Radio and Electronics (Part 3 of 12)

Everything to me was radio. I arranged for our boy scout troop to get the radio merit badge. And another boy and I organized our troop’s display at the Scout Expo that year. It was a demonstration of radio, powered by a portable generator and using a huge array for an antenna. I drew electronic schematics in my school classes and at home. I always was reading some electronics book or another. At school I practiced the Morse Code by tapping my teeth together as I translated words off the bulletin board into code. Once in my seventh grade English class I was drawing a very detailed schematic diagram. Unfortunately, my teacher, Miss Anderson didn’t appreciate that and she confiscated all my drawings until after class. Another time in my reading class I asked my teacher, Mrs. Waller, if I could do a book report on Single Sideband For The Radio Amateur. She looked on my book, (which had very cool oscilloscope test patterns on the cover) with disdain and said haughtily, “Absolutely not! You must read a novel to get credit. You shouldn’t be wasting you time with those books anyway.” I was upset at that. Here I was reading a college-textbook-level instructional manual and she wanted me reading only those seventh grade-level novels.
I also set up my radio station. It was all equipment that my Dad had used years earlier. The receiver was a big black metal unit that came out of a B-29 in World War II. Dad had altered the power supply so it could be plugged into the wall for power. I had it hooked up so I could listen to it with the speaker or with earphones. The transmitter I would use when I got my license was a rather light weight box called a DX-20. It had an output of only 25 watts which was the maximum power that a person with the Novice license could use to transmit. I had another huge unit which was another transmitter called a DX-100. I think it was named after how heavy it was, because it must have weighed at least 100 pounds. When I moved it over to my radio station table, I had to place it on a chair and carefully scoot it across the room, it was too heavy for me to just carry. I couldn’t use it right away because it was too powerful There were other items like an external grid dip meter, a frequency generator, and a variable frequency audio oscillator, the dummy load antenna, a commercial short wave radio, and the oscilloscope, all proudly displayed on a triangle shaped table built into the wall in a corner of my room. My bedroom used to be called the radio room, and later, the computer room, but due to the need to use more basement rooms as bedrooms, I had moved in when I was twelve and made most of it my bedroom, plus electronics work bench area, as well as radio room once again. A few years later I added a 300 watt transceiver to this collection, which my parents gave me for my 15th birthday. This constituted my “Ham Shack” as radio amateurs affectionately call their radio stations. Of course I called it my “Amateur Radio Shack.”