New Members Please introduce yourself.

First topic message reminder :

Hi folks,
I'm David, I live in Canberra, Down Under, and confess a love of valve gear.
Specifically guitar amps, and have joined the site to further my slowly growing knowledge..
I'm also on a steep learning curve for valve testers - just gained a Jackson 637 and am trying to learn about it and am planning to service it B4 testing my growing collection of valves..
I don't know a whole lot about radio's per se, but pls don't hold that against me..LOL
I'll chime in probably infrequently, but have bookmarked the site and will call back regularly.
Cheers, David

Some more Members now on board

Carl French

Cameraman

Perry Mundorff

kp19751609

copain
----------------
A Warm Welcome

Well Cameraman just take a picture of our forum anytime. Click LOL

Just jumped over from Tube Radio Forum, Glad to have another Venue to Post In, thanks for the Invite!

Hi copain! your age shouldn't frighten anyone here, except the younger whippersnappers!
Delighted to have you as a member. Just Pop-in any time your in our forum neighborhood.

My user name is copain, which is French for pal or friend. I'm not of French background but I do love the French language. I'd state my age but it might frighten you; instead, I'll say that my background is schoolteacher and professional book editor. I pretty well taught myself fundamental electronics. In the 1970s-early 1980s I had my own radio-TV repair shop in New Hampshire. It didn't do well profitwise but I enjoyed the work. After reaching retirement age I went fulltime into antique radio collecting and restoring. I have a collection of about 50 radios, all of which I restored to fine working and appearance condition. My favorite makes are RCA, Silvertone, Airline, and Grunow. When I was growing up in Detroit, my parents had an RCA model 85T; my memory is excellent and I can remember when my father brought it home new, mainly so that we could listen to my uncle singing once a week on Detroit's WMBC, whose studios were located in a hotel on Woodward Avenue. In the early 1930s a radio political commentator was murdered in this hotel. I acquired an 85T several years ago from a collector in Southern Illinois; it needed a lot of restoration work but it is my favorite radio and I listen to it every day.

My current interest is in constructing home AM transmitters, and I have posted a message regarding this in another section of this forum.

Thanks Cliff.

de N1NQC

welcome aboard KRYSTALLO

Sounds like you have a lot of tales to tell. Enjoy our forum and don't be bashful. All experiences are welcome here.

Hey All,

I am Kevin ( "Krystallo"), ham callsign N1NQC.

I got started in radio when I was 8 years old ( just turned 51 on Dec 6). My brothers dug out my dad's old RCA tube AM/SW set which had laid for years under an old tarp in the basement.Using that radio my dad had tracked all the battles of WW II on a giant wall map w/ flag pins. His house a had large zig zag antenna on the attic rafters.Prior to buying the RCA with his paper route money , he built a crystal set for WBZ.Later he would get his masters in EE and work on many aspects of defense work,including the atomic weapons program.But it all started with radio.

We fired her up in the basement on a short bit of antenna wire and amazingly we heard a two way conversation from Scotland Yard in London and a German b'cast. I was hooked. OF COURSE I destroyed that radio by fiddling with it later on !

My first project was a LONGWAVE crystal radio ( WHY I have NO idea !). It didn't pick up anything. Then my dad bought me a Philmore Little Wonder slider crystal set.Despite HUGE signals at our Boston area home,it didn't work either.

Then I bought the Radio Shack 28-207 crystal set and FINALLY I had something that worked like a champ (actually ear splitting loud at times).I LOVED those 207's and couldn't get enough of them.I'd buy 2 or 3 at a whack just to have extra parts to play around with.I didn't know of any mail order houses in those days. I have some 207's off ebay stored away in the shop.

By the time I was 10 I had a Hallicrafters S-120a and an E-W and a N-S long wire. It worked GREAT, MUCH long dx ! I have a 120a now,but it's not the same one I had as a kid.

The rest , as they say, is history ! A huge number of crystal sets, home brew and factory, general coverage receivers ( Radio Shack Dx 150, Icom R-70, Icom R-71a, et al), CB's, AA5 tube sets and more recently a BUNCH of ham gear.

I am still an AVID crystal set builder and have a ton of 1920's and newer parts to play with.

I am interested everything from "DC to daylight"- VLF "Natural Radio" (sferics, whistlers, tweeks, dawn chorus,etc). I have some commercial gear and also some home brew stuff for VLF, most notably my "Lightning Bug" "receiver". Moving up in frq I like Afro/Euro LW b'cast and beacon dxing, AM b'cast DXing, SW( especially utility and tropical b'cast dxing), 10 M ham mobile/QRP operations, and V/UHF (formerly) all the way up to 1290 Mhz.Currently I the highest I work is on 900 Mhz, simplex and rptr.

I'm into propagation study,meteorology ( I worked for 10 yrs as a volunteer at the NWS Blue Hill Observatory Climate Research Station at Milton, MA), aviation ( I am a private pilot), misc Earth phenomena, "close in " astronomy(visible planets inward), gardening ( especially tomatoes) , etc, etc, etc

K

P
Welcome jeswonderin!

I started out with a crystal radio for Christmas in 57-or so, found a radio chassis and plugged it in and it worked, of course with bare feet found out it could shock me on concrete floor, so I learned the first terms of electricity and insulation and shock, LOL.

Also had High school radio course and built 1 tube radio. When In high school, newest car radios were transistor hybrids and I used to get old tube radios from trash heap in the auto radio repair shop on the way home from school. Then college ,Industrial electricity, studied Naval Electronics correspondence courses as a Civil servant at same time, during Vietnam era. Stayed working for Navy, Ah Yes WRT2 I overhauled many of the Tuners and couplers too! Made a few mods too!  They sent me to college and learned digital, analog electronics ,solid state electronics and devices, computers, I started to be the first in my classes to hand in assignments with a Commodore 64 and epson 9 pin dot matrix printer, using Basic language programming to make printed assignments, and test's. 

Moved onto Computers Navy Test equipment Calibration Lab, Implemented a Hazmat and Hazmaterial storage and scrap metals for our Electronics Shop 67, and  till retirement, retired 6 years now.

came over for a visit, from radioboard. like it here. may stay a while if the fleas aren't too bad.

started dreaming back in conn as a very young kid. some neighbor/ham/nut/? tossed a pile of chassis over the junk cliff, i found them and hauled the whole mess home to the dark, dank cellar under my folk's 1800's house. it grew and soon was thought of as the mad scientist's lab. i pulled everything apart i touched, got fingers smacked a lot, but learned to love the stuff.

meshna and fair radio sales big then with really cheap war surplus electronics. i bought whatever my soda bottle sales brought in, and promptly tore it apart... what a wealth of wonderous doo-dads littered every corner. stuff like that nowadays would put my kid thru college.

built xtal radio from cigar box plans in pop tronics ? had pile of wires around box, meshna microwave diode detector, usaf phone set, worked well. later bought typical catswhisker gizmo from back of funny book for 29 cents, made another radio, and kept on

once was a navy et guy, back in 60's. worked shipboard comm gear, got prez award for keeping wrt2 xmtr working with rubber bands during time red chinese were harassing us near turkey.

two things influenced my life: lady renting apt from mom was a document reproducer. she gave me a huge binder of gobbledegook that i pored over, but understood little. turned out to be some of the earliest engineering work on materials later to be called semi-conductors and ics. next shot was much later on. shipboard i was trying to order my etn2 course book, but they sent instead 'digital applications and mine-firing techniques'. i fell in love with boolean, digital, binary, octal and logics.

end result was a job at rca main frames. made them work after assembly. next went on to program the computers that tested ics, from wafer fab to final qa tests at itt (had original fairchild patents) and rca again, ala cosmac 1802. suggested to their engineers we might put all the other chips in one case with microprocessor... they laughed. what did i know. o well. can you say intel? amd?

been my own pc company past 30 years. set up business systems, trained them, then got stuck there for years at a time. current one past 18 years, and still teaching them. hope they like me.

now before you say 'wow', let me tell the small print. i'm extremely ocd. where others may have walked in my shoes and ended up remarkable successes, i saw the big picture, details and footnotes, then got bored and moved on before greatness arrived.

so today, after years of collecting, i need to retire and play with my toys. i have hundreds of future-unfinished projects to attend to. but i find much needed inspiration from y'all who have gone 'n dunnit. retirement will have to wait. enjoy my work too much to stop.
don't know if you can relate, so i'm left jeswonderin

Dave Schmarder

xtaljo

peeblesoriginals

JOHN BOY

NT9K

KR1S-Jim

Don Haworth

SWsenior

radiomutt

Ham-er

tallboy

Krystallo
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A Hearty Welcome to our Newest Members
I'll bet you all have stories to tell us about your experiences in the wonder world of Vintage Radios of every type.

welcome Ham-er
And Welcome SWsenior.

We have an open door for many topics about radios. Enjoy and post any Ideas and questions you have.

Just an old senior that recently got interested in crystal radio. While taking the wife yard sailing several months ago, I came across a fellow that had been into radio for years, he was selling off all his radio "stuff" as he had health problems. He had a bunch of things for sale, and gave me quite a good price if I was to take all of it. I looked at all the "stuff" and had no real idea how it was used. Anyway I bought it all, brought it home and am still sorting through it. I now have a very good idea about it all and with the help of a few guys over on Rap-n-Tap, I am now excited with all of this radio "stuff" and have even built a few radios on my own.

SWsenior

I should add that I am mostly interested in crystal radios.

username:Ham-er
callsign :kb0lxy
Where I got my username? : Duh

Hobbies: radio ,radio, radio

Ive been interested in electronics in general, and specifically radio since high school.

I am now retired from the USAF, my carreer was as an electronic repair technician for their wideband communications(radio).

73
kb0lxy - eric

Hi Bill,

Welcome to the group! There can never be enough crystal radio guys around!

Cheers for now, Bob

Hi, my name is Bill. Username is NT9K which is my ham radio call sign. I'm in Melbourne Florida and interested in building crystal radios and tube receivers. My hobbies are building telegraph keys, Elmering new CW operators, building all kinds of ham gear and designing web sites. Lately, I have become interested more in building crystal radios, but I have a lot to learn.

Good luck with the new forum. I hope to get to know lots of you and learn from you too!
73 Bill NT9K..

Welcome Don Hancock and hello to our forum. With your experiences and knowledge I am sure you can be a great benefit to our forum and its members. Dive right in and browse around.

So Glad to have you on board, your experiences are very close in-line with mine (Military Electronics, in Dept of Navy Civil Service). So with your experience please jump right in to the world of old radios and speak right up!

Hi: My name is Don Hancock .I'm retired Air Force .Worked as radio tech,cryptographic tech and automatic switching tech in the USAF.Continued working in electronics after college. Worked in various aspects of the electronics industry from audio to xray.

Started studying radio in high school continued through radio training at Scott Field Ill. After I retired someone brought me an old tube radio and I started playing around with tubes again.Guess I'll never get tired of chasing electrons.

While you are at it, please feel free to join our little forums.
Alot of good people there, and, good help sections. See link below.
Bill Cahill

brycenel
High Tension
Gary Russell

Welcome

Welcome High Tension and come back often, we have a lot of topics that you might enjoy. As we get more Members, we will get more assistance on solutions to repairing these older radios. So don't be shy.

Hi all! I'm 47, a welder/boilermaker in NSW Australia. I always enjoyed radio even from a very early age and have a fascination for radios of the 1920's, especially homebrewed. "High Tension" is a play on words referring to both the "B" voltage circuit and a contrast to the relaxation radio brings. Slowly, I'm learning to build my own radios aimed more at DX than audio quality. I don't post often, but I do read a lot.

HT

Hey Bill. I am a member of your site as well as Ron's & ARF.

Welcome, Dave. Are you a member at my site? Your name looks familiar. Cliff is also a long time member there, and, well respected.
Bill Cahill

Hey y'all! My name's Dave, some of y'all may know me from a few other forums as Motorola Man. I'm an electronics technician by trade, and an antique radio fanatic in my spare time. I've been collecting and restoring tube radios for a couple of years and am most interested in pre 50's radios. I look forward to chatting with everyone soon.

Glad to have you on board Richard-NEW GUY.
Your from Canada EH?
Sorry couldn't resist, (Chuckle)

Welcome to the forums here. Post often. Also, please join my forums, and, post often there. Go take a look. We are radios, tv's, phonographs, vintage appliances, and, when you become a member, we have a nice links page to help you.
We also have a nice tutorial dept. for beginners, and, advanced, as well.
See link below. Save it in your favorites, join, and, post often in both forums.
Bill Cahill

Hi every one my name is Richard Roman im an automotive technician from Ontario Canada. Im 39 years old born on 21st of may 1972. My hobbies are (when i can find time to do them) restoring old autos ,fixing snowmobiles,atvs,finding old antique radios in the garbage and bringing them back to life lol . Fixing old radios is a new hobby to me and im still learning, i have recapped a few and enjoy it very much.

Well Welcome to you!

I have been in the Tillamook area on a couple of occasions and have been delighted at our trips there. How did you find our forum, may I ask?

I know that along the coast the radio reception isn't too great for radios.
Where along the coast are you?

The Zenith may have some rubber covered wire from what I hear, and would show crumbling and falling off the wires.
If this is the case then you will have your work cut out for you.

Please keep us informed of your progress.

Again thanks for posting, and please continue to post. No question or comment is too small. It allows everyone the opportunity to get to know you, and offer needed advice and camaraderie.

The Amp Man is my user name and the reason is that I'm a Amplifier/guitar repair man for a music store on the Oregon coast. I'm 55 years of age and I've been a service tech for 30 plus years. First time on the forum and I might say a very nice one at that. I really appreciate the great info and tips and I too love to work on the old radios and at the moment I've been working on a old zenith console radio, I think 1928 or 29 not for sure. It belong to my wife's folks and so I've been restoring it in my spare time.

Thank you for allowing me to post and have a great evening...

Thx for the scan Cliff,
I have a factory bulletin re this, and some other original stuff as well which I'm happy to email anyone interested.
Equally, if anyone has a manual of even a schematic (they are very rare..) I'd love to hear from you..
Regs, DB