Telegraph Key collection, Radio Astronomy & EME
with unlimited daily hits allowed.
If you have ever received an error message here in the past, due to bandwidth restrictions, that is over. For now, everything still remains here, but a lot of the material has already been moved.
Please check it out and boomark the new URL;
www.bobsamerica.com/swl
HOT RODDING
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Receiver Reviews
"WPE" Certification?
or start V-Soft here
Multi-Input/Output Antenna Switch Box
I began listening to the radio as soon as I could understand the spoken word ... I suppose I was about 2 years old ... maybe earlier. I think Mom used the radio as a babysitter -- just to shut me up! I presume I must have been fascinated with the voices and music that came out of that big mahogony box. I didn't start SWLing and broadcast band DXing until I was much older ... probably about 5 years old, then. I can still recall, quite vividly, those strange languages and dialects coming out of the loudspeaker as I tuned around those mysterious numbers on the dial of that old Zenith console. Those buzzes, whirrings, squeals, churps, whizzes, beeps, and woodpecker sounds were all a big part of the ceremony's ambience. Mom made me keep the volume control to some barely discernable dB level, lest Dad be disturbed from his evening newspaper ... complete with requesite pipe and slippers. I was in the first grade at our elementary school when my, yet to come, water-cooler-gossip training occurred. So many times my five and 6-year-old friends and I would assemble at the (symbolic) water-cooler (read playground) and discuss the Lone Ranger's victories from the night before, or how The Shadow triumphed over evil, or what was the motive force that allowed Superman to fly ... faster than a speeding bullet! Ah, and no one would admit to checking under the bed after listening to Inner Sanctum or Lights Out or The Whistler...woo hoo. These were my formative years and many, many hours of RF-wavelength energy were already arranging my brain's synapse thought patterns.
Fast forward to age seven: I was in the Cub Scouts and had assembled a "Quaker Oats" crystal radio. It used a chunk of mineral galena and a safety pin for a contact point. The cereal box inductor was wound with the enamaled wire remnants from an old fan motor. But would it ever work? Who knows; I had no antenna...errr, sorry, aerial. Enter the two big willow trees outside my second story bedroom window in the back yard: I wasted little time in securing many bits and pieces of copper wire from indeterminant sources, splicing together even the shortest lengths and dutifully climbing to the greatest heights that the limber tree limbs would allow. I remember the awkwardness of swinging the hammer and trying to drive in the nails while positioning the ceramic cleats, holding the nail and clinging to the bark for dear life all at the same time. But it wasn't long before I had a reasonable antenna, of indeterminate characteristics, erected and a copper pipe driven into the soil and connected to the little radio's terminals -- and a set of crystal headphones over my ears.
Marconi redux: VIOLA! Music! Talking! I now knew how ole Tom Edison must have felt at the first sight of artifical light...how Alexander Graham Bell thrilled at the sound of a distant voice. I now knew the jubilation of Mr. Marconi when the beeping dits and dahs finally made the proverbial, etherial, trip. I could only imagine the parallel thrill that Bill Clinton must have had when he said, "...wadda ya mean, I won?"
But, there is a lot more to read. I just don't have the time to write any more right now...actually, I'm having a little trouble remembering back all those years. There seems to be a little memory gap between my eighth birthday and my 35th wedding anniversary. Ah hell, hang in there...I'll remember all that stuff..
(More to come...be nice to me...I didn't spell-check this thing yet.)
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26 Sept 06
