a little time in the Yuma, AZ central office. 

Time after time my dad hauled us down there, figuring if she was involved, not much could go wrong with me.  Besides, it kept me from dissecting another household radio...

The techs were happy to explain everything to me, and I learned a lot about balanced circuits, power distribution, and how audio and signals could go over the same wires simultaneously. 

Everything was grandiose, with big racks of tube amps called repeaters and Strowgers chunking away.

My favorite areas were the power & battery room, and the special board.

Rows of lead-acid battery, with cells taller than me and pristine giant rotary converters making DC from the grid.  Large shiny copper bussbars, and lots of Weston fan meters and big knife switches on thick slate panels.

At the special board you could listen to all the national radio program sources via the Long Lines service, and the projection VU meter on the screen at the end of the row was just plain magic.

It paid off, I got paid for wiring up a normal-thru jackfield at the age of 11 for a local AM daytimer, and made my living in broadcast engineering ever since.

73DG

When I was about 9, I hooked up a 6 volt lantern battery in series with an old AM radio speaker and a carbon mike from a telephone handset. I could hold it close to my mouth and talk loud and I could hear myself reasonably loud in the speaker.

I announced to my uncle , who was about 18 and becoming annoyed with my invention, that I had invented a PA system.

He announced that I was, and I still remember it clearly, "a Moron and if I didn't shut up, he was going to drive me into the ground"

Ah yes, power interruptions. After the 'transmitter setting the bedroom curtains on fire' event, when my shack was condemned to the basement for the duration, I happily spent many hours building and taking apart things down there. But my mom was still suspicious. On November 9th, 1965, when the lights went out, the first thing she did was throw open the cellar door and say "What did you do?? The lights are out in the whole neighborhood!!"
"Ma, it's not *me*"
[/quote]

Exact same thing happened at our house...I was working on an audio power amplifier that had come out of a big old console radio  - had a pair of old school 6L6s in it.  All of  sudden the amp output went dead, and everything went completely black, except for two little blobs of rapidly dimming orange glow from the dying 6L6 filaments, followed by the same yell from the kitchen upstairs!

At age 14 I was reading, "How to Become a Radio Amateur", it showed a picture of excess voltage applied to a small lamp with the caption RIP. I could not understand how a bulb could rip.