[Elecraft] Technology Change

Morgan Bailey mbaileycrna at gmail.com
Fri Sep 23 09:47:32 EDT 2016


I made a miss key, GiGo (for all you fortran non porgramers that means
Garbage in Garbage out), 1625 not 1628....arggg..then there was the trusty
OA3 regular of purple phase noise generator of a mercury vapor tube...then
there was the magic EYE of the ARK 5 command transmitter...with the flip up
top with the mirror on it...man those were the days when a BA/Weller 30
watt iron a few old TV and Radio sets could get you on the air with about 1
pound of solder. What great fun that was...when you could actually take a
TV apart for the terminal strips and drill out the rivets on the tube
sockets, bend an aluminum cookie sheet or use oak lath on 1 by 2s for the
tube base chassis open high voltage on the cathode key and static generated
clix that could be heard on any radio in the house...Bring on the resistor
across the key and cut down the clix...yeah we have come a long way. Not to
mention the 2ft by 4ft dupe sheet for Multi-single contesting for each
band. Making ladder line because you could not afford the nice round coax
when you were 12 years old...it cost more than the entire radio rx and tx.
using fence wire with oak lath strips cut and drilled then boiled in wax to
weather proof, the out put of the tube would load just about any thing.
Just put a light bulb across the antenna terminals and tune for maximum
smoke, with the antenna hooked up...or use a neon light close to the feed
line and do the same when you could afford to buy a ne2 light bulb. Finding
one on the farm was hard. Had to get a ride 70 miles away to a Laffyette
radio store to buy one. OMG found a Wave meter there, used it to tune after
that ...was over driven so connected a resistor to the antenna of the meter
to bring it in range. Worked DXCC with one 1625 and cw  a dipole fed with
ladder line and coils wound on toilet roll cardboard soaked in waterglass
then varnished to make them really stiff. All this was before PVC at a big
box store. They took down the wire from the telephone poles...yes telephone
wire was like 10 gage copperweld wire...got it free for the taking ... had
to use a barbed wire fence tool to work with it but once you had it cut it
stayed up like forever, the tree would come down first...

I could rattle for hours on the things I did when I was a kid learning
radio, My first radio was out of a used cubscout book I found at a library,
(I was not a scout), that taught me to make (condenser) a capacitor a razor
blade (blue blade) detector with a safety pin and a piece of lead from a #2
pencil. I had to get the wire from an audio transformer to wind the coil
and used a #10 gauge copper wire for the slider to tune the coil (fixed
capacitor tank, tunable inductor). Then there was the problem of the
antenna...clipped it on every thing that I could...then finally clipped it
on my open bed springs that I slept on and left the radio on the bed side
table. KOMA Oklahoma city with no batteries all night long...then KNCK
radio Concordia Kansas during the day. Those are where I got my start.

My dad was talking to a shop mechanic, W0PBX, Cliff Horne,  that repaired
tractors and mentioned my exploits in radio when I was 7 years old and he
gave me a key. An old Lionell key. Yeh the same people that made the model
trains post WWII, it was great, A J38. I tapped on it but could not learn
code. LOL needed and oscillator and found that by tuning a radio to an AM
station tone using bfo (Beat Frequency Oscillatory, injected a tone so you
could hear a carrier on an am signal) and keying the speaker yeah the
speaker...back then they were dynamic and had an electromagnet for the
field core (250 volts on the key) well I had me a damned fine and LOUD code
practice oscillator...LOL. Oh what fun that was. Oh but I forgot my first
real commercial receiver...the trusty BC454, with one touch of the top of
the case you wire 20 KHz off freq. Then I upgraded to the BC348. I bought
it from a salvage yard again for $3.49 for shipping. I just paid the
shipping because I knew the guy. He sent it with out the tubes but I had
plenty of old tubes. Back then minimum wage was 60 cents an hour.

That rx was like magic with the xtal filter that you could actually narrow
bandwidth. Otherwise just pushing on the case really hard would make the
tones sound like an electric guitar foot pedal. I used that rx because I
bought it from a salvage yard. No tubes, and it was wired to be used with a
dynamotor at 24 volts. Had to rewire all the tubes filaments in parallel
from the series that they were wired in and this was explained in a book
with a green cover put out by CQ publishing about surplus equip and how to
put it on the air. Then the trusty Command Transmitter was single band but
40 was great back then. Had to use the back socket to put in my xtals
because then I was a novice and rockbound at the age of 12-13. Then my
first pink slip was when I up graded to a 6146 Eico 720 transmitter and SX
101 Hallicrafters RX. Seems like I was on 40 putting out now a raging 60
watts and second and third harmonics on 14 and 21 came in to the FCC
monitoring station in Nebraska. Oh I was scared. So scared that I sold the
radio and bought a Gonset G76 transceiver and had great fun then. Finally,
Loaded hay all summer and bought a Swan Cygnet 270 B and had to manually
switch from Transmit to RX when running CW nets for NTS. Was a NCS for QKS
and TCC  for CAN EAN liason at 14. Got into girls about then and a job and
did not do anything after I got my general for about 18 years was QRT.
College, Family, Wife and finally went to Michigan and got in with a bunch
of great hams there...AC8W and the late Duck Duck...AKA K8DD Hank. And of
course Roy NT8V. Discovered electronic memory keyers then from the AEA
company. CK1 and the morsematic. Still have both. They work great. But,
Switch to the K1EL usb keyer for computer interface. Nothing better and
easier than that. Well again took some time off from radio when I moved
back to Topeka Ks. I put up 3 towers and had 3 beams with 40-10 covered
with GAIN. Oh what a blast I had. Jobs changed and life changes with the
need for income...QRT again and on the road. 16 years QRT this time. All
radios and towers and beams sold. Sold the house and bought the fixer up
retirement home all one floor for my last house then started  working all
over the US as a contract relief anesthetist. Went to a hamfest and bought
an Elecraft K1 that some one put together. I bought it for RX only to
listen to cw...missed it greatly. Best RX I had ever owned. What a miracle
in a small box. Was totally amazed. Bought it for 140$$ and it was the 4
band model. I was amazed. Well one Saturday in the cold winter in North
Dakota where I was working, I was severely bored and turned on the radio
and what would you believe was the SS weekend. Loved contesting, but with 3
watts and no antenna worth squat....well I found some old wire in the trash
and hooked about 15 feet of it up across the room and clipped it to the
drape of the hotel room on the ground floor and called the stations that
were loudest. I had to get on the net to see how to turn on the Automatic
antenna tuner, did this, and bingo 3.5 watts out on 40 and 20 meters. In
the next 10 hours I worked over 60 contacts with this set up. If any one
would have said it was possible...I would have thought them a bold faced
liar. Well I was convinced. QRP works!!!. Especially with the K1. The funny
part was that I was on the ground floor on the inside concourse of a brick
hotel shaped in a U. Was totally amazed. Desided to get back on the air
more often.

My son bought a K3 and still I had no radio or antenna at home, but I
bought an electric crank up tower...have to get the priorities straight. No
radio but, I gots a tower. LOL. Well Tower is still horizontal but I run a
vertical to a K3S and KTA500 with a Tokyo Hypower amp KFX 1.5. N1MM for
logging to an I5 computer with SSHD and they work great. Working on getting
a better antenna set up but will address that when the house is paid off
and retired...26 months for the house then the aluminum seeds will be
planted in the back yard. New beams are in the box and phasing array is
used for FD. DX engineering NCC1 and active antennas for RX. It works well.
Now another 4 years of work and I will be able to play radio ... heck maybe
SO2R and a bit of paper chasing from my city lot antenna farm.

Sorry to rattle but I wanted to show the evolution of the radio and tech
for me. I failed to mention all the radios in between the ones mentioned
but the evolution of radio for me is something that has been great and in
the least keeps the Alzheimer's at bay.

Vy 73,

Morgan Bailey NJ8M

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 7:42 AM, Morgan Bailey <mbaileycrna at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Whats this 6146 stuff...what happened to the 1628 or the 807...and not to
> mention the trusty 813 and for the big power ...304TL...whoot bring on them
> big filament transformers...
>
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 10:45 PM, Jim Brown <jim at audiosystemsgroup.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu,9/22/2016 8:24 PM, Dauer, Edward wrote:
>>
>>> Two thoughts on this . . .
>>>
>>
>> Great observations, Ted! And one more thought, articulated in a novel by
>> Thomas Wolfe, published in 1940. The title is "You Can't Go Home Again."
>> The meaning of the title is that we can't go back to where we grew up (or
>> where we had "a life") and expect it to be the same, because things change
>> in many ways. People we knew then have moved on, they have
>> grown/changed/evolved, the things that made up the life of that place and
>> of those people are different, often VERY different. So we can go back to
>> the same physical place, but we can't go back to the life we remembered.
>> And it's not that our memory is faulty, but rather that the world has moved
>> on.
>>
>> 73, Jim K9YC
>>
>>
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>
>


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