On the "Arizona Outlaws" contest club reflector, there has been a recent
exchange of "how I got started in radio" posts.
Because I take a little ribbing from time-to-time about my "boy and his
radio" tagline, I thought I'd share the roots of it here too.
See below.
---------------------------------
I've spent the bulk of my adult life involved in things which can generally
be termed “technology”, and for fifty-odd years I’ve played in a "geeky"
hobby called ham radio.
Growing up in the 1940's and 1950s on a small Midwest farm not even blessed
with electric lights or a telephone (let alone a refrigerator or a
television set ) does not seem a likely incubator for a lifelong vocation
and avocation in Navy communications, ham radio, and telecommunications
product design. So how did that transpire?
It was all the result of a stew made up of a mix of adolescent boredom,
curiosity, the romance of "far away places", and an old six-volt Zenith
radio.
In our “front room” (“living rooms” were for town people) on a convenient
table next to Dad’s chair stood a large Zenith radio set . Everything on a
farm serves some purpose, and this set served to provide the daily 5PM news
and weather report from WDAY in Fargo. It wasn’t used a lot for
"entertainment", with the exception of the Thursday evening weekly episode
of "Dragnet" to which Dad was addicted. Beyond that, the radio stood idle.
Now besides the usual AM broadcast band, the old Zenith had 3 or 4
additional "short wave" bands. Despite a long wire antenna which stretched
from the house to the top of the hay barn, those short wave bands were the
home mostly of static and very weak foreign sounding stations.
With one exception. On dark quiet winter evenings the "4-6 Megacycle"
shortwave band would sometimes contain a lot of squeaky/squawky Morse code
signals. I knew that our mail carrier was something called a “ham radioman”
so I asked him about those signals. He said on that band that they were
probably messages being sent back and forth from ships at sea.
To a preteen kid on an isolated farm in the middle of the great plains, he
might as well have told me that they were messages between Venus and Mars!
I was determined to learn Morse so that I could eavesdrop on the secrets
that they were exchanging.
I set out then and there to learn Morse from a chart that I found in "Boys
Life".
Turns out that those "secret messages" were mostly about mundane things like
position reports, weather reports, and expected arrival times, but thus
began my love of the magic of radio.
73, de Hans, K0HB
--
"Just a boy and his radio"™
--
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