[Lowfer] Getting on Part 15

[Robert M. Bratcher Jr.]

At 07:07 AM 9/4/2008, you wrote:
>My first rig was a Ford spark coil and a buzzer back in 1956.  My 
>friend KN2QFT and I would communicate about a city block using the 
>low end of the brroadcast band at 500 KHZ (before I got licensed as 
>KN2RBV).  We hung Army field phone wire on the phone poles, only to 
>have it removed by the phone company once a month.  As we lived in 
>Union City NJ we had access to a military electronics surplus store 
>(Red Arrow Electronics).  We could get all the wire we wanted.  We 
>were also a Saturday Mornings trip to Cortland and Canal streets 
>(Military surplus heaven)  in NYC before they built the World Trade buildings.

Buzzer? Back around 1975 I wired a relay as a buzzer then fed it with 
18 volts of raw AC from a toy train transformer. The relay was 
connected to my random wire shortwave antenna. Took a 60's era 
National Panasonic 4 band transistor portable & started walking away 
from my house. When I lost the signal (basically a raspy buzzing) I 
tuned higher up in frequency to pick it up again. Several blocks 
later, about a mile away I lost it all together on roughly 6.1 mhz 
which was the resonant frequency of my antenna. No idea how many 
milliwatts of power went to the antenna however that kind of buzzer 
transmitter is a very wideband spark gap damped wave which is illegal 
under the FCC rules. But I didn't know that back then at 16 years of 
age. Turned it off when I got back home as the end of that experiment 
and never hooked it back up again.