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

Sat Jan 26 16:08:29 EST 2013

Bill, great memories with your email.  Licensed for 64 years.  I have those
same memories as a 10 year old.  Thanks.

Phil

Philip LaMarche

727-944-3226
727-510-5038 Cell 
 www.w9dvm.com
WWW.FLAMGROUP.COM

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-----Original Message-----
From: hallicrafters-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:hallicrafters-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Bill
Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2013 3:58 PM
To: Mike Everette
Cc: hallicrafters at mailman.qth.net
Subject: Re: [Hallicrafters] Matching equipment? We no need no STINKin'
matching....

I agree...as a novice awaiting my General, I had a DX-35 and an SX-99. 
My Elmer W2HSB bought an HT-32 and SX-115, so I was able to buy his HT-9. I
drove it with an HT-18 as a VFO. At 15 years old I chased DX with the lights
out late at night, and no side tone to wake my parents. 
No problem, as the hum of the tubes and the purple glowwhen I keyed provided
all the side tone I need.

You bought the best receiver or transmitter you could and then saved up for
the next purchase either upgrading the receiver or transmitter.

 From this setup I went to a Drake TR-3. Dreaming of the next great rig.

Bill Marx W2CQ
ex-K2PEQ

On 1/26/2013 11:35 AM, Mike Everette wrote:
> 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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