CLASSIC VINTAGE AM STATION

My "Classic Vintage AM Station". Both are 1954 Vintage, and I've restored the receiver, and just repaired the transmitter. 275 watts on CW, and 200 watts on plate-modulated AM phone. From the daze of when you could SMELL a ham-shack by the luxurious scent of "burned dirt" on top of the tubes, warm capacitor wax, the faint scent of warm resistors & wiring. Yes - on occasion the "scent" of things rose to a cresendo of SMELL when something burned up, but typically, it was just that lovely perfume that ONLY hams and old radio folks know.

At Shawnee-Mission North HS, we had the Valiant's little brother... the "Ranger"... http://www.rigpix.com/efjohnson/ranger.htm , downstairs... right next to a Hallicrafters SX-99 receiver... http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~postr/bapix/SX99.htm - look in the '61 yearbook, and see me and Bill Cook (KNĜIFG at the time) sitting in front of them.

How many new hams will know the incomparable thrill of seeing the meter on their home-brewed transmitter wiggle when they adjust the grid-drive for a PEAK, and the plate-current for a DIP? Will they ever be driven to salvage an old transformer, found at a hamfest, or torn from an old TV set... forgotten in the back of a garage and just now being thrown away, with the advent of Digital-mode television... then wind a coil of wire onto a piece of plastic, and desolder the pins on some old tubesockets (they're hard to find now, too) so to be reused? Building a Lew McCoy 40/80 special, with a single 6AG7, that maybe put out 4 watts on a good day - then using a light bulb for a dummy load (those bulbs are disappearing now, TOO), and tuning for "maximum brilliance". Ahhh, my Mother's voice "Those radio wires are EVERYWHERE - Aughhhh!"

Yep, those cathode-keyed rigs could BITE YOU. The agony of a burned finger was only mute testimony to knowing that voltage WAS THERE, so it must be "capable" of working! To know that you were capable of TRANSMITTING a signal into the ether was... and is... an astounding bit of knowledge; I recall a 7th. grade science teacher at Old Mission JHS, engaging us in a discussion about such things as RF energy, and caused our youthful little heads, still filled with "mush" to consider the possibility that all RF energy, EVER transmitted, is still proceeding through space and time, so that perhaps if we could stick around long enough, we might hear our OWN signals, millenea from now. We hams can do more than wait - we can keep the old glow-in-the-dark "boatanchors" going. When we flip a switch (a real switch, not some silly button), and see the wall light up with orange dots of light, from the pilot lamps and filament glow coming out of the ventilation holes of an old radio - then hear the mystic song of billion-year-old static and key up our OWN transmitters, it just could be that Mr. Molotsky was right - it does go on forever.

August 6, 2008