[CW] Thank you, Zenith Radio Corporation

[Jim Vaughan, K4TXJ]

Hi Hans,

I just read about your radio days.  That was a very interesting story.  I 
too learned about ham radio
from an old Zenith radio that my dad had.  It wasn't battery operated, but 
did have the short wave
bands on it and I was listening one sunday afternoon when I heard the 
signals coming in on 40 meters.
I had already learned the code in the Boy Scouts, but I wasn't very fast. 
The signal was very strong
so I copied what I could.  The station was sending the address which turned 
out to be about 1 mile away.

My dad knew about ham radio and he took me to that address and I went to the 
door and knocked
and that began my career in radio.  I was taking the test about three weeks 
later.  I can remember sitting
on the front steps when the postman delivered my license.  Back then it took 
about 8 weeks to receive
your license.

I also became a Navy radioman.  I retired as a Radioman Chief from the 
Submarine Service.

I served aboard the U.S.S. Waldo County, U.S.S. Carp and finaly the U.S.S. 
GEORGE WASHINGTON
(the first nuclear ballistic missle sub).

I often think back to those days with my dad's Zenith radio.

Thanks to the U.S.Navy, I was able to operate from some very nice DX spots. 
I went to the Navy bases
in Antarctica three times and operated from KC4USN, KC4USB and KC4USX.  When 
not running
phone patches, I gave out a lot of contacts from the Ice to a lot of 
deservine both on SSB and CW.

Well this is just another radioman's story about ham radio.  I wonder how 
many more are out there.

Thanks for your story about your connection to the old Zenith radio.

73 and good DX,

Jim Vaughan, K4TXJ
RMC(SS) Ret'd.
Louisville, Ky.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Radio K0HB" <kzerohb at gmail.com>
To: "CQ-Contest" <cq-contest at contesting.com>; "CW Reflector" 
<cw at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2013 1:48 PM
Subject: [CW] Thank you, Zenith Radio Corporation


> On the "Arizona Outlaws" contest club reflector, there has been a recent 
> exchange of "how I got started in radio" posts.
>
> Because I take a little ribbing from time-to-time about my "boy and his 
> radio" tagline, I thought I'd share the roots of it here too.
>
> See below.
> ---------------------------------
>
> I've spent the bulk of my adult life involved in things which can 
> generally
> be termed “technology”, and for fifty-odd years I’ve played in a "geeky"
> hobby called ham radio.
>
> Growing up in the 1940's and 1950s on a small Midwest farm not even 
> blessed
> with electric lights or a telephone (let alone a refrigerator or a
> television set ) does not seem a likely incubator for a lifelong vocation
> and avocation in Navy communications, ham radio, and telecommunications
> product design.  So how did that transpire?
>
> It was all the result of a stew made up of a mix of adolescent boredom,
> curiosity, the romance of "far away places", and an old six-volt Zenith
> radio.
>
> In our “front room” (“living rooms” were for town people) on a convenient
> table next to Dad’s chair stood a large Zenith radio set .  Everything on 
> a
> farm serves some purpose, and this set served to provide the daily 5PM 
> news
> and weather report from WDAY in Fargo.  It wasn’t used a lot for
> "entertainment", with the exception of the Thursday evening weekly episode
> of "Dragnet" to which Dad was addicted.  Beyond that, the radio stood 
> idle.
>
> Now besides the usual AM broadcast band, the old Zenith had 3 or 4
> additional "short wave" bands.  Despite a long wire antenna which 
> stretched
> from the house to the top of the hay barn, those short wave bands were the
> home mostly of static and very weak foreign sounding stations.
>
> With one exception.  On dark quiet winter evenings the "4-6 Megacycle"
> shortwave band would sometimes contain a lot of squeaky/squawky Morse code
> signals.  I knew that our mail carrier was something called a “ham 
> radioman”
> so I asked him about those signals.  He said on that band that they were
> probably messages being sent back and forth from ships at sea.
>
> To a preteen kid on an isolated farm in the middle of the great plains, he
> might as well have told me that they were messages between Venus and Mars!
> I was determined to learn Morse so that I could eavesdrop on the secrets
> that they were exchanging.
>
> I set out then and there to learn Morse from a chart that I found in "Boys 
> Life".
>
> Turns out that those "secret messages" were mostly about mundane things 
> like
> position reports, weather reports, and expected arrival times, but thus
> began my love of the magic of radio.
>
> 73, de Hans, K0HB
> --
> "Just a boy and his radio"™
> -- 
>
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> =30=
>
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