This has nothing to do with amateur radio. It's my wife, Ruthie, and me taken on the beach near Biloxi, Mississippi a couple years ago. We enjoyed visiting there, but decided it was too hot and muggy to want to live there. I stepped outside one night about 1 a.m. thinking I would get a breath of cool outside air. WRONG. It was as hot and muggy then as it had been all day.This is just one of many of my ham shacks. I don't know what year this was, but we still had some of the kids home, so my equipment had to be stuffed into a tiny space. Don't remember what the rig was, either.
I do know what year this was since the date was written on the top edge of the picture. 1983. I can see that I had my one and only linear amplifier. I think it ran 500 watts. And it was helpful. This was the same year I was successful in getting my Geratol number. That was for working all states in the extra portion of 75 meters on SSB. Kinda hard to do since you have to work Hawaii and Alaska in addition to the adjacent 48.Things have certainly become miniaturized. This is my Yaesu VX-1R. As you can see the rig itself isn't as big as the pack of cigarettes. And compared to the pen it isn't very big, either. Yet it transceives on 2 meters and 440. And you can listen to everything from about 76 mHz to 999 mHz. It includes AM on the aircraft frequencies and FM on all the rest. It's amazing how well it gets into the local repeaters with half a watt.
Your comments and suggestions would be appreciated.
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BACK TO MAIN PAGEThis page published August 7, 1999