This is way back at the beginning. The year is 1969. I am but a mere 22 years of age.\u00a0A year back from my Navy tour of duty and a naval reservist, and no more than a year into my marriage. It was\u00a0Chief John Petrick at the reserve center that gave me my novice exam. He was also there when I made my first QSO (contact) with K2UCE. Her card is first on the bulletin board place of honor.<\/p>\n
Hmm… I had a lot more hair back then too. Must be the 40 years of RF energy that burned it off. A hazard of operating a short wave radio transmitter (just kidding).<\/p>\n
The receiver is a Hammarlund SX170C ham band only 17 tube triple conversion superheit. The transmitter is a Johnson Viking 50 watt CW only crystal controlled. The “N” in the call sign signifies a novice call and back then I was limited to 75 watts and the frequency had to be crystal controlled. Of course I had a handful of crystals.<\/p>\nngg_shortcode_1_placeholder\n
The antenns is a 40 meter dipole over the driveway\u00a0that worked just fine on 15 meters too. The station required throwing a switch to change from\u00a0transmit to receive. That switched the antenna and took the receiver out of standby.<\/p>\n
No computers in those days, but we were headed in that direction. Soon everything would become digital. Here we are pure analog except for the transmission of the “dits” and “dahs”. I guess that is about a pure digital as you can get!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is way back at the beginning. The year is 1969. I am but a mere 22 years of age.\u00a0A year back from my Navy tour of duty and a naval reservist, and no more than a year into my marriage. It was\u00a0Chief John Petrick at the reserve center that gave me my novice exam. He was also there when I made my first QSO (contact) with K2UCE. Her card is first on the bulletin...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[43,16,42],"class_list":["post-1035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amateur-radio","tag-amateur","tag-hobby","tag-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}