K=D8HB wrote:
wrote

I don't believe one bit of it.

Gospel truth!

Learned Morse off the old 6V farm radio (a "cathedral" style Zenith with =
5 or 6
bands ---

Geeez, OK, understood, that's roughly the same way I ran into
on-the-air Morse for the first time. A couple old-maid aunts had a big
wooden console radio which tuned bands above the AM BC band which I
messed with and heard the "beeps and boops". Which did not particularly
light my fires. Listening to the BBC and hams yakking on AM phone did
light my fires.

we didn't get REA until I was in high school) at about age 8 or 9.

Ye gawds Hans, no 115vac until you were 8-9 years old??! That would
have been in the 1958-59 timeframe and REA had just gotten to your
neighborhood then?? WTF . . ?!! Or were you in Guatemala??

I was in my early twenties at that point in history and already had a
gazillion confirmed and my *grandparents* had been getting around on
'lectric trains and trolly cars most of their lives.

Sheesh: This 'ole city boy can't even start to imagine . . . . ! Talk
about "coming up" in different worlds.

Where did the six volts come from out in your boonies?

Wanted to know what all those beeps and boops were about on what turned o=
ut to
be the 8 and 12 MC marine bands. Fascinating stuff for a kid thousands o=
f miles
from any ocean.

Of course, but something is missing here. How did you learn to copy CW
by just *listening* to the stuff?

I've been wracking (what little is left of) my brain about when and how
I started to learn the code. I dimly remember a Christmas around the
end of WW2 when I got a pair of widgets made by, I think, Lionel. They
were battery powered "code buzzers" which were connected by a pair of
the usual cotten-wrapped copper wires normally used between the the
Lionel or American Flyer xfmrs and the clips on the track.

The idea was to connect the two code buzzers located a room or two away
from each other and yak via the code with somebody. The code was
printed on the box next to the key. Problem was that I didn't have a
sombody to join the fun so I buzzed to myself and finally started to
get it.

Ham radio interest came much later, introduced by my roomate as a college
freshman.

10-4 that Hans, every beeper out here has a different war story about
how we got here. Helluva a lotta fun eh?

=20
73, de Hans, K0HB

w3rv . . . dit . .