[ARC5] First and Last Q-5er article

[Richard Schumann]

Thanks Gordon....now that story is just plain interesting!

I was born in Woodbury NJ, by the way.

I started out as a novice at age 15 in '62 with a Globe Chief Deluxe and HQ-129X on CW (thanks Dad).  Shortly after I got my general, I was given a 40mtr ARC-5 receiver, a 40mtr ARC-5  xmtr with modulator built into another ARC-5 xmtr case  and the power supply was a built into a huge "rectifier power unit' case, which years later I found was originally used to power the RAL series receivers.  An Eico 722 VFO was added at that time as well.

Thus began my love affair with the ARC-5 which has continued down to this day....it sure gets in your blood!  I retired 6 months ago and have been uploading some pix from my early stations to QRZ.COM and when I find the one described above, I will make sure it gets there as well.  I really enjoy looking at others' stations as they progressed over the years.

I would love to read posts from other members on the list detailing what sparked their interest in the ARC series...I'm sure many would be similar.  Sure wish I still had that AM rig.....sigh....

Thanks for your story and I look forward to each of your posts!

Richard kn7sfz in Orygun


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: gordon white 
  To: Richard Schumann ; ARC5 
  Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 8:47 AM
  Subject: Re: [ARC5] First and Last Q-5er article


  Richard:

     Don't know where that profile of me came from, but it's pretty accurate.

  No, I was never a licensed amateur.

      Getting involved in the Command set subject had two roots. First, I graduated from Mountain Lakes, NJ high school and Mountain Lakes is the next borough (New Jersey term for village) to Boonton. A lot of the A.R.C. people, at least the officials, lived in Mountain Lakes, which was pretty upscale, if not wealthy. I was already primed in the early 1950s to recognize A.R.C.

      Next, when I moved to the Washington, DC area we were pretty poor. I made $110 a week as a reporter. (Scotty Reston said it was a wonder we got paid at all, our jobs were so much fun.) Joan made $3,000 a year as a schoolteacher. Not being able to afford a TV set we inherited one from my parents that did not work. Being a tinkerer, I went into it to see if I could fix it. Lucky I did not get up against the flyback transformer. Long story short, I did get it to work. That piqued my interest in electronics and I soon ran across a local surplus store which had all sorts of goodies. Being that the parents lived just outside New York City, I found "radio row" in downtown Manhattan, and that led to ham magazines which led to a piece about the command sets which I suspected had a lot of bad information in it, leading back to the A.R.C. people in N.J.

      A reporter just has to correct someone else's errors in print and I can be very thorough. When working for the Paterson NJ Evening News my editor realized my bent towards technical history - I'd volunteered a piece on the Conover Automobile which was built in Paterson before WW I. He set me to doing a piece on the Paterson locomotive industry, c. 1850-1900. As the twig is bent so groweth the tree - 

      Being in the Washington area there were a lot of resources - the National Archives and the Signal Corps and Navy files, etc. I just kept on digging and getting more and more interested.

      CQ paid me $100 a month, which, saved over 12 years, paid most of the college costs for the three kids.

      I retired from my last newspaper, the Salt Lake City Deseret News, for which I was Washington Correspondent, in 1991 and having been a fan of auto racing since my dad took me to the track in 1938 when I was five, I got into writing the history of American auto racing - seven books and counting.

      I am intrigued that there are so many fans of the Command sets and that they "found" me about ten years ago.

   - Gordon White