In article , "hossdaddy"
wrote:

Hi Bill,

You might actually be right. I think that's what they are trying to do to
hams with the possibility of BPL.

I think that AM (as it is) should stay that way FOREVER. I am not opposed
to these stations using a parallel form of digital broadcasting (IBOC?) but
to turn the AM-DSB transmitters off I think would be a tragedy. It is the
only form or radio that can be easily demodulated. A grandfather can sit
down with his grandson, a bunch of wire, an oatmeal box, and a few other
cheap components and in a few hours have a working (and demonstratable)
radio - FREE RADIO - and discounting lightning it is 100% safe too! It's
that kind of thing that got me into the hobby - and with the numbers of
licensees dwindling and our RF bandwidth at stake it is high time that we
get the next generation interested.

73!
Paul
KD4GNU

Hello, and I share your sentiments but technology moves on. You either
keep up with it or be left behind. I get nostalgic over old vacuum tube
radios like the Collins KWM types or some Drake models but I wouldn't want
to be stuck in that period. Lots of wonderful things to discover in the
here-and-now, even pour moi (who passed forty about 16 years ago).

There's plenty of electronics out there to interest young minds if you
look for it. Ramsey offers some electronic lab kits I wished I'd had as a
kid. And speaking of AM-DSB wasn't a spark-gap transmitter using morse
code even simpler (well maybe not if you were using a Branly coherer on
the receive end and those transmitting antennas sure seemed to require a
lot of wire and towers)? I built crystal and one-tube radios as cub/boy
scout projects but what I really wanted to construct was a superhet (or
maybe a TRF type) since I knew they could pull in lots of stations without
requiring an outdoors antenna. For simplicity and ease of construction
the majority of those DIY home radio projects excluded the RF and/or IF
amplification required to provide a requisite level of receiver
sensitivity with an internal antenna. Never built a superhet but I
constructed an FM broadcast receiver using a tunnel diode (a componont one
of my later Va Tech EE profs would refer to as an "electronic Edsel") as a
junior high science fair project. Just a few thoughts. Sincerely, and
73s from N4GGO,

John Wood (Code 5550) e-mail:
Naval Research Laboratory
4555 Overlook Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20375-5337