Larry approached me at the meeting, and invited me to write a monthly article for the club. “Anything you want to write about,” he said. He may regret granting a charter that broad.
By way of introduction, the year that I was first licensed, 1960, was closer in time to the sinking of the Titanic than it is to today. I can almost promise that I’m the only ham you know that started his professional career in a vacuum tube factory. Yeah, I qualify as an Old Timer. I will endeavor to be your sweet, lovable, grumpy, opinionated writer.
Maybe this first column is a good time and place to wander through some nostalgia to give the newcomers some sense of where the hobby has come from.
When I first got my license, the only electronic devices in the house were a couple of AM radios. Well, if you want to count a rural party line telephone as electronics, we had that, too, plus a crystal radio that I built. Adding a communications receiver and a Heath AT-1 crystal controlled two tube transmitter to the household was quite an event. The whole notion of communicating for hundreds of miles with your own equipment was looked on as nearly magical. Doing that from your car was high wizardry.
WWII military surplus equipment was still cheap and plentiful, and it seemed that about half the hobby in those days was converting military equipment for use on the ham bands. The ARC-5 was a popular starting point for conversion or for a source of high quality components. The transmitters were basically a single VFO tube, driving a pair of 1625 (807) final amplifier tubes. Chet Ashby from Clearfield used to sell the transmitters out of his barn for $5 each. The receivers were a bit more expensive, and were pretty decent for the day.
Most of the communication was either AM or CW, with some radio teletype being used. There were no repeaters on 2 meters. The HF bands were so busy, you almost couldn’t find a clear spot to transmit if propagation was decent. At night, 75 meters was nearly as calm as a five alarm fire in a fireworks factory. Nearly.
I started out with a Novice license: 75 watts maximum, CW only, crystal controlled. The Novice bands back then were good natured chaos, since as a practical matter, you could not transmit and receive on the same frequency. You could listen for someone calling CQ, and call them on whatever frequency you had a crystal for, hoping that they would find you and respond. In general, receiver selectivity left a lot to be desired. You had to learn to copy CW with other contacts going on nearby.
The FCC took a few weeks to issue licenses, but Heathkit had access to the public license records. You would typically get a Heathkit catalog with your callsign on it in the mail before your license arrived, so the joke was that we all got our licenses from Heathkit.
We were all true novices, unburdened by technical knowledge beyond Ohm’s Law, still a little unclear about the difference between AC and DC, and the equipment was sometimes primitive, but we did have a lot of fun. And the best part was that the old timers of that day patiently taught us, helped us, and often contributed needed components from their junk boxes. We all started at zero, and grew into the hobby.
Denton Bramwell
W7DB
denton@dmbramwell.com