Radio and Electronics (Part 6 of 12)

But I didn’t necessarily like this Morse Code stuff. It seems I had a mental block that I couldn’t get my speed up to where I could receive code at a rate of 13 words per minute. As soon as I did, I would upgrade my licence to the General Class and be able to talk on the radio with my own voice! How I longed to do that. I practiced that too for a long time (with the power to the transmitter turned off.) I said, “CQ forty, CQ forty meters this is WA7BVH, Whisky Alpha Seven, Bravo Victor Hotel.” And then I’d practice having conversations over the radio. In the midst of my longing I took some other diversions.
One was the annual science fair at my Junior High. In seventh grade it was on radio. I had just about every radio imaginable there from crystal sets to the receiver out of the B-29 aircraft. I had constructed and ingenious array out of wood which not only served to act as my display case, but also held the antenna together. I had a load speaker which played the radio conversations from far off places. I thought my project would win and eventually go on to the national science fair. But the only thing I got for all my effort was my transistor radio was stolen from my display table while I was at lunch.
In eighth grade I did a smaller project called “The Principles of Heterodyning.” On this project I had a microphone that people could talk into and then their voice was electronically mixed with a constant audio signal. This mixing caused the output of their voice to be either higher or lower depending on which frequency was used. I thought up the idea, Dad designed the simple circuitry to do this, I built it, and Dad debugged it and got it working. I made a poster for the project and had a great big title, “PRINCIPALS OF HETERODYNING.” I spelled heterodyning right, but not the word, principles. That year we also had a history fair. I did my project on the history of the telegraph. I used a battery, a relay, and my telegraph key to show how it worked.