Congrats, Gene,
Your post reminded me and I remember the feeling well. It was in the mid
50's. I had a WW2 surplus Hammarlund Super Pro receiver but it only covered
3 to 20 MHz. For 160 I used an old multi-band
"living room console" radio that I modified to give me some bandspread
adjustment. That worked fine
for the AM phone contacts I made using my crystal controlled pair of 6L6's
and a 200 foot longwire 15
to 20 feet up in two crabapple trees.
I could hear CW stations keying the noise but there was no beat frequency
oscillator to produce
readable code. So one evening I borrowed the plastic AC/DC radio from my
mother's kitchen, took
it down the basement and sat it on the old console cabinet. I proceeded to
tune the kitchen AM radio
so as to beat its local oscillator with the incoming CW stations on the
old console.
It was a task to chase stations with the two radios, which drifted in
opposite directions and jumped
around in response to line voltage changes. Nevertheless, I managed to
work a VE1 that evening. The
thrill of doing that was really exciting. And to top it off, Stew, W1BB
made note of the contact in his
next issue of the 160 Bulletin.
Here's wishing you as much enjoyment on TopBand as I have had in the last
58 years.
73, Barry, W9UCW
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UR RST IS ... ... ..9 QSB QSB - hw? BK
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