Old all band graymark radio license#
It was for a Class B license and predated the Novice license by about two years. On the day after Thanksgiving in 1949, when I was 16, I made the trip to NYC and took and passed my first FCC ham radio license exam. Fortunately, I came to my senses and picked up where I had left off. Ham radio went onto the back burner for almost two years. I was making good progress until the hormones set in. Back then you had to do 13 WPM straight away.
Old all band graymark radio code#
I renewed it so many times she finally said, “Keep it we’re getting a newer version.” I would read about a half hour a day and practice Morse code as well. The librarian pulled out a copy of the ARRL Handbook and I started reading it religiously. When I wouldn’t give up my goal I told my Uncle that I wanted to become one of “them.” He told me to go to the library and ask for a book about ham radio. His advice, ignore them, they’re ham radio operators and they’re harmless. I went to an Uncle who had a lot of worldly knowledge. I was fascinated, these stations had call letters but they were different, they had a number in the middle! I wanted to become one of those people. One day I heard two guys talking to each other it was an event that would change the whole direction of my life. Up until this point almost all of the stations produced by my experimentation were one-way broadcast. Eureka, I was hearing a wholly different group of stations. I got out my trusty soldering iron and disconnected one end of the coil and took off about five turns and soldered the newly exposed wire back onto to the mounting lug. However, I did notice there was a large coil of wire connected to the ends of the capacitor (again I had no idea of parallel components.) This time I was smart enough to think through a modification that could be reversed. Dare I take off another capacitor plate? I thought no, I had pushed my luck to the limit as far as capacitor modifications. I was listening to stations above the high end of the broadcast band!Īfter a few weeks of mapping my new territory boredom again started to set in once again. I spun the knob around and low and behold I was hearing non-broadcast station that I had never heard before. I was crestfallen I had destroyed my favorite toy. I grabbed my long-nosed pliers and give it a tug and it broke right off. What the heck, I could always bend it back. I wondered what would happen if I spread the end plate out a little. I had become fascinated with the variable capacitor (back then I had no idea what it was called) which controlled the frequency as the capacitor was rotated. It was great fun but my grades were not helped with my midnight DXing.Īfter a few month of broadcast band DXing and spending a good part of my allowance on replacement “A” batteries I started to get bored. Since it was late December you could follow the clock with stations to the Rocky mountain area before the east- coast stations started signing on again. They would sign off at either 11 or 12 o’clock and like magic another station farther out West would take its place. By lunchtime music was emanating from my earphone.īack in those days very few radio stations stayed on the air 24 hours a day. My folks gave me the present about nine in the morning and they assumed it would keep me busy for at least a week. There was another box of parts including a one piece earphone. The kit had a “A” battery that was the size of a small shoe box. The components were mounted using Fahnestock connectors screwed into the plywood. It was built on a one foot square piece of plywood. My parents realized my isolation was starting to make me both crazy and anti-social so my 1944 Christmas present, shortly after my 12 birthday was a one-tube radio kit. My Favorite Christmas Present of all Time: The end result was almost a disaster but that’s a story for another time. “Ah ha,” I proclaimed to myself, I can do that. One month the featured article described the manufacturing of industrial diamonds. When the magazine would arrive every month I would disappear for a few days while reading the magazine cover to cover, including advertisements. It wasn’t easy but I convinced my parents that I should have a subscription to Popular Science when I was 11 years old.
I lived on a small farm and there were no kids my age close at hand so I became an expert at entertaining myself. Seuss created the nonsense word “nerd” for an imaginary animal in “If I ran The Zoo.” By then I was already W2DEC.ĭuring my pre-teen years some of the most common titles used to describe me were precocious, crazy, studious, and a loner to name a few of the nicer names. Maybe it was because it wasn’t until 1950 that Dr. No one called me a nerd when I was growing up in Hillside, NJ although I could have been the poster boy for what we know today as a nerd.
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