Great Discussion Topic on the Lonely Guys Net Today

Thanks Bear for posting,I am somewhat remiss for starting the thread Saturday and not even putting up my details. I remember the thread you are referring to (I might even have started it), I think the topic question was how old were you when you first got on the air, and what was your first rig? The thread drew a very large number of responses. this thread is more focused specifically on who helped you along the path early in your involment with ham radio.

In my case, it initially was my two grandfathers. My dad's father had given us an old Dewald 5 tube AA 5 AM radio (it was one of the Catalin plastic cabinet jobs that go for big bucks now). I used to listen mainly to WABC for top 40 R and R but also found out yu could get stations from all over the place especially at night. Somewhere along the way I got the idea that I could get better reception if I spread out the wire on the loop antenna on the back of the radio into on big single turn loop. When I did, instead of picking up the BCB, I was hearing all sorts of strange stuff, which tunred out to be short wave stations, including AM hams on 75 meters, because I unknowingly had changed the frequency of the LO in the AA5 to way up above the range for BCB reception by uuncoiling the loop which aslo served as the inductance for the LO. My mom's father worked for the phone company and was in the Sginal Corps in WWI in France doing wire comms, he was not a ham, but was heavily into building BCB sets in the early 20's radio boom. when he found out about my adventures with the Dewald, he gave me a pile of his old radio experimenting parts and showed me what they did. He also gave me my first real shortwave receiver when I was 12 in 1964, a Scott SLRM, which I still have and was used with a DX-40 as my novice station.

After playing around as a SWL, I found out about a Novice class being put on by the local radio club, the W2DMC Crystal Radio Club. The instructor was a guy by the name of Carl Sauter, of Upper Nyack, NY, WB2AMO, He was big into MARS, DXing and homebrewing. The class was run in his basement shack, where his big DX rig was an ex Meissner 150 driving a single homebrew 833 final. The place was full of all sorts of stuff like ARC-3s, command sets, and other cool stuff. He got me through the novice class and on the air at age 14 as WN2ZPS in January 1967. He also ran a follow up class for getting us up to General class, which I moved up to around AUgust of 67.

My other early mentors were my friend's dad, Gil Purvis, who ran a Motorola TV dearlership and TV/radio repair shop down the block from our place, and his bench tech, Freddy Sauber. Fred was a ham, alsthough I cant remember his call. Gil let me hang out as a bench rat, and I learned how to troubleshoot from him and Fred working on the small stuff that came in for repairs, like the radios and some of the earlier B&W TV sets. My pay was whatever old junk sets and parts I wanted. Fred had a colorful electronic vocabulary similar to the Tron's, especially for various TV brands that he didn't think much of, lile Schmaggotbox. I learned a lot from those guys,especially on looking first for visual signs of problems before even putting a meter on a circuit, or testg a tube.

Its too bad that nowadays, young kids don't have the oppoutunity to learn the basic nuts and volts of electronics that way. The repair shops are all gone, generally because everything is more relliable,and impossible and not economic to fix anymore. I could see how electronically clueless the younger generation has become while troubleshooting the problem with our Pontiac 2001 Grand Prix over the weekend, which was suddenly throwing about 5 different OBD codes at once. I was able to figure out my problem was likely a wiring problem that was dragging down a 5V reference bus from looking at a wiring diagram that showed all of the sensors throwing codes were powered from the same bus, and that one of the codes being thrown was for the referece bus in question being low. All of the hits on the Pontiac GP forum on the codes had people (most of them apperently young guys from how they wrote) randomly swapping out sensors and gettng nowhere except lighter in their wallets. Once I popped the hood, it took me less than 10 minutes to find damaged wiring on the throttle position sensor (one of the sensors that was throwing a code) grounding out to the throttle body. A couple of minutes and a few inches of electrical tape later, all the codes were gone. I've been helping one kid with a similar problem (it seems there are a lot of Ponchos that throw this particular set of codes) through the GP forum, hopfully I am teaching him, and others following the thread there, to THINK globally about what multiple OBDII coses are telling you, rather than just REACTING to them individually.