[FARC] Home Brew Hams Stuff

[Joseph M. Durnal]

I really enjoyed the meeting last night.  Seeing some of the home brew
ideas reminded me why I got interested in amateur radio in the first
place.

I'm certainly no old timer, I was first licensed in 1993, which was
around the beginning of the "2 Meter FM as your first radio" era.  I
saved and saved at my summer job in Ocean City to accumulate the $240
required to purchase the Realistic (Radio Shack) HTX-202.  I made
$40/week, so it didn't take too long, but living in Ocean City and not
spending money was tough on a 15 year old boy.  It is a good thing
that locals get a lot of stuff for nothing!

When school started again, I was back home in Glen Burnie and started
getting involved on the local repeaters.  My first two projects were a
simple vertical dipole antenna for 2 meters and a line noise filter
for the 1A wall wart 12v power supply that could run the radio at 1
watt.  Without the filter there was a good AC hum in my signal, I
think the antenna was the first of the two projects.  It wasn't long
before I rebuilt (with help) a damaged power supply to get 5 amps so I
could run the radio at high power.  There were some hams closer to my
age at the time that I talked to on the repeater often, but a couple
of them were often on simplex and I was just out of range.  The next
project was to turn my vertical dipole into a 2 element yagi, which
was just what I needed to reach those guys on simplex.

I sure did a lot of home brewing to get the most out of my 2 meter HT
back then.  Since my mentors at the time were real old timers, that
had actually built and used their own HF radios and worked the world,
what I did at the time seemed like no big deal, but looking back, it
seems like something I can be proud of.  To this day, there has always
been something home made in my shack.  Right now it is just a simple
choke made of coax around a 2 liter bottle, and the cable between my
radio and TNC, but home made none the less.

73 de Joe NE3R