CONTINUED: HamFest

Sis had a point.  Richard had heard the weekly Lowdown consisted mostly of old guys who stood around and drank beer all day.  As the afternoon progressed and the keg emptied out, they wound up giving the junk to each other while they began to look for designated drivers.

“That’s why we’re going late in the day,” said Richard.  “Better prices.”

“Darling,” said Mom to Richard, “we really should be conscious of the children’s need for wholesome entertainment.  Something safe, without the use of chemicals; a supervised activity all the mothers would approve of.”

“There’s the Naked Badminton Matches over in Laconia,”  said Richard.

“Dear, that’s for pre-schoolers.”

“I heard it was for the mothers,” piped up Billy.

 “Yes, of course,” said Mom. “To give them a break –“

“That would do it,” said Richard.  “Running around in the altogether while someone watches their kids.”

“Dear,” his wife said rather sternly, “it’s for the children.  Mothers need a break from the toil of raising children. They deserve respect for their noble labor.”

You’d think,” said Billy,” I would get some respect for my medical condition.”

“What condition?" said Richard.

“I don’t like to talk about  it, Dad.”

“But I’m your fa—“

“It isn’t easy, and I like to keep my schedule to myself.”

“What schedule?”

“I can’t go to the Q People fair, because this is the day for my enema.”

“No problem,” said his father, “we’ll help.  Grab that hose over there on the side of the garage while I go turn on the water.”

When they arrived, Richard pulled each of them from the car while he kept the one just extracted from jumping back in.   A rumbling bank of black, ugly clouds was just beginning to build up to the 30,000 foot level on the western horizon.  The Q Code people were arrayed against the hillside and didn’t notice the angry sky.  They sat in low beach chairs, from which they were helped up and out by fellow enthusiasts when nature called and they needed to run into the woods.  Every once in a while a female yelp came trilling  through the trees.  Crusty knew he would hear the women’s ever-increasing complaints about the lack of portable facilities.

”It’s as if you’re trying to discourage us from coming,” one of the wives said to him.

“Oh dear, no,” said Crusty.  “I never, never thought of it. We depend upon the feminine to color our afternoons away from home.” 

Richard saw it right away, a Hammarlund SP 600, the Super Pro.  He had wanted one since he first saw the beautiful receiver in a Robert Mitchum movie where the actor commanded a Navy ship.  In the film the captain gave orders no real captain would, the crew used their equipment wrong, the ship rocked like it was only ten feet long and the radio operator kept the twisting volume control rather than the tuning knob.

The SP at the HamFest immediately won Richard’s heart.  The face panel was red.  RED!  With polished brass escutcheons.  It was probably the most beautiful radio he had seen in his Novice career.

A rather dark and lusty looking woman in her forties stood near the radio, busy speaking with a ham who wore a J-38 strapped over his head.  When the odd-ball left, Richard made his move.

“Excuse me,” said Richard to the woman. “QRL?”

“You mean tonight, hon?”

“Haha.  No I saw you waiting on the fellow wearing the telegraph key on his head.”

“Tap, tap,” she said, and smiled as her finger rapidly touched the side of her head three times. “His brain was calling QRZ but he didn’t answer.

“Must be QRM,” said Richard.

“Then it comes in 12 ounce cans,” she said.

Richard pointed to the venerable SP and tried not to look overly interested.

“How much for the SP 600?”

“Dad is over there on the side of the hill,” she said.  “I think he wants $900.”

“Would he  take an offer?”

“No,” she said, “but you can have it for $300.”

“Really?”

“He won’t care.  We’re moving to an apartment and everything has to go.”

Richard looked at the two tables full of radios and began to thank himself for bringing along the snowmobile trailer.  He and Mom and Billy and Sis owned no machines, but pulling the trailer around in New Hampshire was kind of a status symbol.  Like the empty boat trailers on Long Island.

“What else have you got here?” Richard said as he started down the line of radios.

“Lots of stuff,” said the woman.  “I have an idea. Why don’t you just write us a check for $1200 and take it all. Then I can go home.”

“You know,” he said, “I happened to bring a trailer, and I can move the money from my savings to checking when I get home and log on to the computer.”

She smiled. “I think we can make a deal.”

“It’s the deal of a lifetime,” Richard told his son as he supervised the boy loading the radios on to the car trailer moments before the monsoon descended upon them.

“But where are you going to put it all, Dad?” said Billy. “The basement’s overflowing with radios now.”

“I’ll worry about that, son.  You just worry about keeping your mother from looking back to see what we’ve got on the trailer.”

“Dad, how the heck am I going to do that?”

“I don’t know.  But if you don’t, you’re going to get a lot of help from me with that garden hose.”

AR

Left to Right, Top to Bottom:  The Novice favorite, an Eico 720 75 watt transmitter sits atop a Heathkit DX-100B, the war horse of amateur radio.  It weighed 107 pounds and I’ve always been of the opinion that the transmitters in the DX line were numbered according to their weight ... the DX 20 weighing in roughly at that number of pounds, the DX-35 and DX-40, etc.  The DX-100 was not the most popular ham radio by Heathkit, however.  That honor goes to the HW-101 Transceiver, of which 40,000 were sold.

Underpinning the middle column of radios is the powerful Viking 500 transmitter.  600 watts cw, 500 AM phone and SSB.  Built-in VFO, of course.  Sitting on top of the rig is the Red SP-600.  I found this particular rack-mount on RadioMuseum.org where the description said it had been restored with a custom panel color scheme for a home entertainment unit. To the left of the SP is a Mosley CM-1 Receiver, placed on its side.  A surprise offering from the antenna manufacturer, the CM-1 had unique high performance circuitry.  It was about the size of the Drake 2B and may have rivaled or surpassed that radio’s performance.  The Mosley matching speaker sits on top of the CM-1 in the illustration.

On the bottom at far right are the TCS-12 Twins, the receiver beneath the transmitter.  I spent the better part of an evening trying to figure out why I could not reduce the very high SWR when I tried to load a trap dipole through an antenna tuner.  The answer was simple, I realized as the night got later.  The TCS transmitter output tank was not designed for 56 ohm output, as are most amateur transmitters.  The rig was designed to be used in landing craft, jeeps, and wherever you could put up a high impedance short whip, Marconi antenna style.  When I loaded it up to one side of the ladder line leading to one half of the dipole, it took to the airwaves like a duck to water.  I worked up and down the East Coast of the U.S. with it.  But the annoying relay that clunked with each tap of the key led me to consider replacing it.  Above the Twins is the Meissner  Signal Shifter, the earlier 1941 circuitry Deluxe model with the numberless golden dial and a set of two coils for each band desired (the oscillator and final tanks.)  A few years later Meissner announced the EX model, possibly more familiar with the two large black knobs on the front.  One knob adjusted the tuning and the other explained the real reason for such large knobs.  That knob was used to turn a huge turret switch inside the rig to change bands.  Changing bands was more convenient than the earlier sets of coils, but it was also like arm wrestling with your transmitter.  Meissner Signal Shifters pushed out about 8 watts.  They were probably better classed as exciters.  But you could use them however you wanted. They were very heavy and some have called them the “heaviest QRP rigs in the history of radio.”