[Lowfer] Getting on Part 15

[Peter Cranwell]

The sparfk gap was back in 1954. I got the idea from an Encyclopedia.  We 
used it to practice CW and eventually got our Novice licenses.  Nothing like 
two kids, who never heard morse code, try learning from each other.  It took 
a long time but we eventually learned.

Pete


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert M. Bratcher Jr." <bratcher at pdq.net>
To: "Discussion of the Lowfer (US, European, &amp; UK) and MedFer bands" 
<lowfer at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 6:28 PM
Subject: Re: [Lowfer] Getting on Part 15


> 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.
>
> _______________________________________________
>>From the Lowfer mailing list
> Send messages to: Lowfer at mailman.qth.net
> To sub/unsub visit: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/lowfer
>