It wasn’t until years later that I again became interested in mini broadcasting. Unfortunately I never reclaimed the transmitter at the end of the school year and that’s the last I heard of it. I eventually handed that transmitter over to someone else to operate, as my activities were in conflict with my involvement with the campus student radio station. Broadcasting from the 18th floor of my high rise dormitory, with a wire antenna hanging down to about the 3rd story level, the station covered most of the campus. The transmitter did have a second lease on life though when I attended college. At age 15 I received a telegram from the FCC office in Boston, requiring me to cease and desist immediately! I never understood why the neighbor didn’t let me know I was causing him grief but that was neither here nor there…it was the end of my mini broadcast station for a long time. For another it was evidently rich with harmonics, as I later learned that my transmissions were interfering with my neighbor’s police monitoring hobby. That transmitter was not, however, without its problems.
My friends would bring their records to the house and we would play all the top hits. Now I was able to produce programs for my station then listen to them while I rode my bike around the neighborhood, transistor radio precariously taped to the handlebars. For my 13th birthday I received a Lafayette RK-142 mono reel-to-reel tape recorder. Almost certainly illegal, I had no idea what its power output was (it could have been a watt or so), but with the array of wires and aluminum poles I strung up on the roof I was able to hear it for several blocks with ease. Well my uncle’s home brew transmitter was a revelation. It boggles the mind that never once did I get shocked by that rig…but can you imagine that today? Lawsuits would be flying everywhere. “Don’t ever touch the live wires,” and he also explained that I should never be grounded when I was using it…that is, don’t use it outdoors or in the cellar. All the wiring and connections were completely exposed so he gave me a quick safety tutorial. It was about a one foot square peg board with three tubes, a big variable capacitor, a transformer and spring clips for audio input, antenna and ground. Still this was one of the most exciting toys I had and it was a thrill to be “on the air” with my own station.Īs it happened my Uncle had an electronics background and when he saw my setup he said, “We can do a lot better than that!” In actuality, he had previously bread-boarded an AM transmitter for his own sons, but they were never bitten by the bug, so they gladly turned it over to me. Of course the range was very limited and the audio quality was miserable – notably inferior to real broadcast stations. I knew nothing of pads, proper loading or impedance but it didn’t matter…with this arrangement I could listen to my records anywhere in the house and even out in the yard.
After the initial fun wore off I removed its built-in crystal microphone and replaced it with a connecting wire for a direct input to be fed from our Webcor phonograph using a dropping resistor I selected through trial and error. This looked like a toy walkie-talkie but was actually designed for one-way broadcasting to any AM radio. It all started with a Tiny Tim AM transmitter. Actually I’ve been fooling around with low power transmitters since I was a kid. (7 lbs.One of the things that has done more to enhance the enjoyment of my vintage radios is the ability to program my own radio station to feed my favorite music and Old Time Radio Shows to them. Powered by included AC adapter or requires four D batteries. Requires additional longwave antenna to receive LW signal additional external shortwave antenna can enhance SW reception. Its built-in horizontal antenna rotates 360° for precise AM reception while its telescoping antenna pulls in FM, SW, and aircraft band signals. Stores up to 100 favorite stations for each frequency band. In addition to FM reception (88-108 MHz), it can listen to civilian aircraft radio transmissions in the 117-137 MHz frequency band.
The radio also operates in the shortwave band (1711 kHz - 30 MHz) with single-sideband (SSB) tuning for listening to two-way shortwave communications. Operating at 100-519 kHz, just below the AM band (520-1710 kHz), longwave signals are used by those interested in low-frequency experimental radio (LowFER) communications as well as ITU Region 1 broadcasters in Europe and as far away as Mongolia. Unlike typical shortwave radios, this is the model that also receives longwave broadcasts.