There's been a recent thread on one of the Hallicrafters 'reflectors', with opinions on which old radio receiver is the best looking - several opted for the SX-99, I and many opted for the SX-62, and a bunch for the SX-28, which is very hard to find, unless you are willing to pay big bux for one... which
I'm not.

Still, looking through my 1945 ARRL Handbook (my very first book on ham radio - given to me by a Navy Uncle), those wonderful green pages of Hallicrafters, still capture my eye. S-20R's, SX-28's (tremble, pant, pant), and all the rest of their line, still grab the kid that lives inside the 65 year-old body I call ME. In "those days", The Handbook always had ads in the back, containing all the wonders of the world that mere mortals usually couldn't afford, or at least not a 13 year old, who sold flower & vegetable seeds, and cashed in pop & beer bottles to make a few pennies here and there. We could only DREAM of owning a real "Ham Shack", just like the cartooned ones on QST covers, perhaps containing a Johnson 500 (whew!), and a National HRO-60 - or maybe even a Knight T-150 and a Hammarlund Super-Pro... or hopefully something home-brewed that was in a 6 foot tall, 19 inch RACK - yeahhhh, heck every kid knew that if it was in a RACK, it must be powerful and very cool, indeed. Oh yeah... lots of meters too - the more meters, the better it must work, with all those wiggling pointers that only the smartest of hams understood.

Home brew was very popular back then - yep... beer AND ham radio. Our neighbor used to regularly blow several bottle up in his garage and for a few weeks the area around his house, smelled like a brewery... but I digress. Analog tube-type TV sets were everywhere, and powertransformers to be had for the "cutting out". Every ham (and kid) had boxes of diked out resistors, capacitors, chokes, tube-sockets, switches, and wiring, that his Mother REALLY WANTED TO THROW AWAY, but didn't dare. I recall building a filament-continuity tester, a signal tracer, and a resistor/capacitor substitution box from plans in Popular Mechanics, all in Mom's recipe boxes (boy, was she mad). Hey, they were the right size and were metal, and best... the lid was hinged! Other REAL hams produced full-gallon amplifiers, and out-of-their-head exciters, built with nothing more than experience and knowledge of circuitry - schematics were for the weaker of us. A journey into a REAL ham's basement resulted in something akin to being a guest on the space-shuttle; vast displays of meters, dials, knobs, switches, and big "glowey" things in the back of viewing windows, that produced massive quanities of heat, sufficient to run the turbines of the USS MISSOURI (BB-63), or heat my entire school at least. All manner of gloriously constructed devices in RACKS (remember racks?), lending to the aura of magnificance. Tom Corbett and the Space Cadets didn't have rigs that looked like THIS! (actually, in the movie "Mission To Mars", there's a Hallicrafters SX-42 with a microphone plugged into the earphone jack!) Ohhhh, the depth of inspiration to a kid was beyond anything that resulted in science class - what's a Wilson cloud-chamber compared to a rack-mounted exciter, running 4 1625 finals... into four 813's in grounded-grid?

I recall a fellow in Mission, KS, on the NW corner of 52nd. and Maple, who MADE HIS OWN 600 ohm ladder line! I don't know who he was, but I recall seeing him with two big coils of copper wire, and several glass rods. He broke measured pieces of the rod; laid 'em in routed grooves on some kind of wood or stone, then pulled the twin strands of wire, tightly ACROSS them and clamped the wires.... all this time, he had a gas torch going, and would then play the flame across the glass rod, and melt it so that the wire was melted INTO the rod - he did this in about 3 foot sections and managed to make beautiful VERY LOW LOSS feeder line, for ultra-cheap money. It took me years to figure out what he had been doing, as I was just into crystal sets at the time. Imagine going to Associated Radio these days, and asking for 2 rolls of wire and a handfull of glass rod to make your own ladder-line... actually, I'll bet the guys over there might actually HAVE some.

When I bought a rather beat-up Hallicrafters S-38D a few years ago - which I'd lusted after when I was a boy of 13, back in 1956, I wondered if I could "make it play" again - finally, I got it all fixed, working, and realigned - plus shined it all up and scrubbed the knobs with a toothbrush... I hooked up a piece of wire to the antenna screw, and let it warm up - after listening to the local 40's station here (KEZW), I put it up on the 30m band (9 mcs)... and while tuning about, I stumbled across the BBC, just like the old days, listening to other kid's short wave radios - I happened to glance on the dial-background (with all the names of cities, around the World... Paris, Moscow, Washington, Tokyo, etc... they used to do that) and the dial pointer was sitting DIRECTLY OVER "London" - I laughed out loud and said to myself - yep... back in 1956, nobody lied to kids.. if they said LONDON would be there - sure 'nuff, it would be!
...and it was.

February 18, 2009