My father was my inspiration to get involved with Ham Radio. He never spent much time on the hobby himself, a few contacts a year were all that was required to keep him happy. So few folks heard of WA4SAU (and later WB2UMW and finally KC2ON). But he did venture out of the house once a month to attend the local radio club meeting in Huntsville, Alabama.
Having access to his radio equipment as a child provided me with many hours of listening entertainment back in a time before video games, personal computers, or even inexpensive telephone calls. The thought of hearing someone who lived on the other side of the planet was almost incomprehensible. I loved to listen to shortwave broadcasts from all over the world and tried to figure out what all those dots and dashes meant.
Around the time that I turned 12, my dad figured I was old enough to get more directly involved in ham radio. He started taking me to the monthly club meeting and eventually had me join a class to learn Morse code and the electronic theory necessary to get my first license, which I did in October of 1970 — WN4SON.
My father scrounged up an old Ameco AC-1 dual band radio (80 and 40 meters). It was a crystal controlled transmitter that you swapped a coil out to change bands. I had three or four crystals in the novice band of 80 meters. On a good day it might put out about 3 or 4 watts.
For a receiver, I used an ARC-5 3 to 6 MHz unit that had been removed from a WWII airplane. The novice band took up all of about a half turn of the tuning knob, which meant that all the signals pretty much blended together.
My antenna was a wire that was nailed to the eve of the house — maybe 75 feet long.
With such equipment, I didn’t have much luck. I called CQ for hours on end without success in the days immediately following the receipt of my license in the mail. Finally, in frustration, I scheduled a contact with Bob Gingras, WB4JMH, who was my radio instructor. Since he lived about 10 miles away, on the other side of town, things were bound to work. At 3:30 in the afternoon of October 17th, 1970, I made my first contact. Somehow I managed to send readable code despite my trembling hands, and Bob wished me success in all the QSOs to follow.
When my brother returned on leave from Vietnam over the 1970 Thanksgiving holiday, he, my father, and I erected an inverted-V antenna that was maybe 30 feet tall at the peak. It was 50 feet long on each side because we bought a 100 foot spool of wire. The fact that it wasn’t resonant at any ham frequency didn’t seem to be an issue, and I used that antenna for the next 3 years.
Other contacts gradually followed that first one — all of them the random unscheduled variety over the next few months. By the end of December I had made a few dozen contacts in several near-by states. I had QSL cards from 15 stations in 7 different states as proof of my efforts.
Ameco AC-1 80/40 QRP Transmitter
My first receiver -- A WWII ARC-5
