Short Wave Sportfishing wrote in
news
My very first phone DX contact was with a Heathkit 10 meter "lunchbox"
off an 11 meter CB whip on the back of my then boss's VW Bus which was
the TV delivery van. A DL1 as I recall. On a radio I built with my
own two hands. :)

I was so excited about it that I forgot my call sign at the time.


My introduction to ham radio came at the hands of some really old hams in
Moravia, NY. Jerry Hess, K2HWC, owned a surplus electronics shop on main
street, a junk warehouse of WW2 he used to buy/sell in a bombed out
storefront whos best feature was a coal-fired pot belly stove that kept
the place toasty warm all winter and a great place for us little nerds to
hang out. Debbie Hart, a nice old man who live a few streets away from
us, was a retired radio/TV repairman. By the time I was 9 years old, I
could find a net on Debbie's National NC-303 receiver, zero the
Hallicrafters HT-32 transmitter to the net frequency, tune the
transmitter to a fine pitch and be checked in using Debbie's call, which
at the moment I cannot remember from 1955, though I sent it for nearly 2
years almost nightly. Debbie took me under his wing, mistakenly, then,
like Mr Wilson and Dennis, couldn't get rid of me....or my other friends
totally enthralled with ham radio.

The old guys hung around Jerry's stove one Saturday morning, as they did
EVERY Saturday morning since before WW2, and finally decided if they ever
wanted to get to use their own stations, again, they'd better get us our
own ham licenses and build some Novice stations for us to take home.

For weeks, on Jerry's tired old wooden workbench I can still visualize
piled up with the residue of years of building and repairing junk, they
pulled stuff out of Jerry's attic warehouse, tore apart priceless WW2
equipments and we each ended up with a homebrew novice transmitter (5Y3
rectifier and a 6V6 xtal oscillator/power amp with plugin coils lovingly
hand wound for 80, 40 and 15 meters. An assortment of huge old Navy and
Army crystals materialized that us boys used to swap amoungst ourselves
so we could move across the bands to new territories without encroaching
onto the old ham's off-limits DX. 15 watts, TV twinlead balanced feeders
to 3 folded dipoles, also made of TV twinlead Jerry must have had 10
miles of on various spools and we were on the air! Several old, not-so-
stable receivers, like my Hallicrafters Sky Buddy, came to us after some
feelers put out on the central NY 75 meter AM phone net. Many old hams
responded with receivers, parts, coils-to-drool-over for exotic antenna
tuners....mostly built on scraps of 2X4s our mothers were terrified of
because they had seen some of our more famous flashovers and arcs or
exploding 6V6s. (If the plate falls into the grounded beam forming plates
it takes out the 5Y3, too. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.)

I wore the dial cord out on the Sky Buddy more than once scanning for DX.
I also was moved from my bedroom to my fathers garage in a little heated
room he made for my hamshack so they could get some sleep at night away
from my whooping and ranting from working some Russian or Japan or other
exotic place. I remember causing quite a stir in 5th grade by bringing
in my first QSL card from a Russian, via the Moscow Radio Club at KGB
headquarters, of course. That was on 15M Novice CW about 1957. I was
already famous for bringing in cards and letters from WOM, WCC, NSS, etc.
confirming my copying (sometimes better than they could) some ship comms
to the shore stations on the old marine bands. That's where I learned
how to copy CW to get my license. (I didn't know until I heard the code
machine that Morse was supposed to be sent WITHOUT the chirping from the
ship's nasty CW transmitter jumping frequency.)

Of course, this sealed my fate in school as a smartass and none of the
girls would have anything to do with me....unless their record player
wasn't working, of course. (This hasn't changed since I was 12. They
still call me only to fix something.) Such is our fate....It's all ham
radio's fault, you know...(c;

--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.