Brian Kelly wrote:

Dave Heil wrote in message ...
William wrote:

Dave Heil wrote in message ...
William wrote:

Yep, 35 years later they've got Collins. Keepin' up with the times.

That's right, "William", I've got a modified 75A-3 which is about 51
years old, a 51S-1 which was produced in the late seventies and a
KWM-2A

NICE collection!

....and I saw a fairly priced 75A-4 at the Washington, PA hamfest this
morning. I resisted.

which was built about the same time as Len's Icom R-70 receiver.
I have an Orion which was produced last year.

How do you like using the Orion?

No rig is perfect. The Orion is very, very close.

I stopped by Ten-Tec last year and looked at it, didn't buy it.

They still make 'em.

But David they don't come with antennas and somebody who knows how to
install antennas so that's the end of Silly Willy Beeper's Ten-tec
dream machine.

Ahhh! They have a "William" variant. The Orion is available with a
built-in antenna tuner. I didn't get that model.

I also have other functional ham gear from the twenties, thirties,
forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. I'm
keeping up with the times--ALL of 'em.

Nothing earlier?

To have anything earlier, I'd have to find something earlier. All I
have is a piece of something earlier. My late friend W4JBP first became
a ham in 1912 on the family farm near Indianapolis. John gave me the
spark coil from an old Reo truck. It was the basis for his very first
rig. It is coated in pitch and mounted in a small dovetailed wooden
box.

Yeeee-haw! One of those was my very first "transmitter"!

In seventh or eighth grade I found a big thick dusty 1920s compilation
of DIY projects which had appeared earlier in Popular Mechanics in the
jr. high library. What there was of it. 1950 timeframe. Lotta radio
projects and I built a couple crystal sets from the articles. None of
this 1N34 nonsense, go find a chunk of Galena then go find a hot spot
on it with a home-brewed cat whisker . . worked.

There was an article on building a spark TX based on a Model T Ford
spark coil which is obviously the same critter Reo used. I went spark
coil hunting and bought mine from J.C. Whitney which stocked heaps of
Model T parts and diddled with it. My Lionel train transformer did a
good job as it's "power supply".

I wrapped a dozen or so turns of wire around the wooden box to serve
as the "secondary" of the spark coil and grounded one end of it to a
copper water pipe in the rafters. Then I strung up some wire from the
"output" end of the secondary fom my cellar "laboratory" to an apple
tree out back. Connected a J-38 between the Lionel xfmr output and the
spark coil primary and was set to hit the airwaves.

I needed somebody to listen for me and after several days of getting
patted on my noggin and being written off as a nutcase I managed to
finally recruit George Barnum who lived a block and a half away to
listen for me. His older brother had a radio and TV repair shop so
George sorta understood what I was up to. He heard me *good* when I
fired the thing up on sked.

The problem was that I really screwed up by arranging the sked when
every houswife in town was listening to the Don McNeil Breakfast Club
Hour while they were doing their ironing. I completely obliterated the
AM b'cast band for blocks around, the phone rang off the hook and Mom
not only terminated my Grand Experiment but almost terminated me too.
Again.

You actually disrupted the march around the breakfast table? My pre-ham
radio days were from Hinton, West Virginia with an old doorbell buzzer
and ten-volt transformer. I "worked" Bobby Hayth next door. We were
each using old BC/SW receivers in wooden cabinets but we could have used
any AM receiver on about any frequency at that distance. Let's just say
that the tuning wasn't at all critical. Something about decrement, heh
heh.

Dave K8MN