Quote:
Originally posted by crooner
I was a shortwave freak before I was seriously into audio. Unfortunately being a kid in the 1980s I could not afford a serious rig. I listened on Japanese radio cassette recorders with several SW bands.
I then came by my first Hallicrafters in 1989, a gift from my aunt. It was a 1960s vintage S-120. After that came a plethora of models, including a S-38B, S-40B and a very nice SX-100 that I wished I had today.
But, the set that I really wanted was a 1939 S-19R Sky Buddy. I was reading the "Antique Radio" column that Marc Ellis had on Popular Electronics mag, specially the "Sky Buddy Saga" so I just had to have one!
Many years later my dream came true. I found a very early S-19R without the external battery pack connector. Did not need much restoration. It sits on my shelf and I fire her ocassionally. The rig that sits on top of the Halli, is a first generation Hitachi DA-1000 CD player.
Kind regards,
crooner
|
The pic of your S-19R brought back memories for me. I had one in the '60s, my first shortwave set. I didn't realize, however, that there was a version of the S19R which could be operated from batteries--I always thought this receiver was AC only, with the type 80 rectifier tube. (I remember there was an octal socket on the rear apron of the set, as there was on mine, but I was never sure what it was used for--in fact, I never even thought of it until now.)
The one thing I did not like about the S-19 series was the lousy sensitivity on band 4. I couldn't hear a thing on mine above about, IIRC, 10 MHz or so, even though I eventually put up a wire antenna outside my bedroom window (the first of many SW and ham antennas to be installed out there over the next 35 years).
I had read, in QST or some other radio magazine years ago, that this particular Hallicrafters model was simply a broadcast receiver with a few extra coils and a bandswitch (not to mention bandspread) installed for coverage of frequencies above 1500 KHz (1.5 MHz). The bandspread tuning on mine gave up in the mid-'60s (dial cord broke), as did the main tuning, but a piece of string threaded around the pulleys (that radio had a very simple dial drive) fixed the latter quickly.
A lot has happened since then. My S19R is long gone, and I've had several different SW receivers and ham rigs between then (35 years ago) and now. My present ham setup is, as I mentioned in my last post, an Icom IC-725 9-band 100-watt transceiver driving an indoor antenna (I live in an apartment, so cannot erect any kind of outdoor HF ham antenna system). It works, kinda, but not nearly as well as a setup I had where I used to live (my previous post has all the details of that). Oh well. I guess that's one drawback of living in an apartment building, but I'm glad I can at least experiment with different configurations of my indoor antenna. I am reminded of the story, told in a cartoon in an old issue of, IIRC, Popular Electronics, in which a beginning radio ham was trying to make his first contact with a low-power rig and a jury-rigged antenna. After about six hours of fiddling with this setup, he finally makes contact with someone some miles away, but his wife is bugging him to come to bed. "Okay, so it's four a. m.!" the man snapped, indignantly. "Leave me alone--I think I've made contact across the state line this time."
These indoor systems don't work too well for 2 meters (144 MHz), either. I have an Icom IC-T22A hand-held 2m rig with an MFJ 3/8-wave telescoping whip; it does not work well even through the so-called "local" repeater, some five miles from my apartment. I can use the repeater, but I have to be in a certain spot in my bedroom, holding the HT a certain way, to get any kind of decent results. I think this may be because the second story of the apartment building in which I live (I am on the first floor) has aluminum siding around it; that and the fact that my hand-held only puts out some 1.5 watts with a 7.2-volt NiMH battery pack. (I have a Yaesu FT-207R, 3.3 watts, but the results are the same with it and the 3/8-wave whip as with the other rig.)
Oh well. I'll keep trying. One of these days I'm bound to get things going as they should. That's the amateur spirit anyhow, to experiment with different techniques until the desired results are obtained. After all, if it were not for those early hams back in the 1920s experimenting with their station, 8XK in Pittsburgh, KDKA may never have made it on the air until many years later, if at all.
73 (best of regards),