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In the beginning

 

Things mechanical and electrical have always been a fascination, probably due to countless evenings spent in the basement watching my father fabricate and repair things. As a top class welder, metal worker, lathe operator and carpenter, Dad was highly skilled; his observant young son was a thirsty sponge.   

One day it was time to practice what had been learned. That auspicious beginning, driven mostly by curiosity, unfortunately ended in “demolition”- the disassembly of Dad’s night table radio, the “All American 5”, an AC/DC 5 tube AM broadcast radio built in the late 1940’s. The “Baby Champ” as it was known, boasted a complement of octal tubes - 12SA7 converter, 12SK7 IF amplifier, 12SQ7 audio detector and signal amplifier, 50L6 audio power amplifier, and 35Z5 rectifier. Are you old enough to remember those?

Not surprisingly, without a soldering iron, solder, proper tools, a schematic or any knowledge of same, re-assembly of the Baby Champ was quite out of the question. It truly was a "Humpty Dumpty" moment!

And so started the junk box. While Mom was not amused, Dad said nothing. Instead, a story spread at the local paper mill that Fred’s young son was into the disassembly of old tube radios for parts. As destiny would have it, this was at a time transistors were bursting onto the scene; tube radios were out - transistor radios were in.  

Dad’s friends soon began dropping their old tube radios at our front door. It was a veritable bonanza! 

As disassembly and de-soldering skills grew, so did the junk box. In short order a large, neatly sorted and catalogued inventory of components had been accumulated – resistors, capacitors, pieces of wire of various lengths and colours, RF coils (inside little tin cans), chokes, transformers, tubes, miscellaneous hardware, along with once proud radio skeletons, populated only by empty tube sockets, painstakingly stripped of components and all remaining traces of solder.

By age 12, custom built shelving and small wooden boxes housed an ever growing treasure. 

Thanks to magazines such as Radio World and Popular Electronics, and a seemingly unlimited supply of components, experimentation eventually lead to the construction of a small broadcast band transmitter - whose harmonics might just allow operation on 80 and 40 meters. A citation from the Canadian Department of Communications monitoring station at Montague, Prince Edward Island, later confirmed that theory. 

The watershed event though, was a Boy Scout “Jamboree-on-the-Air” event about year later, during which the Ham Radio "bug" bit hard and deep; the infection continues even today, a half century later. 

For almost every baby-boomer Ham operator, military surplus figured prominently in the growth and development process - a No. 19 Set, an AN/ART-13 transmitter, a BC-348 receiver - giving way to Hallicrafters, National, Heathkit, Drake and Collins gear, and eventually to the Far East "invasion" of JRC, Icom, Kenwood and Yaesu equipment.

Across the hobby, PC-station integration, limited only by one's imagination, was followed by a DSP revolution of sorts, driving the development of equipment whose performance was heretofore unimagined.

With each succeeding generation of gear the bar of performance had been and continues to be raised. 

In addition to rapidly evolving equipment technology, a large part of the enjoyment  and effort has included antennas - mostly yagis. Everyone in the antenna game knows bigger and higher is better! 

And finally, for those of us who believe life is too short for QRP - may the power always be with you!

Previous callsigns include:  VE2BSE, VE3DHB, VE2NB, VE2ZH, VE3OZ, HK3JBA, HK3AK & VE1OZ
Breaking down the wall of indifference