December
2014 Contents
Feature
Articles
The
Radio Rovers of the 1920s
By John Schneider W9FGH
Americans spent $60 million on radio sets and parts in 1922, and businessmen and hobbyists fed the radio
craze by building
hundreds of new broadcasting stations. Almost overnight, the radio spectrum was packed
with signals from all around
the country—the number
of licensed stations went from 28 in January
to 670 by the end of the year. But there were still many smaller cities and towns that did not yet have their own broadcast stations. To serve these cities a special
class of “portable” station license
was created.
Mystery Regenerative
Radio
By Rich Post KB8TAD
Rich Post spotted
a radio at an antique
radio swap meet and was immediately drawn to it. From a distance, he thought it looked like a Lafayette Explor-Air KT-135 regenerative receiver. It used the same tubes as the Lafayette, but so did nearly all regenerative sets from the 1950s and 60s, including the Allied Knight-kit Space Spanner and the Heathkit GR-81. But who actually manufactured the set?
Testing Those Vintage Capacitors
By Rich Post KB8TAD
If you ask most radio restorers, what part or parts most often need replacement, they will answer “capacitors.” Rich has been repairing radios for over half a century,
and, back in the day, often had to replace some of the capacitors. Now, those capacitors are often themselves a half-century or older.
What could happen
to that circuit
if the capacitor was leaky or shorted? How likely
is it to short?
How can you test it to be sure?
Vint Hill Farms Cold War Museum Traces
History of Cutting-edge Communications
By Cory Koral K2WV
(Photos courtesy
of Gary Morgan,
Founding Member, The Cold War Museum)
Current
simmering East-West tensions
brings to many minds the Cold War era. At the center
of electronic technology of that time was a sprawling top-secret complex in the Virginia
countryside known as Vint Hill Farms, where the fine art of
modern spying via HF and satellite was directed.
Now, it’s a museum dedicated to remembering Cold War lessons.
Old-Time Radio Lives Today
By Ken Reitz KS4ZR
What’s the point of having a restored vintage
radio if all you can listen to are today’s ear-numbing AM talk shows?
Now you can get the most out of your vintage
radio by streaming the top shows of yesterday.
Even if you don’t have an old-time radio you can get close to the same experience.
December 2014 Columns
Scanning America
By Dan Veenaman
Scanning Southwest
Ohio and Western
Washington State
Federal Wavelengths
By Chris Parris
Las Vegas Federal
Monitoring
Utility Planet
By Hugh Stegman NV6H
HM01 “Outage” Still a Mystery
Digital HF: Intercept
and Analyze
By Mike Chace-Ortiz AB1TZ/G6DHU
Two More Mystery Networks:
Pactor and MIL-188-141ALE
HF Utility
Logs
By Mike Chace-Ortiz and Hugh Stegman
Amateur Radio
Insights
By Kirk Kleinschmidt NT0Z
The Cold Equations: Why an Extra 30 W Means Nothing; Why Amplifiers Don’t Work; Why QRP Does, and What You Should Really Do to Boost Your Signal!
Radio
101
By Ken Reitz KS4ZR
Radio Ephemera
Radio Propagation
By Tomas Hood NW7US
Hidden Portals in Earth’s Magnetic
Field
The
World of Shortwave Listening
By
Rob Wagner VK3BVW
Solomon Islands, Congo, Russia and More!
The
Shortwave Listener
By
Fred Waterer
Christmas Worldwide via Shortwave
Amateur
Radio Satellites
By
Keith Baker KB1SF/VA3KSF
Happy 40th Birthday AMSAT Oscar-7!
The
Longwave Zone
By
Kevin O’Hern Carey WB2QMY
A Cure for PPHD (Part III)
Adventures
in Radio Restoration
By
Marc Ellis N9EWJ
Sizing, Selecting, and Installing Capacitors and
Resistors
The
Broadcast Tower
By
Doug Smith W9WI
The Dial: Then and Now
Antenna
Connections
By
Dan Farber AC0LW
Antennas of Yore: A Look Back