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Max Summerville BROADCAST, SHORTWAVE & HAM RADIO EARLY RADIO LISTENING As a child I remember listening to my parent's Sylvania AM-FM-phono console as well as an RCA table radio named "Baby Max." Grandpa had a floor console AM/SW radio with five push buttons on it that worked once in a while. My Uncle Dan had a Zenith AM/FM portable. One night we stayed up late counting 'one one thousand... two one thousand...' in the time elapsing between the static crash on the radio and the thunder heard outside. Uncle Dick had a small Sony SW radio, and all I knew about it was that it could get music and foreign languages and I wasn't allowed to touch it. I listened to pop music as a ten year old around 1967 in East Brady, Pennsylvania on my own hand-me-down Hi-Fi Star-light All-American 5 tube AM radio. It was the transformerless kind that would shock the bejeezus out of you if you plugged it in backwards and the top got so hot it would burn you. Local daytime stations included WISR 680 and WBUT 1050 in Butler (250 watts each), WACB 1380 in Kittanning (1000 watts) and WWCH 1300 in Clarion (500 watts). Also WKBN 570 in Youngstown, Ohio (5000 watts). I had a facination with trying to receive WARO 540 in Canonsburg (250 watts) but never was able to hear it. KDKA was the big station on the dial. On KDKA, I listened to a program called Contact, various music programs with Art Pallan, Clark Race, Jack Bogut and other DJs plus Ed and Wendy King's Party Line every night at 9pm. CKLW Windsor/Detroit and WCFL Chicago came in strong at night and had good pop music programs. Next Christmas, I got a brand new all-transistor Sears AM clock radio like this one. Not only would it come on right away, it could turn itself on and off, too. AM BCB DX My favorite AM DX stations were WNBC 660, WLW 700, WABC 770, CKLW 800, WWL 870, WCBS 880, "Big Ten" WCFL, WBZ 1030, WHO 1040, KYW 1060, WRVA 1140 and WOWO 1190. Re-finding stations was done by noting that a particular station was, say, a pencil mark just above the 10 on the dial. Uncle Dan explained that stations were assigned frequencies notated in a thing called 'kilocycles.' Once I knew that stations were assigned fixed, evenly spaced frequencies I could keep track of them and spent a lot of time documenting who was where. As the spaces began to fill in with strong locals, I started searching for weaker and more distant stations using White's Radio Log. I spent considerable time in the driveway sitting in our Pontiac Tempest station wagon like this (only red), which had an incredibly good transistor AM radio in the dash. On family trips to Florida, Arizona and Washington state, I tried to receive stations that I could not hear from home such as KOA, WFAA, KABC and XELO. Back then in the 1970's, newspapers still generally listed local radio stations, both AM and FM, and even their program schedules. FM FM was still in its infancy in the 1970's. Some stations I remember were WWSW 94.5 playing easy listening, WEEP 107.9 playing country, "Wide Stereo" WYDD 100.7 playing contemporary, WAMO 105.9 playing funk and soul and WDVE 102.5, the rock flagship on the FM dial. THE CITIZEN'S BAND The walkie-talkie phase and the I want a big antenna like that phase came around 1968 when I was introduced to Citizen's Band by East Brady mayor and CB operator James Corbett KNP-4420 and CB operator Wilders Verner (call forgotten). I started out with a set of cheap handy talkies, then picked up the Sears AM/CB base station with a Morse code key. I ended up with many cast-off CB QSL cards from the 1960's, which of course were taped and tacked everywhere and ended up with the same fate as the shoe-box full of 1950s and 1960s baseball cards Uncle Dan gave me. (doh!) SHORTWAVE About that same time, my allowance eventually bought a Sears 4 band battery portable radio. Dad wanted me to get a Knight-kit Star Roamer like this one, which he correctly thought would be a sturdier (kid-proof) radio and also teach me about building radios, but I wanted the portable as I was out about town on my bike most of every day. I still remember walking out of the Sears in Kittanning looking for a store that sold flashlight batteries. After checking out good old AM, quickly perusing FM (AFC, how's that work?!), I headed straight for SW. Oh, the noises! All kinds of noises, from what source? For what purpose? Roars, howls, grinding gears, cackling, diddlies... The teen-aged mind could only imagine what each was. THE MARINE BAND A man walks into a shop. "Does this radio pick up the marine band?" he asks the clerk. "Mister," the clerk - obviously not a DXer - replies, "if the Marine Band is playing, that radio will pick it up." I remember tuning across the phasing buzz of LORAN around 1900kc. Up the band a little way, 2182kc was the marine calling frequency and you could occasionally pick up someone in pleasure craft on the great lakes calling the shore operator to get a phone patch through to home. That was back before VHF and everybody had HF radios to communicate. There was a network of weather stations on 2514kc including WMI Lorain, Ohio, WBL Buffalo and WLC Rogers City, Michigan and some VB stations in Canada that rotated hourly with Great Lakes marine weather. I also remember hearing the infernal AT&T 'circuit adjustment' transmissions on the 'fixed circuit' frequencies and the slow repeating morse code of utility stations WCC, WHX, WOO and other coastal marine beacons at 2598kc. At 3001kc 'New York Radio', 'Gander Radio' and 'Shannon Radio' aeronautical weather stations rotated turns, and of course CHU at 3330kc drove Mom crazy with that tone beeping away for hours. WWV had an even better effect with its incessant drone and tock. Uncle Dan traded in his Pontiac Grand Prix with a cool tachometer for a yellow Porsche with a cool AM/FM/MB radio that could get CHU and other marine stations. (see Tom McKee's excellent marine radio archive at www.imradioha.org) 80 METERS Tuning up into the 80m band, I wondered how anybody could make any sense out of morse code. It didn't sound anything like the dots and dits the code instruction books showed. (can you say wide passband and no BFO) The mystery of the unreadable diddlies and the source of that unintelligible hog-slopping noise higher up the dial (and the expensive equipment needed to de-hogslop it) was explained to me by ham operators Norton Smith WB3LTW and Lee Mortimer W3RWJ who each loaned me various study guides that kept me quiet in my room for months. After repeatedly opening and closing the back of the Sears portable to facilitate speaker add-ons, trimmer tweaking, band range stretching, solder (and wire) melting with a wood-burning pencil, dial light brightening, dial string fixing and band-plan color coding, it finally gave up the ghost. That winter, I sold enough Christmas cards to buy a Longines Symphonette 4 band portable which eventually met a similar fate. RADIO FORGOTTEN AND REDISCOVERED From around 1972 to about 1978, I was more interested in Ruth, records and roadrunning, but in 1980 I found an old half-working AM/FM/SW radio removed from a high-school paging system. The shortwave bug bit hard enough that I started to look around for a real receiver. I was looking for a general coverage receiver but, as fate would have it, found instead a Drake 2-B and a Collins 75A-3 in the local swapper. I also did eventually find a general coverage Zenith TransOceanic like this one at a flea market and not long after that I was given (wow! given!) an old H.H. Scott RBO-2 WWII battleship receiver like this one from Chuck Gray who needed to get it out of his wife's closet and heard I was interested in radio. It had really, really weak audio and I had fun learning how to peak IF cans. THE AM CREW With all these receivers it didn't take long to run onto the gang of AM operators on 75 meters (and the slop-buckets that tormented them). Operators heard included Tim WA1HnyLR in Skowhegan on various hollow-state rigs of his own conjuring, Tom WB2IIS (now W2KBW) and Joe K2VXV both in Buffalo and both on Collins KW-1s, together known as the ''Buffalo Kilowatt Bookends', Donn W8JGP in Skaneateles, NY on a Collins 32V-3, Uncle Ed WA3PUN (people understand nothing) in Harrisburg on a Globe King 400, Russ WA2RII in Bernardsville, NJ on a Johnson Desk Kilowatt, Jack W8AHB in Ann Arbor on a Collins KW-1, Russ WA4JFQ (January February Quebec) in London, Kay-Why on a Hallicrafters HT-37 and Don K4KYV (Kay Foe Kay Why Vee) in Woodlawn, Tennessee on a home-brew kilowatt. Also heard were Herb K2JVM (now K2VH) in Penn Yan, NY, Ashtabula Bill W8VYZ (duhhh-byah 8 Vee Why Zed) in Ashtabula, Rich K1ETP in Milford, Mass, Ozona Bob W5PYT in Ozona, Texas and countless others. (see my top 24 AM ops circa 1980) LOCAL AM OPS Around 1982 while tuning around the citizen's band, I heard two guys rag chewing. I was able to receive but not transmit. The conversation was so untypical of CB, all about old radios, tubes, modulators and antennas! It sounded like 75m AM but on the CB! The longer I listened the more I had to find out who these people were... and where. I frantically fired up a mobile CB in a car that was stored in our garage and was able to make a brief contact with one of them just as they were shutting down. We scheduled QSO the next evening. I spent the next four hours studying the ARRL antenna book, running coax and building a 11m quarter wave vertical out of EMT and a ground plane out of buried copper wire. I set it up it in the yard with a single passive director aimed at Butler, PA. I brought the mobile CB into the house and hooked it up to a 12v power supply. The next evening I was able to talk at length to Darrell Francisco KA3PWO (now inactive) in Fairview and Joel Cumberland KA3PFC (now N3EYR) in Butler, my elmer, web-host and still best friend after 24 years. Joel had a Viking II, Globe King 400, NC-300 and several other interesting pieces. He later acquired this BC-610 and this T-368. (see Joel's radiation-dedication page at zeta2.com/radio/) RADIO ON THE ROAD During 1982 and 1983, I toured around the east coast as a sound engineer with a rock band. (note to reader: watch any VH-1 special and observe the group's road antics) While the others were drinking whiskey and entertaining groupies, I was studying electronic theory and listening to yay-eM on whatever boatanchor I could squeeze into their van. My mobile motel-rigs included a Heathkit GR-78, my first Hallicrafters SX-28 and a Drake 2-B. Longwires were thrown out windows, over railings and up into trees where ever possible. Particularly memorable locales with good conditions were Mansfield, Ohio, Grand Rapids, Michigan and Savannah, Georgia. While on the road, I always made it a point to walk about the countryside looking for beam antennas or other signs of intelligent life. The most striking antenna system I recall was in Mansfield, Ohio where I came upon umpteen fixed beams on a fully slip-ringed rotatable Rohn tower. I was so disappointed when I got a tour of the shack and found a neat, tidy operating position with a single rice-box and a linear. In 1983 while playing in Sharonville, Ohio, I got a ride to Dayton with a local ham, Jim Stegans (call forgotten). His antenna system was much more modest, but he had a shack full of all kinds of goodies. RADIO IN NEW JERSEY In 1984, I married my girlfriend (future radio-widow) and moved to New Jersey. I passed my tech at Gloucester County hamfest around 1986 and was licensed as N2FXL with QTH at Elwood, NJ. I picked up a Johnson Viking Valiant in Philadelphia and worked 80 meter CW until I got my speed up to about 15 wpm to squeak by extra at a hamfest near Freehold, NJ about a year later. I put the key away and worked lots of 75 meter phone around 3885 during the late-1980s resurgence of AM activity. I was immediately dubbed "The Fuxel" by TimTron. THE ANTENNA FARM Over the next four years, I hung lots of long-wire antennas on three acres of tall trees. I was blessed to have received three very long rolls of used two-conductor copper-weld telephone drop cable. My favorite creation (beside the full wave loops mentioned later) was the 3/4 wave end-fed, with a half-wave flat-top and the low Z feedpoint at the shack end. Maybe it's some kind of a Zepp, but I don't know. All the end fed antennas in the manuals are half-wave voltage-fed affairs. I found it useful where the feed-point is near a property line or where there is no way to get the center of a half-wave dipole over the shack. It was also convenient in that no coax was necessary and, being single-ended, it was a low Z (current) feed and no balun or tuner was required. I used it with good results in NJ at about 35' high and WV at about 50' high. Speaking of loops, I made good use of the phone drop and a very tall sycamore tree and hung a 160m full wave horizontal square loop (80' high at one corner, about 35' at the other three) and a 75m full wave vertical delta loop (80' high at apex, 20' at the base). MY SHACK AND CONTACTS I used the Viking Valiant transmitter and a variety of receivers including a Hallicrafters SX-42 like this one, a Hallicrafters SX-62, a Hallicrafters SX-101 like this one, a rare Drake 2-B model with four bandwidth positions instead of three (and with the matching 2-BQ), and a Drake R-4C almost like this R-4A. I occasionally worked SSB on a Barker and Williamson 6100. My only foreign contact (other than Canada) was Nicaragua on 20m. During this period I visited the QTH of Joel N3EYR and was able to make some enjoyable contacts on his T-368. ACCUMULATING GEAR I eventually accumulated the standard repertoire of obligatory boatanchors, plus other sundry and assorted unusual pieces. I made several trips to Dayton, Gaithersburg, Frederick, Butler, Sellersville, Wheeling and all the local South Jersey hamfests, dragging home all sorts of junk, non-junk and semi-junk. Particularly satisfying finds were a set of TRS, a Rohde & Schwarz selective voltmeter, a General Radio 1608-A LCR bridge and a near mint Hallicrafters SX-28 (80 pounds carried the whole way across the Dayton flea market and then the whole way across the parking lot). At one time or another I possessed the obligatory R-390A, Collins 75A-4 and a Collins R-389 VLF (should have kept this, yeh... yeh... def... defffi... definitely shoulda kept this...). For a while I used the Hallicrafters SX-62 with an R-42 reproducer. The SX-62 had push-pull 6V6 finals in the audio and a glorious full-bodied sound that was perfect for listening to the AM hams late at night when the slop-bucketeers passed out and you could open up the passband to 'wide'. At Timonium, my wife pointed to a particularly dirty Hammarlund SP-600 which I huffed at. She said "You should get this." I snickered. $160 for that piece of dirty, beat-up junk? When I got it home and cleaned it up, I found underneath the surface grime was a gorgeous JX-10. And to boot, the purchase price included this Scott SLR-M marine receiver. At Butler hamfest, I found a JIL SX-400 scanner which was used to listen to beepers, police calls and wireless telephones (HI) in NJ. Not much call for a scanner in the hills of WV. The most memorable find was a Collins FRT-51 SSB exciter, which I was overjoyed about until I tried to load it. It was the most massively over-engineered piece of gravity-sucking equipment I have ever moved. It broke a hand truck and very nearly my back and the springs on my Ford Ranger. It likely weighed over 500 pounds and had a dual walled steel rack. It was servo-controlled and auto-tuning and self-adjusting. It had about a hundred tubes of which only about 50% of were in use on any particular band, had a massive 240v power supply and put out 1/10 watt RF. The hardware alone when I parted out the transformers, tube sockets, connectors, knobs and other goodies was still enough to sink a good sized boat. Other interesting pieces were this WWV receiver, NEMS-Clark VHF receiver, a Scott SLR-F like this one, and a Collins ARC-2 transceiver like this one. Around 1990, I finally overdosed, having gathered approximately two dozen rack-mount boatanchors, all manner of other odd sized receivers, VLF gear, selective voltmeters, test equipment and such. RADIO IN WEST VIRGINIA In 1992, I headed back out to the fests and sold many of the heavier and less essential rigs. We moved to West Virginia and into a 7' x 28' trailer, the bedroom of which I immediately remodeled into a ham shack. I worked several months using a Viking II. That was an interesting rig, two 6146s modulated by two 811-As driven by two 6L6s, plus outboard RF using the TR-7 as a stable frequency source. It had an upsized mod transformer and a pair of 811-As shoehorned in. The power supply was modified to develop 800v on the 6146 RF finals and 1500v on the 811-A modulators. Audio was brought in from an external souped-up Webster tube amplifier with the volume control removed and gain controlled by regulating the negative feedback. It is currently disassembled and in the pile of projects to be finished. :( Some notable boatanchors that I have retained or have acquired since then include a Hammarlund SP-600 VLF rig, a Collins 51J-4, and a Collins R-390, a Allied A-2515 and a Lafayette HE-30 from Joel, a Nordmende Globe Traveller from eBay and a curious piece featured in the science-fiction cult classic movie "The Phantom Planet", a Cole Dictater 3" reel to reel deck. I also managed to hang on to a stack of HP test gear. PRESENT In 1999, we rolled out our hillbilly love-nest trailer with the radio shack and moved into the hillbilly love-nest house that we are still building, which does not yet have a shack. I have not been active since even though I have a Drake TR-7 sitting close by. In 2003, I allowed my vanity to change my call sign from N2FXL to W8MMS, something I probably would not repeat, had I to do it over. There is something about your first call that just says who you are... and "Mike Mike Sierra" just doesn't say it like "fine bizness old man, name here is The Fuxel." RADIO, RADIO, WHEREFORE ART THOU, OH RADIO? I still have a ton of boatanchors (a ton is not that many boatanchors) waiting for room in a new shack, including a new Viking Ranger. I found on eBay a Sears 4 band battery portable like I started out with way back in 1968. Also found on eBay, was a Scott SLR-H which is essentially a Scott RBO-2 like this one with an extra selectivity position, and a BFO (they call it a C.W. Osc.). I occasionally turn on a Panasonic RF-2200 to listen to shortwave, and sometimes the Sony ICF-2010, but what with the veritable plethora of propagandists, preachers and conspiracy theorists, I can't find much that interests me. I just wish all the old signals were still there. I am now almost 50 and still an avid enthusiast of the "unusual" on the radio. I am saddened by each disappearance from the radio bands of faithful, comforting sounds never to be heard again. LORAN, marine band ship to shore, the voice-format utility stations, CW pileups, full-quieting AM reception, the woodpecker (don't really miss that one), the BBC, Happy Station, HCJB, and in general... english language SW broadcasts of any entertainment value. I have not heard Radio Tirana, Radio Moscow, Radio South Africa or Deutsche Welle for years, now that I think of it. The internet has killed a lot of the magic of radio. Thank goodness for AM on 75. UPDATE I recently got the foundation, base and first section of a new tower planted. With proper care, sufficient rainfall and sunshine, I hope to grow a 80' high flat-top for 75 and 160 meters, center-fed with ladder line directly over the house. I am also looking at resurrecting the Viking II. I might also, if parts and funds permit, look into home-brewing a 572-B or 810 RF deck to be externally driven in the same way. I recently won this Hallicrafters SX-62A on eBay! I also got the broken slugs in the 51J-4 fixed and have been tuning around a bit on it looking for signs of life. Anybody who wants to trade a 300 and 2100 Hz or so filter (500kHz center freq.) for a USB and LSB filter let me know. Mo' later. 73, Max CREDIT AND DISCREDIT I've used all my own photos where possible, but a few of my rigs were sold without being photographed, so I've used assorted images found on my hard drive from eBay auctions or other undocumented sources (that means I have no clue where they came from). These items use "like this one" links. I believe as a not-for-profit endeavor, this constitutes fair use. If you find your image here, let me know and I will either credit it or remove it. As for my pictures you are free to copy or print any of them for historical, display or demonstration purposes. Share and share alike! Just put up a link to this website if possible. |
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