[Hallicrafters] Matching equipment? We no need no STINKin' matching....

[Mike Everette]

Maybe I am repeating old stuff here; but, it may come as quite a shock to many younger folks that very few hams actually had "matching" stations back in the day, until perhaps with the advent of the Collins S-Line and its (low grade) clone, the Heath SB-series, in the sixties.

A truly authentic period ham station will be set up with little or no regard to "what matches this or that."

Back then, you bought what you could afford, and upgraded each piece -- receiver, transmitter, etc -- individually, as experience, finances or skill at building allowed.

Some companies did not make anything but receivers, or transmitters.  Not both.  Imagine that!  And there was no standardization among manufacturers regarding how things were done, in the area of station-control functions.

Most folks had a receiver they liked, and a transmitter they liked.  There were no "systems," no "standard pin-outs" for cables.  NO plug-n-play! You had better assume, today, that no octal-tube-plug on the end of a cable you find at a hamfest or elsewhere is in any way wired like any other!

It was literally up to us, to make a system out of this stuff and make it work.

Sometimes the results of our systematizing weren't so good.  In that case, we tried again.  Sometimes we improved things over time.

And, some of this was fraught with Rube-Goldberg.  But that doesn't mean they were necessarily bad.

One of my most colorful memories from early teen Novice ham days was visiting the shack of W4GQG, "Red" Benton in Fremont, NC.  He used a Hammarlund BC-779 Super Pro receiver, and a home brew AM transmitter which was "very freely" laid out, with power supply under the table (don't stick your feet underneath) and the rest in a variety of wooden frames or boxes.  I forget what the tube lineup was, but the final was a couple of big firebottles.

Transmit-receive switching was done by a "gang" of at least eleven wall-type electric light switches hooked together by metal rods, and activated by pulling on an emergency brake lever from an old car.  It worked wonderfully well, almost as good as push-to-talk in fact.  

When the lever was yanked -- Sha-ZAM!  Power transformers grunted, meters jumped, 866 murky-vapor (HAZMAT!  HAZMAT!) rectalfire tubes flickered purple, the final plates reddened, modulation transformer laminations "talked" back, and the whole room seemed to turn blue; the smell of ozone was prominent... Hell, you could smell the very Ether heating up.  It was like Dr. Wonmug's Time Machine.  Wow!

I came away with a healthy respect for "doing what works."

Lord help any cat, rat or whatever that ever got into his shack though.

Red was actually an electrical engineer, with a degree... but had pretty much always worked for the power company as a lineman and even in his late sixties/early seventies could still shinny up a pole without any climbing spikes!  He did not claim to have never slid down and gotten a chest or face full of pole splinters, though.  He had also been in radio repair since the late 20s.  His shack was a series of "add on" rooms, built as the one before filled up.  It was like a museum... rooms with stuff from the 20s-30s-40s-50s, and the newest was the 60s which was just getting started.  Each room had the remains of his ham stations from every era.  Red's pride and joy was his home-brew "B-1" receiver from the late 30s, when (as he put it) nobody, least of all him, had any money for things like radio.  He had concocted it from a Philco all-wave broadcast receiver -- adding a preselector stage, another IF stage, a crystal filter, and a BFO.  It was all
 wide-open and above board, real wild-looking, like maybe you shouldn't turn your back on it when it was fired up; but it worked great.

I would give a lot to be able to repeat that experience... even through photographs.  Every person who visited his shack got to sign his "guest book" -- which was the wall!  And you could only do it once!  I signed with my Novice call the first time.  Several years later, after getting my Extra, I visited again and asked to re-do/update my signature.  "NOPE!  Just once!  'At's th' rules."

When Red died, I think all that stuff went to the dump, and his shack was bulldozed.  Too bad.

73

Mike
W4DSE

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