Discovering Radio
Growing up in the 60s I was witness to the invention of the transistor radio and it soon become one of my best friends. In the daytime it allowed me to listen to St Louis Cardinals and at night I could hear Twins baseball games. The real fun began after the ball games was over and I was suppose to be sleeping. Instead I was carefully tuning the dial on my Western Auto radio trying to hear some distant AM radio station located either on the East or West Coast. I was also a veracious reader and if my memory is correct Boy's Life had an article about shortwave listening and it told about how you could send them a letter stating you had heard their station and if you provided enough correct information about the time, date and program, they might send you something called a QSL card. I ended up with cards from radio stations WLS in Chicago, IL, KAAY in Little Rock, AK, and many others across the US and Mexico.
Then one day my Mother made mention of a man she knew who lived about 10 miles away that had delivered radio messages to and from soldiers and their families in World War II and she also said that he had a huge thing in his back yard that what looked to be made up of tubes of metal and lots of wire running to various corners of his home. This sounded like something I needed to check out and since I had recently obtained my drivers license it sounded like a great chance to explore as well as drive the furthest from home I had ever gone driving by myself. So on a late Saturday afternoon I took of in search of this man who name was Johnny Argeta (SK) KØIAF
After driving around for a while I found his house and as my Mother had explained it did have a very tall antenna and various wires from trees to a house and they all seemed to terminate in a rather large building next to his house. As I walked to the door I noticed my hands were sweating from my nervousness about meeting a real radio operator. After knocking on the door I wiped my palms on my pants not wanting to shake hands with sweat dripping from them. A woman answered the door and I assumed it must be his wife so I introduced myself and told her what I wanted. She smiled and told me I must be talking about Johnny her husband. At times she was a bit hard to understand since this Iowa farm boy had not spoken to very many true Italians. After the initial shock I was to do it once again when I met her husband. When I went to the screen door of his shack I could make out the sound of code coming from inside and at this point I was unable to understand any of it and they might of well have been speaking Italian to me.
I knocked on the door and as I looked in I could see he was sending Morse code and without turning around he raised his large arm and hand and waved me in and as he continued to send he told me to pull up a chair and set down telling me he was almost
done. As I looked around I saw all kind of electronic gear along with TV sets and what interested me the most was what he was setting in front of. Looking back I don't remember the brand names, but if I were to guess I would think they might have been E.F. Johnson. When he was finished we traded introductions and I told him I had an interest in radios and wanted to see if he could help me. This is when he ask me if I just wanted to listen or to actually talk to someone. I told him that I wanted to talk to them and that is when he said to me "Then you want to be ham radio operator". He explained to me what a ham or amateur radio operator could or could not do, and told me about the test that I would have to talk to have this privilege.
As we continued to talk I learned that he repaired TVs for a living and that ham radio was a hobby that he truly loved and it was very evident by the way he talked about it. Before leaving that night he gave me two books that I used until they were falling apart. The first one was titled. "Learning the Radiotelegraph Code" and "How to Become a Radio Amateur".
Radio Takes a Break
After graduating from High School my next exposure to radio happened in South East Asia where I was able on rare occasions to use the MARS stations to communicate with my family back home. This was a service that was every solder and airman appreciated.
After returning home and leaving the military I was introduced to another form of radio and that CB radio. We used it for communications on the farm and we had radios in almost all the tractors and a base station at home. These radios were especially helpful if you had a breakdown miles from home. Looking back I now know that during this time we were experiencing a peak in the sunspot cycle because it was not unusual to have someone to break-in on a conversation and find out that they were not a few miles away but rather a few hundred miles away or even further This just served to re-ignite the bug that bit me prior to going into the service.
I had made mention to a friend of mine that I was going to try and pass my novice exam and we both happened to know another ham that was qualified to give us our test. So we both studied day and night preparing ourselves to take the test and after a large amount of sweat had been dabbed from our foreheads we were informed that we had passed our test and were now novice operators. The next step of course was to take and pass our general exams. This was during the time when you had to take your test in front of a FCC Examiner for both the written and the code exam. I studied more for this test than I had studied for any test in my life. The Morse code portion of the test I really struggled with in part because of the fact that I am tone deaf and also because of the lack of musical talent. I was living in southern Iowa at the time the closet place for me to test was at Des Moines about 80 miles from my home. The problem was Des Moines used a rotating schedule and I did not want to wait for the next cycle to test out of fear I might forget something. That left one choice and that was to drive the 150 miles to Kansas City, Missouri to take the test. QST magazine had articles that were intended to help you prepare for the test and one of the tip was to be able to copy at least 2 to 3 words per minute faster than you normally do because of the nervousness factor. I passed the technical test with flying colors but that was not the case with the code portion of the test. I missed 1 to many questions to get my ticket and the examiner told me I could try again 30 days. Thirty days later I retook the examine and aced it making me the happiest man on the planet at that moment. The General call I was issued was WBØYHG .