On Wed, 19 Mar 2014, sctvguy1 wrote:


I also had a Star Roamer, got it from a radio guy who restores old radios
in Orlando. It was stone deaf!
I started SWL'ing in the 6th grade, around 1963. I got the usual "big"
station QSLs, i.e., BBC, DW, Radio Moscow, Prague, Bulgaria, Spain,
Vatican, Peking, Havana, etc. I still have them in a shoe box. I also
had the Electronics Illustrated "SWL Certificate" that was given by the
magazine, the editor was a bearded guy, can't remember his name.

Was it Tom Kneitel? He certainly wrote for Electronics Illustrated,
stories about Radio Swan and certainly when I started reading it at the
beginning of 1971, he had a sort of Q&A column, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" if I
remember properly, that was more a chance for him to give snarky replies
to letter writers.

The magazines would run plenty of fiction, short stories related to
electronics and radio. One was about some local radio club having a
contest, and someone getting their last QSL card by some freak accident,
someone else challenging them, until he proved that he could hear the
station despite not having a receiver to tune that frequency, by some
scheme that involved NAA at some really low frequency.

But i think Electronics Illustrated took the cake with the contest they
had in 1971. A big announcement, and pages of equipment that would be the
prizes, all that neat stuff when it was all so new to me. And then
followup announcements, you had to get QSL cards from a certain number of
countries or stations.

If they ever announced the winners, I don't remember. At the very best,
it was a low key thing, "here are the winners", not matching the
announcement of the contest.

Of course, the magazine folded into Mechanix Illustrated towards the end
of 1972, a special section for a few months and then it was gone.

Michael