Tag Archives: citizensband

ham radio redux post during these times of horror

Posted on July 11, 2022 by | 3 comments

I’ve posted all this before, but it’s still important to me. It influenced my life to this day.

I think this is 1976 or so. My basement ham radio station (Amateur Radio), plus a CB (citizens band) radio. I had more antennas than those in the pic. They ran all over the yard.

Neighbors sometimes accused me of all kinds of interference on their TV’s and radios. It’s possible I did some damage to reception of local TV station channel 2, but it was best to deny it all with something like “I haven’t been on the air in a week” even if I was on the entire time.

1970’s were heavy Cold War, but I kept up with radio friends all over the old USSR areas plus the entire world. I loved them all.

What teenager would get up at 5 AM on school days? Me! I wanted a couple of hours on the air every morning before school.

I still have a valid license that I really need to put back to work.

My 6th grade teacher said one time, “it’s a lot harder to drop bombs when you have friends on the ground.” I believe in this.

73’s and 88’s

antenna array
the station, or shack

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my old ham radio “shack”

Posted on May 14, 2021 by | 1 comment

Some of my ham radio (amateur radio) equipment from when I was a teenager in the 1970’s.

I didn’t date in high school, so I had to have an absorbing hobby. I still have a valid license. I’ve been careful to keep it renewed for decades, because it would be big trouble to go back and retake all the exams.

The outdoor shot:

The horizontal antenna is a tri-bander for the 10, 15, and 20-meter amateur bands. I used a cheap Radio Shack “Archer Rotor” to turn it that was meant for small TV antennas, so that array turned around very slowly. It would take several minutes to do a 180, yet that motor never burned out.

The vertical antenna is a fiberglass CB (Citizens Band) antenna for the 11-meter band.

The indoor shot:

The radio in the middle with the low profile is a 23-channel CB. Brand is Craig. It would do more than the legal 23 channels after I modded it. Standing up just to the left of it is an Astatic D-104 “power mike” (lollipop shape) microphone that was the envy of CB’ers. It made you sound BIG on the air.

On the right is a Heathkit HW-101 amateur radio that I built from a kit. It contained 20 vacuum tubes. It was for the 80, 40, 20, 15, and 10-meter ham bands. Like the CB, after I modded it, it would do more than that. To the right of it is a Sure 444-D microphone. Nothing really special about it, but you can see one in the TV show “Superstore” in customer service.

Now you can see what happens to frustrated gay closeted teenagers who don’t know what to do about things and can’t tell anybody. They take up complex weird hobbies.

All this was pre-Internet when conventional instant international communication was reserved for well-heeled companies and the wealthy. I talked all over the world on the ham rig. I’d get up at 5 AM on school days so I could “work the USSR” for two hours before school. The cold war communication problems didn’t apply to amateur radio. Everybody talked where they wanted to when the Earth’s atmosphere would support it.

My parents liked that this hobby kept me off the streets and out of trouble. As far as they knew, it did.

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