[Wayne Stacey VE3QO shares some of his “Sixty Years of Weird Stuff in Radio”.]
For me, one of the big bonuses of beginning my post-secondary education at the University of Manitoba in 1962 was that I could join the campus amateur radio club. The club station, VE4UM, was in those days situated in a tiny office inside the university’s rifle range bunker – a cold and dismal concrete hole that I suspect must have been built during World War I. But members never had to worry about being cold when operating the station because of VE4UM’s one and only HF transmitter. When this ancient beast was in full flame it created enough heat to make the shack feel like a sauna.
The transmitter itself was a sight to behold. It was originally built sometime in the 1940s, as a thesis project by an electrical engineering student who evidently had only a casual acquaintance with safety concepts. It stood 6 feet tall, and consisted of multiple 19-inch chassis which were not mounted in a closed-in cabinet, but rather in a rack frame. All the tubes, coils, tuning capacitors, high DC voltages and RF connections were fully exposed at the rear and cooling was by simple convection. In short, it was a rack-mounted electrocution device for people with wandering fingers.
The transmitter was capable of running about 400 watts of either CW or plate-modulated AM.
CW operations were the most impressive for visitors because this rig employed a keying relay that clicked away loudly, while the room lights dimmed and its VR tubes flashed blue, in sync with the Morse being sent. Originally crystal-controlled, the transmitter had been modified by one of the braver club members to operate with a Heathkit VF-1 external VFO. The VF-1was not famous for its stability, so occasional frequency adjustments were required during longer QSOs.
Although it was capable of operating on several HF bands, re-tuning this transmitter was a chore because it employed a separate set of plug-in coils for each band. Tuning it properly took a skill-set that only a few members possessed. Getting it wrong produced interesting results…such as the time one of its harmonics landed on a frequency in use at the Winnipeg International Airport. So band changes were usually left to the more senior operators, one of whom had named the transmitter “Adolf” because he said it was pure evil. Picking up on this Teutonic theme, another club member had posted a sign in fake German that said:
ACHTUNG!
[Editor’s note: This sounds like a variant of the infamous Blinkenlights poster that was common in many computer rooms.]
Das transmisser ist nicht fur gwerken by der dummkopfen!
Gnob getwirlen und svitch pullen
macht gepoppenkorken mit spitzensparken.
But for all its limitations, the transmitter had another very useful feature, beyond service as a space-heater. Its easily-accessible HV power supply at the bottom of the rack took care of the bunker’s mouse problem.
When I last saw it in 1966, this monster was still gracing a corner in the (new) VE4UM ham shack in the Student Union building, having been replaced for day-to-day operation by a shiny new Heathkit Marauder SSB/CW transmitter. By then, it was fixed-tuned for AM net use on the 80-metre band and only fired up on those “holy-crap-it’s-cold” winter days, well known to Winnipeggers.
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Last Updated on 2024-12-23 by AdminOARC