Radio Shack Views including some history and other photos.
updated on May 30, 2022
VU2ESE visits
W7ZOI Shack.
W1FB and W1DX
(how I knew them...)
VU2ESE and W7PUA, May 2022.
Farhan was on his way home from Dayton and FDIM and stopped to
visit with Bob and me. It was a great
afternoon. This photo was taken in a local park.
We had hiked through some woods south of my house, and then exited
to to the park and some potential views. This spot
offers a good view of Mt. Jefferson, about 60 miles to the SE.
W7ZOI, Then and
Now..
W7ZOI in 1957.
The gear in the above 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 low dipoles or a vertical of one sort or
another.

This is the shack as it appears in January, 2019.
The station in 2016 and later generates a power similar to the
Viking Adventure shown above and is still mostly CW, but is now
all solid state. Much of the present station is
homebrew. Click on the station photo below for more
views.
Click photo for more station views.
The antenna photo shows rotary dipoles for 15 and 10 meters.
This antenna also functions on 17 meters when the
transmatch is used. 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. A view of the lab/shop 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. The 'scope
moves between rooms, depending upon the needs. Two spectrum
analyzers and a VNA (N2PK type) are included in the
lab. Out of view we also have an HP4342A
Q-Meter, HP6002A power supply, HP8640B signal generator, and an
old analog Tektronix oscilloscope. We have
recently added a microscope to facilitate SMT work. The
Rigol DSO is light weight and moves between shack and lab.
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 QST
paper by Joe, W6FZJ. (Remember him?) Great fun --
many thanks to Fred & Susan.
WA7TZY,
WB7BST, and W7ZOI in 1975. I have a color version of
this photo on the wall of my shack.
WA7TZY (sk)
This photo of Fred
Telewski, WA7TZY, was taken the last time I saw him.
He and Susan met us at a reception at the Seattle Space Needle
in 2013. It was an amateur radio gathering
associated with the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques
sponsored International Microwave Symposium. We lost
Fred in the summer of 2020 at age 74 when he died
of complications following heart surgery.
I first met Fred when he joined Tektronix in the early
1970s. Fred was a circuit design engineer in the
spectrum analyzer group. I was also working at Tek, but in
a group called "Display Device Development," far removed
from his world of circuit design. We had a
connection through amateur radio and related writing that we had
both done. (See ref 1 below.) I joined Fred in the
Tek spectrum analyzer group in 1974. Fred and
another ham, Larry Lockwood, W7JBY (sk) were my mentors in this
transition. Fred eventually left Tektronix for
greener pastures, but remained on the west coast. We
stayed in contact and would talk on the telephone a couple of
times per year with our last call only two days before he
entered the hospital for surgery. I'll miss those calls as
well as our occasional QSOs on VHF and above, or personal visits
at meetings in the Northwest. Fred’s amateur radio
interests were dominated by VHF and UHF including 432 MHz EME.
Fred preferred EME contacts where the CW signals could be
heard by the operator. In later years his ham
interests moved toward chasing DX on the 160 and 75 meter
bands. Fred's other interests varied from ball
room dancing to color photography, including the color
processing. We'll miss him.
Ref 1. Telewski, Fred, “A Practical Approach to 432-MHz
SSB,” Ham Radio Magazine, June, 1971. This was
followed by a paper in Nov. 1971 on a 432 MHz Corner Reflector
antenna.