memory lane

[Mike Silva KK6GM]

I sure have enjoyed reading all your stories of "the good old days", and in
that spirit I offer my own.  I somehow became the repository of all the
family's old TVs when I was too young to know much more than how to take
them apart.  Then one day (1965?  I would have been 10) my dad brought home
what I remember as a small Hallicrafters SW kit with a half-round dial (but
my memory is *very* vague on this.  I do remember being fascinated by the
parts, especially the shiny dipped-mica caps.  I/we put that together but it
hardly worked at all, and I don't remember what happened to it.  After that
I started building amplifiers out of sweep tubes and AM broadcast
transmitters out of whatever.  A year or so later I had saved enough to buy
a Star Roamer kit from Allied.  That one *did* work (after $4 worth of
repairs at the local TV shop:  I'd melted the shielded audio cable thru to
the shield when soldering to a terminal it was touching, and I'd soldered
both OSC and RF circuits to the same gang of the tuning cap).  I remember
being able to consistently get Radio Johannesburg, and I built an outboard
BFO so I could receive SSB and code.  A year after that I managed to talk
the family into getting me both a 5MHz O'scope kit and a VTVM kit from
Allied for Christmas.  That O'scope sure was magical.

I found a friend in high school who was also interested in radio (we started
talking when I saw him drawing a transmitter schematic in his math book) and
we got our Novice licenses a few years later.  For some reason I never
seemed to be able to make a homebrew ham-band receiver or transmitter work
well enough to make a contact -- maybe because I never had an elmer.  I
ground a lot of crystals which could have ended up in the Chirp Hall of
Fame.  I finally got an HW-101 kit after high school, and that served me for
many years, but by then I discovered, ahem, computers (and you thought I was
going to say girls!  I learned about them earlier...)

There was a Lafayette store in downtown San Franscisco that w'd go to, as
well as a couple of surplus stores near the main library.  My friend and I
spent a good part of our high-school weekends at those three places.  I'm
sure glad I caught the tail end of the surplus store era.  I bought an 807
for $2, as well as a socket, and while I never built a rig around it I
hooked it up and watched it glow in the dark many a night.  Wonder of
wonders, though my mother tossed out most of my "junk" years ago, that 807
has survived, and I'm working on a 6AG7-807 rig this very weekend.  That
tube's patience will finally be rewarded!  Largely via the internet I've
been able to gain a new stash of parts, as well as most of the books I had
back then, including my first (1967) copies of the ARRL and Bill Orr's
Handbooks.  And this time the stuff I build seems to work!

BTW, anybody care to guess what that Hallicrafters SW kit may have been?

73,
Mike, KK6GM

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