The way I became interested in two way radios is from the husband of a friend of my mother's. They lived in a small town in northern Indiana. I had been told that the gentleman was into ham radios and due to his being a German emigrant, the U.S. Government paid him regular visits during World War II to check on his "radio activities". The gentleman always showed them his radio which was dismantled and placed in several different boxes in different rooms!

So when we would visit them I would wind up in his "Shack" and see the most beautiful radio you could ever want. It was large and had a wood box for the case and had knobs and gauge dials all over the front of it. It also had the antenna on the top of the radio formed into a square with many rounds of wire sitting on a base shaped like the base of a table fan ( if you have ever seen an old WWII movie with the "underground" using a short wave radio you know just what I'm talking about ) . The radio had the standard code key and a D-104 microphone in front of it.

Needless to say at my young age I fell in love with it, or at least the idea that one man could talk into a piece of furniture, speak to Germany and scare the government officals with his words. My first thought was "this is something I gotta do" !