RF and ME
Or How I got into ham radio
My love of radio is a long and diverse story. It all started with a personal crisis at the age of 9. My mother had a dairy herd and was busy morning and night milking the cows. My father was a farmer and was often away from the house planting or tending crops or pigs and occasionally worked away from home as an electrician. I had a sister a bit over 7 years older than me who was a second mother to me. Tending to me when my mother had to be at the barn. When she was 17 years old she got married and left home. I was devastated. I was the youngest of the family. My 2 brothers were quite a bit older and had left home a few years before. I went from spoiled little brother to only child of aging parents in a few days. One thing that I had to learn how to do was entertain myself. I can remember leaving the house at a pretty early age and walking a mile or two to the neighbors pond and spending the whole morning fishing. My mother didn’t seem to care as long as I showed up in time for meals.
It must have been Christmas of that year or the following year which would have been 1963 or 1964 that I received a special gift from my folks. Handheld transistor radios that run on 9volt batteries had just been invented a few years before and by that year the price on them had dropped to around $15. My folks didn’t have a lot of money but I think my father who had always had an interest in radio himself decided I should have one. It was an amazing device. Radios were before that time, large desktop or floor cabinets with glowing tubes inside that required high voltage. Now here in a package about the size of a pack of cigarettes was all the world. I could listen to the local stations during the day discovering their were stations throughout the region not just the one my folks listened from the nearby large town. At night the local stations either reduced power or went off the air and due to the nature of the AM broadcast band stations from across the heartland of america that were clear channel stations running many thousands of watts would show up on the dial. I can remember listening to rock and roll on WLS Chicago until way past my bedtime. My father on saturday night would listen to the grand old opry on WSM Nashville.
My Dad noticed my great interest in the little 9 volt radio and taught me about crystal radios that he had built as a kid and then probably about 1966 for Christmas I received a Shortwave radio. Sears sold a shortwave radio that was transistorized. The radio with one coil set was about $20 which was a sizable investment. Eventually I got 3 other coil sets which allowed me to listen to other bands.
A whole new world opened up to me. There were stations from all over earth that one could listen to. I listened to HCJB Quito Ecuador, BBC in London, Radio Nederlands, Radio Moscow, Radio Havana. A plethora of stations. There were all kinds of unintelligable things too. Utility stations, numbers stations, voices that sounded like donald duck that were all garbled which I later discovered were hams talking via SSB. RTTY, The russian woodpecker, Loran. Learning what all this was wasn’t easy. There was no internet, no wikipedia. What I learned had to come from books in our local library, word of mouth, or the occasional magazine that I could find. There were shortwave radio shows like DX calling that explained some of it. But I spent hours trying to figure it out and hours finding new stations that I hadn’t heard before like radio vatican city.
At first I had no idea where to listen. Some times the stations would come in strong and other times You couldn't find much of anything to hear.
Gradually I learned that this radio was much different than AM broadcast radio. Stations didn’t broadcast all day long on the same frequency. They came and went. I learned that time of day, time of year, and activity on the sun all affected how shortwave worked. That was at first irritating but in a way added to the fun of finding the new stations.
I also eventually discovered companies like Lafayette Electronics, Allied Electronics, Heathkit, Radio Shack and a supplier from Kansas City called Burstein Applebee.
Although I had next to no money to invest in their wares I eagerly awaited their catalogue when it came. Lafayette and Allied’s catologues were as thick as metropolitan phone books and were enough to salivate over for weeks and months.
In about 1969 I got a coil set for the radio that let me listen to 27mhz and I discovered the Citizens Band. Here were people both local and sometimes quite far that seemed to be everyday folks talking to one another. I started looking at CB radios in the catalogs. At $100 they were completely out of my price range. Then I discovered Burstein Applebee had a sale on a tenedyne 1 channel cb radio. It came with an antenna that you could adapt a car fm antenna with to use as a cb antenna. It came using the Emergency channel 9 for its 1 channel. It was $12 as I recall. I talked my dad into getting it. Somehow I knew that it used crystals to tune it and after talking to the only person in the area who we knew that used CB, I purchased crystals for channel 12. Then I got licensed as KGP3366 to be legal. The wait for the license to come in the mail was agonizing . I was on the air!
It wasn’t long before having it in the truck wasn’t good enough so on a rare visit to Kansas City to see my aunt, I went to Burnstein Applebee and purchased a 12volt 3amp power supply and a trik stik antenna. The trik stik was simply a dipole antena made from aluminum with tunable end pieces that could be adjusted for the frequency desired and fixed in place with a hose clamp.
After some time CB started to become quite popular and I was wishing for a radio with more channels. In 1972 I was in college. I had some money that a great aunt had given me years before. I had cashed the CD to help pay my college expenses and I set $59 of that money aside and purchased a midland 23 channel cb radio. Let me tell you that was a big purchase. Now I could talk on channels with folks from outside my circle of friends on channel 12. The one channel radio ended up in my dads truck and kgp3366 had a mobile and a base. A few years later after I had finished my schooling and had a job I was able to purchase a really nice base station, a cobra 2000. I had a beam and was thrilled to make a contact in australia at the height of the sunspot cycle.
All these years I had been interested in amateur radio. Two things kept me from getting my license 1. you had to learn morse code and I had no one to learn or practice it with. I tried. I built a code oscillator from Heathkit, but by myself just couldn’t learn it. The other thing was, you had to go to kansas city to take the test and It was hard to get the time to do that even if I had learned the code. There were no elmers around. I ran into one guy in Memphis who was a ham. He showed me his “shack” but didn’t seem to have the time to help me get started.
In 1988 I moved to Kirksville, the following year I discovered a local ham club was having field day activities and the public was invited. Thinking I could find an elmer I grabbed a friend and went to the event. I got there about 2pm and they were still setting up. It was a beehive of activity. I heard the word balun for the first time. I saw someone doing packet radio with an old tandy computer and a lot of things I didn’t really understand. However everyone was so busy and seemed to be so involved with what they were doing that I really didn’t find the encouragement I needed to pursue the idea any further.
I did buy a study manual for the tech license about that time but without an elmer didn’t do much more than read it once though. That was partly my fault. I think if I had talked to the club members after field day and asked for some direction they would have been glad to help but I was too shy and too busy with work to think about it much. I got interested in computers instead and satisfied with listening to other hams with my sangean portable shortwave radio.
In about 2008 I discovered that the morse code requirement had been dropped from the tech license and thought about getting a license. I was taking care of my aging mother and working full time so I didn’t do anything about it until after she died in 2009.
Finally in December of 2013 something on a website about ham radio caught my eye and I realized morse code had been dropped from all license levels. I started studying from a license guide and contacted the president of the local club about testing. In late January I took the tech and passed it 100% and at his urging took the general and passed it the same night. The following fall I studied for and took the extra.
Ham radio is an amazing hobby and I am sorry I missed out on it for so long. I think a lot of people are like me. They have a lifelong interest in the hobby but just don’t have the time or money to pursue it until later in life. Sometimes they just need a little encouragement from someone who tells them they can do it. I try to go out of my way to elmer other prospective hams as I think if someone had taken the time to do that with me I would have gotten into the hobby much earlier.
As of this writing I have worked 179 countries and all 50 states. Waiting for the next sunspot cycle to arrive.
73
