Radio Shack Views, including some history.

updated on May 21, 2017


VU2ESE visits W7ZOI Shack.  Click on photo for more.

W1FB and W1DX  (how I knew them...)

Lunch with K7QO

W7ZOI, Then and Now..

  W7ZOI in 1957.

The gear in the photo is pretty common for a novice, or post-novice station of the era.   The Viking Adventure kit transmitter was driven by a remotely-tuned VFO built from a description in the 1954 ARRL Handbook.   The receiver is a four band outgrowth of the "SSB Q-5er," which consisted of a crystal controlled converter ahead of a BC-453 Command Receiver.   The Novice Q-5er and the SSB Q-5er were creations of W6TNS as published in CQ Magazine.   A National NC-46 receiver provided general coverage listening in an era where there was a lot to be heard.     My antennas were simple, consisting of low dipoles or a vertical of one sort or another.    

My present station, in 2016, generates a power similar to the old Viking Adventure and is still mostly CW, but is now all solid state.   The present station is almost all homebrew.    Click on the station photo for some other views, including shots of recent (2016) changes.
     

The antenna photo shows my little beam: two elements on 15M.   A 10M dipole is also on the mast.   The array is 28 ft up on a push-up mast that is rotated by hand.       

Our homebrew gear is built in another corner of the basement of our house.   A view of the lab is shown below.
  The lab is dynamic in that it changes frequently, depending upon the experiments being done.   The photo shows the main lab oscilloscope, a Rigol DS1052E.    Two spectrum analyzers and a VNA (N2PK type) are shown.    Out of view we also have an HP4342A Q-Meter and an old analog oscilloscope.    We have recently added a microscope to help with SMT work.

Some other history.

  While on a 2013 trip to Florida, we spent a couple of days with John Lawson, K5IRK, and his wife Carol.    John and I collaborated on a receiver project, the "Progressive Receiver." (QST, Nov, 1981)    Click on the receiver photo for a shot of John and me with the receiver.   (John is the one with the hair.)   John tells me that the original receiver still works just as it did in 1981.   John replaced all of the electrolytic capacitors to achieve this status.    Guess even our 1981 solid state homebrew receiver has reached boat-anchor status.     

A major ham experience in my past was my participation in EME.  I helped Fred and Susan Telewski, WA7TZY and WB7BST, with a station for 432 MHz.   Their EME station was first put on the air in November 23, 1975, so we could work a group at the large dish at Stanford University.   We devoted an all-night session to the project, finally making a contact at 5 AM.    I returned the next morning in daylight to get a photo of the antenna before it was moved to Fred's back yard where it did not irritate the neighborhood.   (The photo below was by Fred.)  The antenna was a 128 element extended expanded co-linear (bed spring) on a polar mount, an outgrowth of a W6FZJ QST paper.   (Remember him?)  Great fun -- many thanks to Fred & Susan.
WA7TZY, WB7BST, and W7ZOI in 1975.