It is indeed a special day today. I'm working on the restoration of my old WRL Galaxy 300 SSB transceiver - my first SSB rig I bought as a new General lo those many years ago. I had to pull use all my savings, plus cash gifts from my parents and grandmother to scrape enough money to buy it mail-order from Associated Radio in Kansas City. I think it cost $229.
This is the rig that put me in the hospital on Martin Luther King Day 1977 or 1978. I was 13-14 years old, fooling around one evening in my room, trying to determine why there was a tube shield on the Galaxy's 6BZ6 RF amp tube. It is located right behind the finals in the PA compartment.
At one point I got very careless. With the transceiver turned on (bad), in fact transmitting a full-power carrier (very bad), I lifted the lid and reached back in with my right hand to remove the 6BZ6's shield. Trouble is, to get to it I reached over the two 6HF5 finals and their plate caps with about 900 volts DC, plus a couple hundred watts of RF. My wrist touched the plate caps at the same time my fingers reached the tube shield, and the shocking and the burning commenced. My hand drew up in a fist, making it seemingly impossible to pull it back out. With the pain of the electric shock and RF burns I couldn't get my hand out! Fortunately I was only using one hand for this madness, and I ultimately pushed myself away with my other hand on the wooden desk. This also meant that the current had only flowed through my hand and arm, not across my chest (very good).
I had some pretty serious and painful burns on my hand and forearm. Clutching my wounded limb, I sat on my bed considering my options. I had a VERY BIG CONCERN that if I told my parents what had happened they'd stop my ham hobby dead. I was also very embarrassed to have hurt myself in such a dumb way. But I was also hurting pretty bad, and worried about the side-effects of a strong shock, so I concluded to be up-front about it. Not sure now how I would have hidden the injuries anyway. now that I think about it thirty years later.
They handled it very well, and took me to the hospital emergency room. The doctor did not understand the situation very well and was checking my feet for burns, worried about my heart, etc - and he demanded that I be kept overnight. I was admitted and put into a bed in a room with eight patients.
All night long, every few minutes one or another of these poor souls needed a nurse for something and would start calling out, ringing bells, moaning and crying. The nurse would finally enter, switching on the gigantic bank of fluorescent lights that lit the whole room like the surface of the sun. Click... zzzzzz.. , snap, snap, snap as the lights fired individually and finally hummmmmm they were on and I was blinded by the light. No sleep for me, and I spent part of the the next day in the hospital wasting a school holiday - Martin Luther King Day.
My parents never said a word in judgment of my foolishness or against ham radio because of this accident. And I was able to "milk" my injury to get me out of gym class for several months (very good).
"Before" photos of the Galaxy 300 at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34505242@N02/sets/72157612756003726/ Steve WD8DAS
sbjohnston-at-aol.com
http://www.wd8das.net/-----------------------------------------------------
Radio is your best entertainment value.
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