My radio hobby started 34 years ago, lasted a couple of months at best, went into a very long hiatus and has just been revived. I purchased my Realistic DX-160 new from Tandy (Radio Shack), it was a major purchase for a young family with small children but we got it anyway, put up an antenna and listened for awhile, then moved house. During the movie the radio went into a box and pretty well stayed there through another three houses over the next three and a half decades, oh how much I missed during those years.
Recently in 2009 I decided to build a Crystal Radio (which I did successfully), this stemmed from our investigation into Zero Point Energy (ZPE), which in turn led to various studies of electricity, which finally led to radios of varying types.
My interest had been rekindled and so I dragged the DX-160 out of the box, dusted it off and threw a small piece of wire onto it as an antenna and heard quite a few AM stations. Encouraged I joined a Realistic DX-160 user group and all the talk by the over 900 members really fired me up so I strung up a longer, antenna of 150 feet from a tree on the street down to my former garage, which is now lovingly known and referred to as the ‘Shack’.
The new antenna instantly added thousands of new stations and also some SSB signals as well, however I also discovered that I lived 1.2 kilometres from a 5,000 watt transmitter for a local radio station, the signal from this station was so powerful I could hear it in the background of every station from .15 Mhz to about 5Mhz, then it dies off after that and I can receive normally through till 30Mhz.
This led me to further investigation and I have taken some steps and at the time of writing have other plans to fully rectify the issue of the very strong station. I received vast amounts of help from the user group and all the chaps there have been simply most generous with their time and experience. (Thanks boys).
So, you could be excused for thinking this was the end of the story, however it is only just the beginning. This last week I won at auction a magnificent Realistic DX-200 and you can see photographs of it on this site. It needs a bit of a clean which is one of the many things I have to do on a growing list of things to do. I decided to collect 8 different Realistic radios and so far have two. Once I get the full set of 8 that I want, I may get a few extra Realistic radios before I move over to another manufacturer and start collecting them.
Why would you want so many radios? That’s a good question and if you have to ask, then you won’t understand the answer, so I’ll just say that these works of art from our past, are simply stunning, they are fantastic to look at, sensational to operate, they by-and-large should increase in value over time (that is not my motivation however) and let’s face it, as a species we are inherently collectors, and I choose to collect radios.
There is also one other sideline that I should mention, I recently did a trade of a telescope for 10, very old, very dirty, grimy, broken, space occupying radios. These are simple AM radios, and they were obtained for the express purpose of cleaning them. There is something very special and magical about taking a radio that has been abandoned and is past ready for the tip and transforming it back to its former glory. If I can get some of them working then that will be good, a bonus, but the primary goal is to restore them aesthetically. There are before photographs on this site and when I’ve worked on them, I’ll upload the after shots.
Just listening of course was eventually not enough so I studied for my HAM license and started buying various transceivers, after passing my exams I upgraded my license switched callsigns and eventually ended up as VK2NET, the callsign was available and after all I have been doing websites for over twenty years so it was appropriate.
My current radio is a Kenwood TS-480SAT that runs through a MFJ-948 tuner and is hooked up to a very long, long wire. I’ve had good and bad luck with antennas and the development of them is an ongoing and continual study for me. I’m a member of a sensational radio club at Hornsby (HADARC) and I really look forward to their meetings twice monthly.
The story will continue, I have no idea of the next twists and turns but you can rest assured that it will involve a radio of some description.