' Equally dumb, for a time, I thought that loud buzz sawing diathermy machine noise were airplanes in flight! "
Hear's "one more for the pile"
klc
oh that aint so bad. when I was a wee tyke, I used to wonder how the movie film got changed in the back of the TV when the channels were changed, and why it never ran out of film. The explanation of "I wanted to see where the film went" did not help the situation when I broke the CRT of the spare TV that had been moved into the garage by using a pair of my father's water-pump pliers to "unscrew" the yoke. I was astonished that there were no reels of film in the picture tube, and also by the explosion. My father was also "astonished" but for entirely different reasons.
The first transmitter was home made. It came straight from figure 9-2, grid-leak oscillator, in the "Radio Amateur's handbook", the non-ARRL version written by Collins in 1957. The circuit showed a triode, a switch in the plate circuit (haha the "key"), and a coil with a tickler, and a battery. It had no component values therefore I figured any would do. I wound a coil with a couple 20 or so turn windings on a toiler paper tube, and since I did not have a battery, I used a 450V power supply made from TV set parts. The tube may have been a 6A3, I don't recall, but I used the biggest one I had. I did not have a capacitor for tuning, so I decided to just do without. I took this approach because I did not have enough parts to build the real transmitters toward the back of the book. The diagram showed no place to hook up the antenna, so I just strung a wire across the room and hooked it to the plate terminal. Well I fired this up and was going to see if I could hear it on an AM radio. It pretty much was there, from 530 to 1650.. and also in the TV set as my father informed me. The most often heard phrase in those days seemed to be "what the heck are you doing in there?!?".
