[Wayne Stacey VE3QO shares some of his “Sixty Years of Weird Stuff in Radio”.]
My friend Jon and I learned Morse code in the late 1950s, when we were about 14 years old and keen Boy Scouts. Our mutual interest in radio developed a year or so later, but we had not yet been able to achieve the 10 wpm Morse speed that was a mandatory requirement for an amateur radio licence in those days. As a result, we decided to hone our technical skills in voice-modulated radio while we worked on our CW proficiency.
As it turned out, our first experiment was not so benign. Neither of us owned a short-wave receiver but Jon did have a portable transistor AM radio receiver. So employing typical youthful fuzzy logic, we concluded that the AM broadcast band was the way to go. Jon found a circuit diagram in a science magazine and cobbled together an all-tube transmitter of the type employed for so-called “carrier-current” systems in the 535-1605 kHz band. The 10 watt AM output was supposed to be coupled into a commercial building’s electrical wiring. In theory, this would confine reception to the building itself because the RF signal would be blocked by the first 60 Hz transformer it encountered up the line. However, Jon instead connected the output to a rather long wire stretched across his back yard. Not having a suitable microphone, he modulated the transmitter with audio tapped from an AM table radio that was tuned to a local station. The signal at my house, about 1 km away, was quite listenable. As it turned out, it was also detectable across most of the city as well.
Unfortunately, Jon’s little bootleg transmitter was tuned to the second harmonic of the station he was rebroadcasting. This evidently caused much head scratching by the station’s technical staff, who were quite adamant that this seemingly spurious signal was not being radiated from their transmitter site on the other side of town. But it did not take the local Department of Transport monitoring station very long to figure things out. Stern words were uttered by the DOT radio inspector who eventually tracked Jon down and seized the transmitter. Needless to say, that was the end of Experiment Number 1.
Lessons having been learned, the nefarious AM band experimental operations then morphed somewhat. The transmitter became a small battery-powered all-transistor job, putting out less than a watt of AM and modulated by a keyed 400 Hz tone. I could barely hear this wee signal at my house, so we decided to experiment at school instead.
Jon would sit in his classroom with his portable transistor radio under his sweater, its earphone cord running down his sleeve and into the earpiece which he cupped to his head in the bored pose he usually adopted in class. In my classroom down the hall, I sat with the little transmitter inside my flip-top desk, its Morse key propped up on books. A short thin wire and an alligator clip connected the transmitter to its antenna – the hot water heating radiator located beside my desk. By pressing lightly on the desktop I could key this Rube Goldberg set-up and send Morse messages to Jon.
Experiment Number 2 was deemed a success. We believed we were quite clever in coming up with this subterfuge and that the school staff never found us out. But I did wonder why Miss McCrum, our ancient home-room teacher, kept referring to me in her quaint British accent as the class “wireless chappie”.
-30-
Last Updated on 2025-01-15 by AdminOARC