Golden era of ham radio?

[WA7KKP]

In television, the golden era was back in the days of black & white, with shows like the Twilight Zone, etc . . .

I've been thnking, and as a wee tyke, the harmonic of W7YZQ, that in my jaded opionion, the 50's and 60's were also the golden era of ham radio for these reasons:

Surplus WWII radios were plentiful and cheap. Ask anyone who ever owned and used a Command Set/ARC-5.

SSB was getting established, but AM was still the norm on the HF bands.

Both QST and CQ featured home-brew equipment. 73 Magazine came along when W2NSD/1 left CQ and became the third magazine in the hobby. Ham Radio came along in the mid/late 60's as a more refined mag speciallizing in the state-of-the-art homebrew equipment and antennas. Look at the magazine advertisers. Small ads for the commercial "ham" gear, but lots of listings for parts, and surplus. And ads for RCA tubes . . . .

The sunspot peak during the IGY in 1958-59 had many hams on 10 and 6 meters, working the world on a few watts and a dipole.

Heathkit was more popular and cheaper than Collins. Everyone had something by Heath in the shack.

The FM craze was started in the mid 60's by a dumping of obsolete WB FM two-way radios from the commercial services. Can you remember when most hams on 2 meters had either a Motorola, GE, or RCA radio?

There weren't the plethora of ham radio candy stores; most dealers were also retail/wholesale electronics distributors, and that paid the bills. Remember Henry Radio when it was in Butler, MO?

Whaddaya think? Pick an era, and tell us why you think it is/was the golden era . . .

Gary WA7KKP

[n8yx]

Whaddaya think? Pick an era, and tell us why you think it is/was the golden era . . .


Late 70's.

Equipment which was comparable in performance to today's offerings was beginning to show up in the marketplace, thus making operating a fun prospect instead of a chore. There were a goodly amount of HF and VHU/UHF spectrum inhabitants - not all had gravitated to satellite and/or cell phones. Be it ham, SWL, ute, public service or CBer, everyone had their RF bailiwick...and all of it was fun to interact with, if only just to listen.

[WB2WIK]

I agree with you.

I lived those days, and such experiences are very unlikely to repeat for this or future generations.

Other than an HF receiver, 100% of my first ham stations were completely homebrewed: Transmitters, VFOs, antennas, tuners, keyers, amplifiers, everything. I had a borrowed "Gonset Communicator" from Civil Defense (didn't everybody?) and that exposed me to 2 meters. Even those days are gone: Back when I was licensed, no matter what kind of "ham" you were: HF DXer, contester, experimenter, tinkerer -- everybody was on 2 meter AM and knew all the "locals" because of that experience. So, even that's gone.

Being able to work CW stations on 40m using Radio Moscow as a BFO, because they were so strong, was something all "us kids" (new Novices) shared as an experience, worldwide.

The fraternal initiation of going to the FCC office and taking tests in front of a government examiner -- usually sitting in desks that were 50 years old and had seated two generations sweaty-palmed test-takers before us -- was a right of passage we all shared.

It ain't coming back.

WB2WIK/6

[wb5ydk]

I wonder if one's personal "Golden Age of Radio" corresponds to the time frame when he first entered the hobby - when everything was fresh and new. Thirty years from now, one of our current teenage hams might write:
I remember the Golden Age of Ham Radio like it was yesterday. My little Icom DSP rig wasn't much of a performer by today's standards, but it delivered signals from around the world. I won it in an eBay auction. Anyone familiar with that place?

Remember those ancient Pentium computers? I used a slooow 4 GHz, quad processor model to check the DX clusters and chat on the message boards that were popular back then on the old Internet.

One of my best memories was when my old Elmer showed me his EME station. What a tour! It was incredible that one could actually work another ham by bouncing a signal off of the Moon!

These days, I'm still in contact with my Elmer. But, things are a little different since I've been assigned to the International Moon Base. He still uses his old EME setup, but there is hardly a need to bounce signals across the heavens anymore when a simple Earth-Moon 2-way communication will do!

[n8yx]

I wonder if one's personal "Golden Age of Radio" corresponds to the time frame when he first entered the hobby - when everything was fresh and new. Thirty years from now, one of our current teenage hams might write:

These days, I'm still in contact with my Elmer. But, things are a little different since I've been assigned to the International Moon Base. He still uses his old EME setup, but there is no need to bounce signals across the heavens when a simple Earth-Moon 2-way communication will do!

But you'll still need a comparable station and antenna array (albeit at 1/2 the gain) for Earth-Moon comms...path loss being what it is. ;)

[wb5ydk]

But you'll still need a comparable station and antenna array (albeit at 1/2 the gain) for Earth-Moon comms...path loss being what it is. ;)Hopefully, on the moon they won't have HOAs and CC&Rs to limit the size of our ham antennas. :D

[n8yx]

Hopefully, on the moon they won't have HOAs and CC&Rs to limit the size of our ham antennas. :D

I wouldn't bet on it. Suzie BusyBody has likely cast jaundiced glances in the direction of 'That ol' Kentucky Moon' - and her intentions weren't that of finding her true love. No, they were more along the lines of how she could get herself appointed to the position of lunar HOA president... :mad:

[wa4brl]

Equipment which was comparable in performance to today's offerings was beginning to show up in the marketplace, thus making operating a fun prospect instead of a chore...

Really, this statement is common to all eras, save for the very first wireless experimenters.

Still, I take issue with the statement that any newer rigs make "operating a fun prospect instead of a chore." We take our references from the present and the past, as none of us see the future. Operating state of the art equipment in any era is perceived as an improvement over previous technologies. Most of us view that as a privilege without thinking our past operating as laborious. Add a dose of nostalgia for your own former primitive rigs, antennas, and skills, and that too becomes a fun prospact. If our hobbies seemed chores, we'd drop them.

I never had trouble tuning the finals of a rig after learning how (3 to 5 minutes.) No problem calibrating and reading frequency off separate coarse and bandspread dials. Copying CW from the DESIRED signal within a 6 or 8 kC bandwidth quickly bacame second nature because it was the only way. The same for pounding your J-38 at 28 WPM because you didn't have a bug. Believe it or not, all of that was part of just HAVING A BALL as a Novice licensee.


But really, John, I know what you meant... I'm just playfully arguing inconsequential semantics here. :D

[KB4QAA]

To quote Carly Simon circa 1972, "These are the good old days".

Bill

[k3wrv]

There's a bit of truth in all of the above. But in the 50's - early 60's, you had to learn radio theory in order to survive, and mostly you had to build stuff, either from a HeathKit or a KnightKit or even a WRL rig. And since it was a kit (or homebrew) you didn't feel guilty about modifying it or punching holes in the chasis to adapt your DX 20 to power a VFO. There wasn't much resale value most of the time. And new guys were welcomed and Elmered.

I suspect that has something to do with the current interest in QRP these days - It's mostly affordable and you mostly build it yourself. And debug it. I suspect this has something to do with the allure of the Digimodes these days too. It wasn't plug and play, it was plug and pray!

Then around 1967, the ARRL got the FCC to cahnge the rules, and 2 Meter FM and repeaters took off, as did store bought equipment. Haqmming became less of a technical hobby and the age of the appliance op came on and a lot of hams dropped out.

Don't take this wrong. I use storebought rigs today, for the most part, and they DO perform better than the rigs from back then. And the OF's back then complained mightily about the "non technical noobies". Remember "No Kids, no lids, no SPACE cadets?" Has always been thus. Now how can we upstage the Emcomers and Winlink?. I'm sure somebody has an idea, so let's get it developed!

[EDIT] and some of the rigs from that era still perform up to todays standards - Drake 2-B or Collins 75S-3 anybody? Nope they weren't homebrew, but they were pretty exceptional.

[k4avl]

I would tend to put the 50's - early 70's as the prime era. Some really old timers would be to differ that the more pioneering older times were most exceptional. Radio in the early decades of the century, it would seem to me, were very fascinating days, even though I was only born in 1954. I know my dad was thrilled by it, he was born in 1924, and was fascinated by the early days of radio, going to the 1939 NY World's Fair, around the time TV had just been invented. He went to Brooklyn Tech High School majoring in radio courses (I still have his yearbook), graduated in 1941, was immediately drafted, was a radioman in WWII and later went to RCA Radio school and became an engineer at Dumont TV.
He never became a ham but always experimented with electronics, and built a bunch of things in his "shack".
For me, I got my interest in electronics from him, but got into ham radio in 1970 when I was 15 in high school, a teacher got me through my novice and later technician test. Growing up in NJ in the 60's, my dad took me to radio row in NYC a few times (torn down when they built the WTC) to rummage through the various shops, plus even in the early 70's there were still quite a few ways to get parts, local Lafayette stores, Radio Shack, Allied Radio, Olson, Heath, etc. The emphasis was on homebrew and making it a real hobby by being able to put your own rigs together and play around with the know-how quite a bit.
What could be more fun for a young person than putting together a Heathkit or drilling your own chassis and screwing in the tube sockets, transformers, etc., and knowing you did everything from the ground up?
I remember the old ARRL handbooks would describe all the theory from the ground up, and then show practical circuits for each stage and you can see how things worked and went together.
Though I agree that newer solid-state rigs have more bells and whistles and, I believe that the end of the tube days began the dumbing down of ham radio, where you just ended up with some black boxes and started to get a step or two more away from the actual hands-on experience.

[WA6MHZ]

I think the Golden age was indeed the 50s and 60s, and I came in just at the end of it all. In the 70s, we saw the demise of boat anchors and the climb of FM, Microprocessors and ICs. All radios were PCBs instead of wired point to point on terminal strips. Tubes went away except in the final amps. Ham Radios became the size of CB sets. People started using Keyers instead of straight keys. The excitement of contacts slowly went away as the internet came along and you could chat with people in other countries easier. HTs became HO-HUM when Cellphones came along. Now, it is hard to find anything extraordinarily exciting in Ham Radio anymore. It is still fun, but just has lost the magic it had in the 50s and 60s. The only contact I have been truly excited about in the past 20 years was working Hawaii on 2 meters. Many DXCC contacts were quite difficult, but just not special enough to start ringing Church bells over. But imagine working the other side of the planet on a Hallicrafters S-38 with a homebrew TX using a 6L6 and a Longwire. Now THAT was a contact!! With todays Whizbang radios, we start looking for something hooked up wrong if we Don't make the contact!

[wa4brl]

To quote Carly Simon circa 1972, "These are the good old days".

Bill
Amen, Bill -- and the right timeframe, too.

I earned my Novice license in 1971, and upgraded to General fourteen months later. The start I got with borrowed 1960's Novice equipment and building kits to add more is what I identify as my “Golden Era”. I built a DX-60B, but I aspired to that gorgeous Heathkit SB line.

As a General, I moved up (?) to an (already built) Eico 753. The Yaesu FT-101 and later rigs I bought had a far more sophisticated air about them, which I appreciated. But I recall those early kits most fondly.

I had a great appreciation and admiration for my Elmer’s era – the 1950’s. He started out building most all of his equipment -- homebrew, not kits. He still had most of it when I stumbled onto the scene. All the homebrewing gave him a broader base of electronics knowledge than I got building kits. It was a long while before I even started to catch up to him.

Only recently have I collected that early line-up of Heathkit SB rigs. I look forward to restoring and operating the “dream machines” of my memories.

[WB2WIK]

There's a bit of truth in all of the above. But in the 50's - early 60's, you had to learn radio theory in order to survive


::Amen.

I was very active in the mid-60s, as I am today. But back then I never heard -- ever -- "how do you solder on a PL-259?" or "how long should a dipole be for 7.2 MHz?" or lots of things I hear today constantly.

Those who honestly think the hobby hasn't "dumbed down" must be joking.

[n8yx]

I was very active in the mid-60s, as I am today. But back then I never heard -- ever -- "how do you solder on a PL-259?" or "how long should a dipole be for 7.2 MHz?" or lots of things I hear today constantly.

Heck, you don't hear any of that today. Instead it's "What's the number of (insert_favorite_amateur_store_here)? I need to buy a dipole..."

[wb5ydk]

I would love to have visited the fabled "Radio Row", in NYC, that K4AVL mentioned. Alas, I was just born a few years too late (and too far away from NYC).

My friend and former co-worker, Fred Runde WB4LDZ, (SK: 1915 - 2004), used to talk about his early days in ham radio with such enthusiasm. As a late 1930's young professional, recently graduated from engineering school, he shared a room at the New York City YMCA with another ham. All of their ham gear was homebrewed. Apparently, radio operation and experimentation were not encouraged in the YMCA dormitories, so Fred and his roommate had to keep quiet about their ham adventures - with hidden antennas and such. I suppose this was the 1930's precursor to the problems that we hams would face with HOAs.

[KA4DPO]

I have to agree that the 50's through the 70's was the golden age. As a novice in the 60's the bands were hopping almost all of the time and I don't recall ever not hearing some activity on some band at any time day or night.

When I got re-licensed in the 70's SSB had become the norm but the bands were still very active and it was almost impossible to call CQ on 40 meters and not get a response.

The general amateur population was far more technically proficient than today and nearly everyone had hombrewed at least some part of their equipment or antennas. It's true that parts were more readily available and war surplus stuff could be had for next to nothing but you still had to know something to make it work.

I'm just going to build myself a nice station and not worry about it. I can still enjoy radio and I can still roll my own equipment. As long as I can do that I'll continue to enjoy the hobby.

[wb6bum]

I too have to agree with Gary. But like another post mentioned, we might just remember our earliest years as the "good old days." I got my novice ticket in 1960 when I was 11 years old. Became a general the next year.
Great memories of all that surplus gear. Heathkits, and Henry Radio in Anaheim. I remember they had rows and rows of used equipment for a young boy to drool over.
I was just re-licensed 10 months ago after 35 years away. I feel like a stranger in a strange land. My Kenwood 530 lets me still tune the finals, and I have gone straight back to my CW roots.
I will always miss the boat anchors, point-to-point wiring, the comraderie, and a time when no one said "why not just use the internet?"

[WA6MHZ]

In 1971, I drove up to Henry in Anaheim from San Diego and bought a Swan 250. They had dozens and dozens of used radios on the shelf, but I wanted a great 6 meter rig. The Drake TR-6's and Heathkit SB-110's were too pricey, but I got the 250 for $150. Best of all, they had a time payment account plan and I would only have to pay $15 a month til it was paid off. That Swan served me well, and later I added a Heathkit SB-200 modified for 6M which supposedly put out 700W! That seemed high, but it just stomped!! And I had TVI complaints from as far away as 10 miles!!! In one instance, a good friend had a surgery at Alvarado hospital across the Canyon, and he called me up while I was working some Sporadic E. He said I was wasting the whole Hospital TV system!!! HE could tell it was me because he was a ham too, but didn't let on who I was. Henry Radio also had a great store up near LAX or Santa Monica somewhere. But they both folded up and now the exact same Anaheim store location is HRO, doing very well!

[W2BBQ]

To quote Carly Simon circa 1972, "These are the good old days".

Bill


BINGO


The best radio times are....today

[wb4old]

Pre-1991 .

[AC0FP]

Anytime or year that is not within +/-3 years of the solar minimum!:p

[W5HTW]

1950s, 1960s, to roughly 1972. As already stated, surplus military radio equipment was available for very few bucks. I found new unused Command sets at the Army-Navy store for $3.95. A lot of money for a teenager back then, making 50 cents an hour, but it could be handled.

CW really was king. Everyione knew it, though there were many who did not use it. We as hams were the "national communications reserves" when it meant something, when a ham could be drafted into the military, handed a radio, and could keep it working on the battlefield, using CW to pass messages in standard military format.

AM was very much alive. SSB was taking over, but had not yet. AM was still king on VHF, and a lot of us used those military surplus goodies to be on 2 meters. I had an ARC3 8 channel 8 watt 28 volt transceiver, and an SCR522. That got me on 2 meters.

We had to know electronics theory. Why? Well, for building, of course. But more importantly, for repairing. When the old Johnson quit, there was no one to repair but yourself. If you couldn't do it, you found someone in the radio club who could help. But shipping it back to the dealer was out of the question. You repaired it or you were off the air. Same with receivers. When your rig quit, you used your basic electronics knowledge to fix it. That was the only choice available. It wasn't necessarily that you wanted to pull the rig apart. It was that you had to.

I don't think anyone sold pre-cut dipoles!

I lived for a time in Inglewood, CA in 1959. I was only a few blocks from what I recall was a Newark Electronics store. Wow! Aisle after aisle of ham radio gear, shelves and shelves of used equipment. It was truly Wonderland.

And Radio Shack had RADIOS! The one in Framingham, Mass had an on the air radio room, glassed in. No, no CB. Good stuff. Like SX115s. That is the only "real live" SX115 I ever saw, was in that Radio Shack! Hallicrafters HT37s, you could go in and get on the air, if you had your ham ticket with you! And rows of parts bins. Used ham gear. New ham gear.

When you stop and think about it, there are other aspects. In the 1950s, television was live. No tape, no film. Real live TV. Even as it moved into color, it remained mostly live. There was no such thing as post production.

Broadcast radio was live. Every minute it was on the air, it was with a live DJ or announcer. It did public service, such as local news, local weather alerts, traffic alerts. It kept us informed immediately, not waiting for a five minute local newscast at 6 PM. If something happened, tune in the radio station. It was telling you about it.

Today radio is almost entirely satellite programming. It went through the automation cycles in the late 70s and early 80s, but today it doesn't even have that. Just some guy or gal in a room somewhere, no one knows where, pretending to be local, but he has no idea even where he is being heard. Nor does he care. Just pocket the paycheck.

Local radio news died entirely by 1985 or so. Today many television stations are cutting back on news as well. Here in New Mexico, the long king of news, KOAT, has eliminated their noon time news, and hired a Botox Babe to read a bit of news at 6 pm.

Broadcast television is shot. It neither entertains nor informs.

In 1957 I was getting 20 miles per gallon in my 1950 Ford Custom sedan V8. 18 city, 22 highway, normally. Where's the progress? I had no on board computer. I had a car I could work on with ease, buy cheap parts for, and date girls in. And 30 cents a gallon gas. Nope, didn't have air conditioning, no DVD player, no power windows, no satellite radio or tape player. An engine, transmission and wheels. And a metal body, no plastic. And overdrive!

I could listen to a live DJ on the radio, even in the evenings. I could watch good comedy on TV, or good variety shows, such as Perry Como or Dinah Shore. Today the closest thing to variety is Big Survivor's Last Comical Sister With Talent Dancing With A Dog. All the same-old, same-old. All identical.

Today's ham rig looks and feels and operates like a 1970 CB. More channels, that's all.

Progress.

[k1oik]

In television, the golden era was back in the days of black & white, with shows like the Twilight Zone, etc . . .

I've been thnking, and as a wee tyke, the harmonic of W7YZQ, that in my jaded opionion, the 50's and 60's were also the golden era of ham radio for these reasons:

Surplus WWII radios were plentiful and cheap. Ask anyone who ever owned and used a Command Set/ARC-5.

SSB was getting established, but AM was still the norm on the HF bands.

Both QST and CQ featured home-brew equipment. 73 Magazine came along when W2NSD/1 left CQ and became the third magazine in the hobby. Ham Radio came along in the mid/late 60's as a more refined mag speciallizing in the state-of-the-art homebrew equipment and antennas. Look at the magazine advertisers. Small ads for the commercial "ham" gear, but lots of listings for parts, and surplus. And ads for RCA tubes . . . .

The sunspot peak during the IGY in 1958-59 had many hams on 10 and 6 meters, working the world on a few watts and a dipole.

Heathkit was more popular and cheaper than Collins. Everyone had something by Heath in the shack.

The FM craze was started in the mid 60's by a dumping of obsolete WB FM two-way radios from the commercial services. Can you remember when most hams on 2 meters had either a Motorola, GE, or RCA radio?

There weren't the plethora of ham radio candy stores; most dealers were also retail/wholesale electronics distributors, and that paid the bills. Remember Henry Radio when it was in Butler, MO?

Whaddaya think? Pick an era, and tell us why you think it is/was the golden era . . .

Gary WA7KKP
In the 50s you actually had to know something to pass the amateur exam and the FCC gave the exam.

[kc9mav]

In the 50s you actually had to know something to pass the amateur exam and the FCC gave the exam.

Oh for Gods sake hear we go again. :mad:

[k1oik]

I would love to have visited the fabled "Radio Row", in NYC, that K4AVL mentioned. Alas, I was just born a few years too late (and too far away from NYC).

My friend and former co-worker, Fred Runde WB4LDZ, (SK: 1915 - 2004), used to talk about his early days in ham radio with such enthusiasm. As a late '30s young professional, recently graduated from engineering school, he shared a room at the New York City YMCA with another ham. All of their ham gear was homebrewed. Apparently, radio operation and experimentation were not encouraged in the YMCA dormitories, so Fred and his roommate had to keep quiet about their ham adventures - with hidden antennas and such. I suppose this was the 1930's precursor to the problems that we hams would face with HOAs.

I recall visiting radio row in the early 60s and there were all these signs petitioning visitors to stop the "World Trade Center."
Who was to know the horror to come 40 years later.

[n8yx]

Oh for Gods sake hear we go again. :mad:

He didn't mention "code" in that reply...

[WB2WIK]

Oh for Gods sake hear we go again. :mad:

"Hear" we go again?

Point proven.

[wb5ydk]

He didn't mention "code" in that reply...Ah, but there is something memorable about having to travel to the FCC Field Office, located in the downtown area of The Big City, to take your test. I remember my nervousness while sitting in that little wooden schooldesk, pencil in hand, while the FCC examiner turned on the paper-tape Morse code sending machine.

[WB2WIK]

I recall visiting radio row in the early 60s and there were all these signs petitioning visitors to stop the "World Trade Center."
Who was to know the horror to come 40 years later.

::I, too, used to frequent "Radio Row" in Manhattan, although I was only a kid. They tore down Cortlandt St. in about 1966-67 and by '68 it was gone forever, to be replaced by the Twin Towers.

I used to "sneak" to go there from my home in the Jersey suburbs, when I was 13-14 years old. Parents had no idea. I took a bus to a train to a subway...and bingo, landed right there. The "fares" cost about $2 each way, which was a lot for a 13 year-old kid in '65.

They sold surplus electronic parts, receivers, transmitters, power supplies and everything else by the pound. I recall coming home with so much crap in a cardboard box that I could barely carry it, and the box was coming apart because it was overloaded with variable capacitors, oil-filled filter caps, smoothing chokes, filament transformers, knobs, rheostats, tubes, crystal sockets, octal sockets, crystals, and everything else....and the box full cost $5. A 1625 tube (similar to an 807) cost $.20 if you could bargain them down from the normal asking price, which was $.25. And a 1625 would run about 40W output on 40m, which is all I wanted to do.

I built rigs with that stuff.

My first rig was a 40m high powered (10-15W) oscillator (xtal controlled) using a 6V6, built on one of Mom's cake pans, turned upside down to make a chassis. Total cost was probably $6-$7, including the crystal. That, with a 1950 vintage NC-125 and a knife switch as a T-R "relay," made a pretty good station. I made my first four or five logbooks worth of contacts (1000 contacts per book) with that, all on 40 CW.

That "new" hams have missed out on this process makes it impossible for the hobby to carry forward in the way we did it. The hobby will likely carry forward anyway, but when operators have absolutely no idea what's going on behind the front panels of their equipment because they never built any radio gear, it's a different experience. I suspect the experience "we" had will never, ever be repeated.

Now I could regale interested parties about building my first computers but the hell with it.

WB2WIK/6

[W4HAY]

Although it was before my time, based on reading through the QST CDROM collection and old books and magazines, I would say the period between WWI and WWII.

Radio was truly in it's infancy, and each year brought new inventions and discoveries. Communications was found to be possible above 200 Meters. Some radio waves were discovered to originate in outer space. The tetrode and pentode overcame many of the deficiencies of the triode, which had earlier displaced the coherer and crystal and electrolytic detectors. Regenerative detectors were developed, and then along came the superhetrodyne and the patent wars. Most equipment was homebrew; store-bought gear was prohibitively expensive. It was an exciting time. I would like to have experienced it -- which means I'd probably be pushing up Daisies now!

Incidentally, for those that never got to see it, here's a look-back at Radio Row (http://sonicmemorial.org/public/radiorow/radiorow.html). I got to visit it very briefly before it was demolished in the mid-60s.

[n8yx]

Ah, but there is something memorable about having to travel to the FCC Field Office, located in the downtown area of The Big City, to take your test. I remember my nervousness while sitting in that little wooden schooldesk, pencil in hand, while the FCC examiner turned on the paper-tape Morse code sending machine.

...and I went from Novice to Advanced in one sitting before those examiners...

Could have gone straight to Extra but doubted myself more than I should have at the time and didn't register for the required element tests.

[WB2WIK]

...and I went from Novice to Advanced in one sitting before those examiners...

Could have gone straight to Extra but doubted myself more than I should have at the time and didn't register for the required element tests.

::Me, too. But then in front of the same darned examiner, I took the commercial "phone" exams, 2nd class then 1st class, then 1st class RADAR endorsement, etc, etc. Same guy, always. He was a fixture there.

I found out later he was also a ham (SK now). He smoked a stinky cigar and left the windows open in the FCC exam room to ventilate the place (in NYC), even in winter. So that meant, when you took a test, you had to chase the papers around the room on a windy day.

What fun. Wouldn't trade the experience for a million bux.

WB2WIK/6

[wb5ydk]

My first VFO-controlled HF transmitter was an old surplus ARC-5. As a 15-year old kid, in 1974, I paid a whopping 25 cents for it at the local hamfest. After throwing together a few miscellaneous parts for a power supply the green "Magic Eye" tube came to life and I was on the air!

[WB2WIK]

My first VFO-controlled HF transmitter was an old surplus ARC-5. As a 15-year old kid, in 1974, I paid a whopping 25 cents for it at the local hamfest. After throwing together a few miscellaneous parts for a power supply the green "Magic Eye" tube came to life and I was on the air!

::"Those were the days."

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played. Songs that made the Hit Parade. Guys like us, we had it made. Those were the days.

WB2WIK/6

[ky5u]

Golden Era? All I know is that it sure ain't the hell NOW in AR!

[kc9mav]

"Hear" we go again?

Point proven.

Sorry,

I guess I should have paid attention in Mrs. Pempeks English class I was to busy studying the general book!:D

HERE!

[AC0FP]

...and I went from Novice to Advanced in one sitting before those examiners...

Could have gone straight to Extra but doubted myself more than I should have at the time and didn't register for the required element tests.

The head of engineering where I worked went in to take his Amateur radio test and went from no license to extra class in one sitting. Thats right, the only callsign he's ever had is a 1x2. He told me later, after he'd taken the test, that "once I got by the Tech/General exam I knew I had it made".

73,

Frank:)

[W5HTW]

...and I went from Novice to Advanced in one sitting before those examiners...

Could have gone straight to Extra but doubted myself more than I should have at the time and didn't register for the required element tests.

I wonder when that was. At one time you had to be a General or Advanced for a minimum of two years before you could take the Extra test. Later that was shortened to one year, and at some point in the 1970s, I think, perhaps around 1974, that "in grade" requirement went away. It may have been after that, I'm not sure.

[wa3vjb]

You guys who pine for the "good old days" of point-to-point wiring, discrete components, good-sounding AM, the warm glow of vacuum tubes, etc. forget that one of the most vibrant façets of the hobby RIGHT NOW are the members of the AM Community on HF.

We Do That ! (with a nod to my friends in Newington)

Go grab a boat anchor and head out.



http://www.wa3vjb.com/pics/51S1.jpg


www.amwindow.org

http://amfone.net

[WA6MHZ]

When I took my General code test at the San Diego FCC office, it took many many times to pass. Each time I would go in and bomb the test. For the 13WPM, you had to copy 125 letters in a row, and sometimes I would get 80 to 100, but never 125. Then, one day in 1980 or so, I went down to take it and sat listenning to the V V V's being sent and was ready to copy. They sent the 20 WPM test first, which I always failed drastically, but atleast it made the 13 seem slow. This time, they had a very attractive young lady in the FCC office filing papers. She had a short skirt on and my eyes immediately started tracking her instead of paying attention to the code. I wrote down what I heard but continued to watch her, straining my eyes when she would bend over to the lower cabinet to file the papers, probably tests of other applicants. Suddenly the code stopped and Mr. Spellman rushed in and collected up the papers we were writing on. A few minutes later he came out and informed the many who failed to try again next time, and began to congratulate the ones who passed. Most surprizingly, I was in the WRONG group! I had PASSED!!!! I just about wanted to HUG him I was so thrilled. But who really deserved the hugging (and a big KISS!) was that little cutie in that short short little skirt who took my weary mind off the darned code and allowed me to pass. I had 126 letters in a row correct!

[WB2WIK]

You guys who pine for the "good old days" of point-to-point wiring, discrete components, good-sounding AM, the warm glow of vacuum tubes, etc. forget that one of the most vibrant façets of the hobby RIGHT NOW are the members of the AM Community on HF.

We Do That ! (with a nod to my friends in Newington)

Go grab a boat anchor and head out.



http://www.wa3vjb.com/pics/51S1.jpg


www.amwindow.org

http://amfone.net


::Now, that's just too funny. Where's the BC-610?:p

Paul are you the one who had a daughter living across the street from me for a while? I forgot. A few years ago I had a new neighbor (YL) who came over to introduce herself and complain about my getting into her computer speakers. She seemed to know an awful lot about RF for a typical YL. I went over and added filters to her PC speakers, and the problem was solved. Then she told me her dad was a ham who was really into AM...was that you?

If so, small world!

WB2WIK/6