Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#10
|
|||
|
|||
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:46:34 GMT, "Eisboch"
wrote: Short Wave Sportfishing wrote: On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:31:30 -0500, Harry Krause wrote: Short Wave Sportfishing wrote: On 19 Nov 2004 01:39:52 GMT, (Gould 0738) wrote: Our regional boating magazine is about to observe its 40th year of publication, so I'm digging through issues from each of the first few decades to choose material for an article to lauch the anniversay year. ~~ snippage ~~ T&G Electronics was advertising some VHF radios. (Remember, these are 1965 prices...) The 75-watt, six channel model was available for $299. A 110-watt model, also six channel, was priced at $399. The top of the line, very deluxe 150-watt unit with *8* Channels (!) was a mere $549. (A lot of middle-class jobs only paid about $500/month back then. Imagine taking out an 18-month installment loan to buy a VHF) And those were crystal controlled with flibberdejibbet tune controls. I have one in my collection of antique radios - I'll take a picture today and post it. Gosh...from the days when Radio Shack was a real electronics hobbyist store. First store ever - right across from BU on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. I had a Radio Shack short wave receiver from that my Uncle sent me one Christmas. I was living in WI at the time (before we moved east) and heard the BBC for the first time when I was around ten sitting in my room with wire strung all over the place hooked up to the little transistor "Shortwave" receiver. Sparked my interest in electronics actually. Remember Lafayette Electronics? My first FM receiver was a Lafayette - I'll never forget putting that kit together - took me almost a month working after homework was finished late into the night. Got it together and had to tune it and bought my first piece of test equipment - a signal generator - which was also a kit. :) I remember my father saying "FM - it will never catch on - all they play is classical music". WTMG in Milwaukee in fact had the only FM transmitter in the mid-west at the time. WGN in Chicago was a couple of years behind them. Heathkit was also high on my list of stuff every Christmas when they were still around. At one time I had a ton of Heath amateur radio and test equipment. My Dad's first color TV was a Heath. That was fun. Oh - gosh - how could I forget Allied Electronics on Michigan Avenue in Milwaukee. I used to beg my Dad to take me to work with him at the Milwaukee Sentinel on vacations so I could hang at the Allied store in the afternoon and just look at "stuff". Ah yes - the gud ole' daze... Later, Tom I certainly do remember Lafayette and Heathkit. We had a wonderful Radio Shack in downtown New Haven. It had some displays of "manufactured" goodies, but most of the store consisted of aisles and aisles of red plastic and painted wood parts bins, with every electronic piece and part known to mankind, or, at least, all that a kid could imagine. I think the store was that good because it was in walking distance of Yale's engineering college. I remember in the 7th grade finding a brand-new Model A Ford spark coil there, if not OEM, then one built to Model A specs. Well, I really needed one badly, because my Science Project for that year was to build a cloud chamber. Which I did...and the damned thing worked. I still remember exactly how I built it, too...after all these years. -- Man, talk about flashbacks ... Back in the late 50's or very early 60's when "HiFi" was the rage my father and a group of his friends got into building speaker cabinets for their "systems". They all met 1 or 2 times a week after work at one of the friend's garage because he had a well equipped wood working shop. I still remember the cabinet design - V shaped with a tunable slot along the rear for bass reinforcement. They took me along to the Radio Shack in Boston to get the speakers and crossover components and I can still remember the building and the original Radio Shack sign. A few years later when we moved to CT, there was a Lafayette Electronics store at a strip mall on the Merritt Parkway. I saved all my lawn mowing money one summer because I just *had* to have a Lafayette audio amplifier kit. I built it and it was the center of my music system for years. I think the kit was $18.95 and my mother, who drove me to the store when I finally had the money, just couldn't understand why a box of tubes, resistors and capacitors meant so much to me. Little did she know, it was the beginning of what ultimately led to a career and still remains as an enjoyable hobby. WARNING! Flashback alert! Hide the beanbags and the lava lamps..... My engineering career was sparked by those "100-in-1" electronic project kits that Radio Shack used to sell. This led to an interest in radio, which I cultivated with CB and then Ham radio. I used to practically live in Radio Shack and Lafayette. It distresses me to see what Radio Shack has "evolved" into. The have few parts anymore and are little more than a small time consumer electronics/toy store. It saddens me to see it that way, but I understand the market pressures which brought it on. There aren't many "experimenters" out there anymore who actually use discrete parts. Most new techies, are into software driven circuits. Another reason to long for the good old days..... Dave |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Forum | |||
searching archives | Boat Building | |||
BushCo STILL trying to hide from 911 commision | General |