I got my novice ticket some time in the late 1950’s and less than a year later passed the test and code for the Technician Class license. Bob Heineman in Carlisle administered the Novice test and Walter Lane in Gettysburg administered the Technician test. I belonged to the Adams County Amateur Radio Society for some time and then dropped out. I didn’t have a driver’s license and getting the 25 miles to Gettysburg was not always possible.

As a Technician Class Operator I settled on six meters. For a while I used a transmitter and converter Ed Boise worked up for me. The transmitter was in a minibox with the tubes sticking out the top, a pentode maybe 6C4 for a crystal oscillator tripling the 8.3 Mhz crystal to 25 Mhz and a 5763 that doubled the frequency in the final. The Audio was two stages in a 6AU7 driving a 6AS5 that modulated the plate of the 5763. The converter had a 6AH5 broad band RF amp followed by a 6U8 pentode section that was used as a mixer with the 6U8 triode as a crystal oscillator – frequency quintupler to get 49.5 MHZ. This took the 50 MHZ down to the broadcast band, the output of the mixer went to a 6C4 cathode follower to get a low impedance output for the input to a military broadcast band receiver. The image rejection wasn’t fantastic but the image band wasn’t used and I only had one Mhz of the six meter band but it worked. In two years I worked at least ten states with it and a five element gamma match beam about fifty feet up on tower my dad and I got just for taking it off the roof of a building.  It had fallen, we cut it loose, took it apart and had a nice tower.

For a while I used a transmitter that was an old aircraft unit from WW2 that had an 832 in the final, I believe the modulator was a pair of 6L6’s. The 832 was a squat version of the 829 – a family of the ugliest tubes ever made. The body was nearly three inches in diameter, the 829 was about three inches high, the 829 about two. There was no base, the connections were pins much like the seven and nine pin tubes of the fifties but they were at least twice the diameter and about three quarters of an inch long and there were eight of them on the bottom and two on the top. It was a dual tube, a pair of pentodes with electrical characteristics of each was much like the 2E26 but the plate dissipation was maybe twenty watts for each. The filament took two pins, the cathode, control, and screen grids took eight more. The suppresser grid was tied to the cathode internally. It was keyed (to be inserted the right way) by the one heater pin being larger in diameter. There were two more pins on the top for the plates. I believe the RF drive was from an oscillator – doubler 6SN7, the dual triode workhorse in that era which was used by the dozen in radar sets and there was over 16,000 of them in the first computer, ENIAC which also had a bunch of the 6L6s.

I replaced that transmitter with one I built using the circuit diagram of the other transmitter, 6C4, 5763, to get RF to drive a pair of 6146’s in the final and a pair of 807’s for modulation giving me nearly a hundred watts with very good AM modulation. This worked fine till the power transformer got damp and shorted out. At the time I was a college student and didn’t have the money to replace it. I built a voltage quadruple circuit and fed it off the power line. I got only a little over 400 volts rather than the 550 from the transformer and the power was about 65 watts but it worked. I stayed on the air for a while then some other things happened, I was working nearly full time to stay in college and by the time my ticket ran out I didn’t have the air time to renew. I just never got back to it.

Now forty five years later I decided to come back. About three weeks ago I typed “amateur radio license” into Google and pulled up the ARRL web page. My goal was get a license. I learned the Novice Class has gone away as has International Code requirement. This is often incorrectly called Morse Code which is different for several letters. The license period is ten years, not the five from the sixties and the Extra Class has become the Advanced and it now has additional privileges. I pulled up a mock test for Technician and passed. I tried the General and passed. I tried the Advanced and didn’t make it. Most of the questions I missed were not about radio theory they were ones about regulations that have changed and terminology that has changed. I could probably do some quick study and pass. I found a place that was giving the test, spent the previous evening doing some insurance study for the Technician and General classes and headed out. I took the Technician first, it took less than twenty minutes and after they corrected it the guys there encouraged me to take the General which I passed. They wanted me to take the Advanced, I probably should have, I might have squeaked by, but I had accomplished my objective and I just wanted to head home. I’ll set up and take the Advanced in a month.

That was two days before Thanksgiving.  Over a week later I still am not on the air. My transceiver is caught somewhere in the labyrinth of UPS for over ten days! It is expected to come today. It came two days later and I am now using it. I’m getting some decent results with this on a car whip.  I even get good results from my living room wiht the rubber duckey antenna as KB3SBE.  I a month after taking the test I have applied for a vanity call sign and gotten K3HQI which rolls me back 44 years.  This was my call sign at that time.

The transceiver is an ICOM 82 hand held unit. I find it interesting that this little unit has seven watts output, one watt less the output power of the Gooney Box III we used in the late 1950’s. For those who don’t know, that was officially the Gonset Communicator III, there were a I, II and IV also. They came in 10, 6 and 2 meter models and were sold in both grey commercial and yellow CD (Civil Defense) models. Other than the color they were identical. The CD models were bought by counties and issued to hams who were in the CD nets. I was not a member – I was too young but one of my friends, Ed Boise was and he had one of these.

The Gooney Box II and III were the best of the breed. The Gooney Box I had some problems they fixed in the II and they screwed it up on the IV trying to make it look nice. They were cubic in shape except the IV, close to fourteen inches on a side. They would run on AC or on auto DC. They came with two cords, one for AC and one for DC. I believe you got one DC cord with the unit but if you wanted the other one – 6 or 12 volts – you could buy it. Cars were going from 6 to 12 in the middle fifties, Ford made the change between 1955 and 1956, some others were earlier or later. VW didn’t make it till after 1968. The cords had a rectangular socket on the end with a bunch of flat pins and each cord had jumpers on it to make the right connections to the vibrator, power transformer, etc. The vibrator was a buzzer that alternately switched the DC from one pin to the other at some frequency near sixty cycles to make square wave AC in the transformer. Vibrators died so regularly that some car radios had them so you could pull them out through a hole in the radio case and replace them without pulling the radio out from under the dash. On AC the 110 winding got power from the power cord and the 6 or 12 volt winding was connected to the tube heaters. The high voltage winding made the B+ on either AC or DC. On DC the 6 or 12 volts was connected directly to the heaters and the vibrator which was connected to the 6 or 12 volt windings of the transformer to make the B+. The III had both six and 12 volt windings, not sure about the II and IV on the transformer and the heaters were wired so that the jumper in the plug could put half of them in series with the other half for 12 volts or all of them in parallel for six volt operation depending on which cord you used. It wasn’t quite that simple but it worked.

Let’s fast forward 44 years.  The ICOM 82 has a standard 7.2 Volt, 600 mh battery that has better life than a car battery did with the Gooney Box. You pretty well had to start the car more than every hour on receive and if you transmitted more than a couple minutes you better start it. It sticks in my mind that the 12 volt version fuse was 15 amps and the six was twenty five or thirty. They did have some things that helped. The tube filaments (heaters) for the transmitter were wired to a switch on the front. The heater for the 2E26 in the transmitter was a whopping .8 amps at 6 volts. To give you an idea, that drain to heat the tube would take the ICOM battery down in less than 45 minutes. Other transmitter heaters had to be wired in parallel then in series with the 2E26 to make up .8 amps to balance it. I believe the modulator output tubes were also used for the speaker output on receive giving a really great audio output. You could get volume on the speaker! These were much like the Cobra’s of the CB era, the ones you could recognize on the air. They had a clean RF signal and enough modulation to give it punch and an audio unit that was clean sounding.  The audio bandwith shaping pretty well took out anything over 3KHZ.

So I am on my way back.

I started working to get involved with the emergency and community services.