New boy on the forum...

Hi all - just joined the "Radio and Wireless" forum so a short history is probably warranted. For my eighth birthday Dad bought me an "Ivalek" ctystal set and with a long wire stretched down the back garden many MW station were received but it got boring. Dad's friend Fred Turner modified it to receive the 49m band which in the cold war era of the early 50's was jumping. 11th birthday we took a trip up to Tottenham Court Road and bought a surplus R1475 receiver - a bit of work to hook up a speaker and within minutes I was hooked! (Pic attached). Leaving school I went to SE Essex Tech to get a Marine RO's ticket and did about 5 years at sea before joining the CAA installing ILS's, VOR's and other navigation and comms equipment. Emigrated to NZ in 1974 and joined the CAA here as an instructor of apprentices and repair of receivers (Eddystone 680x's were used in the control towers for monitoring the NDBs and the winners of the 4.30 at Riccarton....!) and crystallizing Redifon R499's for the Auckland HF circuits. In 1979 I joined the Calibration Flight of the CAA and spent ten years swanning around the South Pacific inspecting navaids from our Fokker F27's but it was too good to last we were closed down as 'too expensive'. I went to Mount Cook Airline as a licensed avionics engineer, later taken over by Air NZ and I ended up in 2007 as a calibration engineer. Now retired, collected a selection of older radios of better quality, mainly from our local auction site, generally getting a lot of pleasure from just mucking about with radios!

 

Thanks, Bertus, for the welcome. Yes, I do have a ham licence but haven't been seriously operating for years - I put a 2m rig and a mag mount in the car on long trips and it's usually listening to the local repeater at home but that's about it other than a Kenwood 120V that I use for a signal source when playing with HF receiving antennas. When I moved to my current location I went to a meeting of the local radio club where I was totally ignored so I didn't go back! When I first got my licence in the 80's I lived at a great site about 150metres up and sloping down about 5km from a northwest coast - grey line propagation was fantastic and on 80m I could QSO across the Mediterranean from Greece to Portugal - somewhere I have the QSL cards!

73 - Martin ZL2MC

 

I dug out an old pic of my "Ivalek" crystal radio and it says it was a "Galena" radio?
I don't think I had to fiddle around trying to find that "sweet spot".....