My First Heathkit

In the winter of 1968, I was taking a French class in 9th grade and wanted to tune in to some foreign shortwave stations to listen to real French being spoken. I ordered the cheapest Heathkit shortwave receiver, the model GR-81, that they had for $24. I put it together and got it working and was amazed and dissapointed at the same time. I had never used a regenerative receiver before and discovered that they made lousy shortwave receivers for AM broadcast signals but made excellent ham band receivers. Suddenly, I could understand the single sideband phone signals on the ham bands and could hear CW (international morse code) as tones rather than thumps. I quickly taught myself the Morse code, got my ham license, forgot all about French and the rest is history. I owned a number of used Heathkit ham receivers and transmitters but only built three Heathkits in my life - the GR-81, an HW-8 portable CW transceiver and the IG-5218 audio generator. I actually still have and use the audio generator that I built in the early 80s.

FORTRAN - 1954

In 1954, the first FORTRAN program was run on an IBM 704 mainframe. I remember those darn keypunch cards and Fortran from my engineering classes at the University of Washington in 1975. This photo is courtesy of Geeks Fun Blog.

Navy LF Transmitters

How do you communicate directly with a sub under water? You use very low frequency RF 15-30 kHz and LOTS of power (1MW). I live 20 miles from one of these Navy transmitters (Jim Creek, WA) and had the pleasure to tour it once with a hamfest group in the 1980s. I worked in a TV station so was used to broadcast sized transmitters but was still in awe at antenna tuner coils that you could stand up inside of. They wouldn't let us take pictures since it was an active site but here are some links from around the web of virtual tours, pictures, etc:

Yosami Japan VLF station using mechanical generators

 Jim Creek,WA virtual tour