I marvel at the attraction some of this old gear seems to still have on folks. Nonetheless, I've seen some excellent restoration jobs, and I suppose there was a great deal of satisfaction in doing it. I'm not immune to nostalgia attacks either. This happens most frequently when I see old BC-348's on swap tables. That was my first receiver, and it got me a lot of 80 meter CW contacts. Well, that is, until we moved to Albuquerque, NM. It was there that I learned the hard way about some of the design imperfections in stuff like this. BC-348's have an oddball I.F. freq--I think it is 915 khz. In Albuquerque there happened to be a pop music station (KQUE, later KQEO) at 920 khz! Suddenly I had a very good one station broadcast band receiver! I fiddled with various filtering arrangements, but nothing really seemed to get rid of the problem entirely.
This led to my next educational experience. That was the "time payment" plan! The local electronics store (even Albuquerque had a "ham" store in 1956) had a brand new RME 4350A which sold for $249. With my dad as cosigner, I borrowed the money to buy it, and for the next 18 months I was clipping payment coupons. It was a big step up though, with full ham band coverage up to 10 meters (the BC-348 stopped at 18 mhz), and seemingly luxurious bandspread. It was a huge acquisition though, cost-wise, if you convert that to today's dollars. Sacking groceries at Piggly Wiggly only paid 87 cents an hour, and I had to join the union (and pay dues) in order to get that! Since I was only 14, and in high school, I couldn't work very many hours anyway. Later I got a job at a neighborhood bowling alley, working on automatic pin-spotters, at a whopping $1/hour. I was in fat city with that job. I got 15 to 20 hours a week of work, almost all on weekends, so I was pretty "flush" money wise. Since I was car-less, I didn't have to spend money on gas and repairs. Unfortunately, being car-less, also meant I was girlfriend-less, for the most part. If you didn't have a car, you were pretty far down the social ladder! So, I took up bowling! Dave W7AQK ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ron D'Eau Claire" <r...@cobi.biz> To: "'Elecraft Reflector'" <elecraft@mailman.qth.net> Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 8:38 AM Subject: Re: [Elecraft] OT- A trip into Yesteryear! >I still enjoy a regenerative receiver. Even with a trf >stage to avoid > radiating QRM, it's an amazingly small handful of parts, > but one that > provides astounding performance with practice and a tender > touch. What a > delight to pull in signals clean and crisp! > > QRM can be unpleasant, but it isn't always so. Like > listening to people > chatter in a crowded room, a little practice pulls out > what we want to hear. > That's been so since the very early days when even the > selectivity of a > simple regenerative detector was something unimaginable. > > Author Thomas Randall described it like this in his novel > "The Nymph and the > Lamp": "When you put on the phones it was as if your inner > self stepped out > of the bored and weary flesh... you were part of another > world, the real, > the actual living world of men and ships and ports... > Whistling, growling, > squealing, moaning, here were the voices of men transmuted > through their > finger tips, issuing in dots and dashes... flinging what > they had to say > across the enormous spaces... At night when the darkness > increased their > range by three, four or five times the uproar was > terrific, the sound of a > vast swamp on a spring night filled with vociferous > frogs..." > > Hopefully our rigs today don't "whistle, growl, squeal" > etc., like the spark > transmitters of old, but there's something lost in the > sterile, impeccable > signals we expect today, all too often with > machine-perfect keying that robs > our signals of their last vestige of personal identity. > > Ron AC7AC > > ______________________________________________________________ > Elecraft mailing list > Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft > Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm > Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net > > This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net > Please help support this email list: > http://www.qsl.net/donate.html > ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
