Such a beautiful article. Ramakrishnan VU2JXN sent it to me. It reminded me of how puzzeled we were when we found "Schenectady" on old shortwave receiver dials, amidst truly exotic locations. Rangoon! Peking! Cape Town! Schenectady? Obviously this was due to General Electric's location in that New York State city. But reading this article, I am thinking that the presence of Charles Proteus Steinmetz had something to do with it. His informal title (The Wizard of Schenectady) confirmed that we have been right in awarding similar titles to impressive homebrewers.
Here is the Smithsonian article that Ramakrishnan sent.
And here is a link to a PBS video on Steinmetz:
https://www.pbs.org/video/wmht-specials-divine-discontent-charles-proteus-steinmetz/
Here is a SolderSmoke blog post about "Radio Schenectady":
https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2020/07/radio-schenectady.html
My journey into the world of amateur radio began in a very primitive way. My first "rig" comprised of a spark-gap transmitter and a coherer based receiver. A coherer is a primitive radio signal detector that consists of iron filings placed between two electrodes. It was popular in the early days of wireless telegraphy.
Spark transmitter (using a car's ignition coil to generate high-voltage sparks):
Coherer based receiver (using a doorbell for the "decoherer" mechanism):
When I keyed the transmitter, a high voltage arc would appear at the spark-gap and this produced (noisy) radio waves. The signal would be received by the iron-filings coherer on the other side of the room. A coherer is (usually) a one-shot receiver. You have to physically hit it to shake the filings and bring the detector back to its original state. That's what the doorbell hammer did. It would hit the coherer every time it received a signal. It amazed me to no end. A spark created in one room of my house could make the hammer move in another room. Magic!
Soon after this project, I started experimenting with *slightly more refined* crystal detectors and crystal radio circuits. As most of you would know, these amazing radios don't require any batteries and work by harnessing energy from radio waves. I guess these simple experiments instilled a sense of awe and wonder regarding electromagnetic waves, and eventually, this brought me into the world of amateur radio in 2015.
My main HF rig is an old ICOM IC-735. The only modification on this is radio is that it uses LED backlights (instead of bulbs):
With space at a premium in San Francisco, the antenna that I have settled for is an inverted vee installed in my backyard (and it just barely fits). I made the mast by lashing together wooden planks. For this city dweller, it works FB:
I have recently gotten into CW, and it has definitely become my mode of choice.
I'm a self-taught electronics enthusiast and I love homebrewing radio circuits. I'll be sharing more info about them soon.
Thanks for checking out my page. I hope to meet you on the air!
73,
N6ASD
I posted about this back in 2008, but I was listening to it again today, and quickly realized that it is worth re-posting. Realize that Shepherd's Heising modulation problems happened almost 90 years ago. But the same kind of obsession affect the homebrewers of today.
Note too how Shepherd talks about "Heising" in Heising modulation. Heising has an entire circuit named for him, just like Hartley, Colpitts, and Pierce of oscillator fame. Sometimes, when I tell another ham that my rig is homebrew, I get a kind of snide, snarky, loaded question: "Well, did you DESIGN it yourself?" This seems to be a way for appliance operators to deal with the fact that while they never build anything, someone else out there does melt solder. They seem to think that the fact that you did not design the rig yourself makes your accomplishment less impressive, less threatening. This week I responded to this question with Shepherd's observation -- I told the enquiring ham that my rig is in fact homebrewed, but that I had not invented the Colpitts oscillator, nor the common emitter amplifier, not the diode ring mixer, nor the low-pass filter. But yes, the rig is homebrew, as was Shepherd's Heising modulator.
Guys, stop what you are doing. Put down that soldering iron, or that cold Miller High Life ("the champagne of bottled beer") and click on the link below. You will be transported back to 1965 (and 1934!), and will hear master story-teller Jean Shepherd (K2ORS) describing his teenage case of The Knack. He discusses his efforts to build a Heising modulated transmitter for 160 meters. He had trouble getting it working, and became obsessed with the problem, obsessed to the point that a girl he was dating concluded that there was "something wrong with him" and that his mother "should take him to a doctor."
This one is REALLY good. It takes him a few minutes to get to the radio stuff, but it is worth the wait. More to follow. EXCELSIOR! FLICK LIVES!
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