Your Comments - Part 2

Just thought I'd drop you a line...

...since you and I seem to have a similar history! I "discovered" the fun of short-wave radio in the early sixties with my father's Philips radio - can't remember the model now, but it was a big brown bakelite case with an EF39 RF amp, ECH35 Mixer, EF39 IF amp, EBL31 AF amp and AZ31 rect. How's that for memory! And of course, the obligatory long-wire that ran down the garden. Then crystal sets (school science club). Then the serious stuff from (when I was about 16): WS19, AR88, HRO, 52set etc., etc.
Your photo of the innards of a WS19 brought back memories that I had long forgotten! Oh happy days. Then came the amateur radio license (VHF), in the dying days of real amateur radio. Xtal controlled TX, AM via a pair of 6V6Gs, tuning "low to high", super-regens, etc. All home-brew. Halcyon days. And then it went all professional: SSB, FM repeaters, transceivers, etc. And I lost interest faster than you can burn out the series - filaments on an AC/DC set with a mains dropper mains lead that you've just chopped six feet off!
These days I just take a passing interest, although having recently moved to a "quiet" location in the sticks, wanted a brief refresher / update on LW aerials - and I found your Web Site. Jolly good too.  So perhaps I'll put up 66ft. of wire and a toroid balun, dust off the Racal RA17 and the Eddystone 888A (both modified, of course), just for nostalgia's sake.
And who knows. And am I ever going to get round to finding a good use for those 4 brand new TT21's stashed away in the attic? Along with the rest of the "junk" - and there's a lot of it too.
Anyway, you probably get lots of mails like this, so I'll say ta-ta
73, and be visiting your page again one day.
Alan Hall
G8DLH
Worcestershire, UK

Confident But Wrong

I'm writing to you to see if you could give me any information on the website. I want to do some reading and I know there is a magazine called 'The Listener'. So I'm now wondering if this website has any connection to that magazine. Can you be so kind as to tell me that?
Warmest regards,
Yours sincerely,
Cynthia

I came across the guide page while surfing the net...

...(isnt that a misnomer more like pottering the net certainly on my dial up connection). Somewhere in the house (in dull North Wales, but the sun shines later in the year) I have a copy of the yellow paper version which I remember was presented to me when picking up an AOR AR1000(which I still have) from Lowes in Derbys. Nice to reprise it electronically some years later. It still contains a great deal of sense and good advice.
I started off with an interest in radio in the late sixties as a schoolboy and joined the long defunct Flint and district radio society GW3 XJF I remember was the club callsign. My first reciever was an HAC (Hear all Continents) one valve trf set, many happy hours on the phones listening to Radio North Sea International. People told me if I got into radio or electronics as a career I would never get a licence and they were right. I got a job as a telecoms apprentice with my local electricity board and after spending so much time on first line radio maintenance (Boot Rangers, PYE Cambridges, Ultra MR4A6's) the novelty of transmitting my voice went away somewhat. I was there for 30 years through various positions until taking redundancy last year on a move to Scotland or go away scenario.
Radios well I have had a few over the years and remember stuff like the HRO's fondly and their double hernia inducing qualities. My present "big set" is a Drake R8E, a really good performer though whoever designed the ergonomics had a sense of humour for sure. Indeed its rattling away with Shanwick as I type.I was once visiting a friend in the US and spotted my Drake in the Franklin institute science museum in Philadlephia. I commented to the guy in the shack that I had one and what a good reciever it was and he said "Oh that thing we use it to listen to the local radio station" aaaarrrggghhh what a waste.
Its interesting the decline in pure short wave recievers a cursory glance through this months SWM only seems to reveal the 7030 and a Realistic set as dedicated swl recievers. May be I am old fashioned but I dont feel these wide band hear everything scanners are going to perform anything like the 7030 or R8. Too many compromises in the circuit design to get the wide band coverage.
Well hope that wasn't too boring, keep up the good work on the guide, much appreciated.
All the very best
Alan Edwards

I too had a personal R107...

...in addition to the CCF one at the school, as a teenager and before I came to Canada in 1956..
In a fit of nostalgia I hauled another R107 back here as a second piece of check in baggage in 2000, still haven't reassembled it. But at least I've got it and it worked fine until I partially took it apart on my sisters dining room table in Farnborough, usimg her bathroom scales to get it's weight down below limit!
Many thanks for your reminiscences, you brought back memories. And that sort of irreverent approach to making things work (I have part of a radial arm saw we bought as a bargain on the kitchen table right now!) is somewhat the way we approach things.
This is the most easterly point of North America, Ireland is roughly 1600 nautical miles east. Toronto is about 1400 miles t'other way and Vancouver about 4800 west. I live near the provincial capital St. John's and the next nearest provincial capital is Halifax Nova Scotia about 800 miles or an hour and half by jet! Long wave is not used in North America for broadcasting but I do occasionally pick up faint 150 to 250 kilohertz European signals using loose coupling to a metal core clothes line about 5 feet off the ground outside the bedroom window! Apart from that haven't yet made any serious attempts to say build a loop antenna although I do have a very nice ex US navy TRF Rx. that covers 15 to 600 kcs. (and a 190-550 Command set) That I intend to fire up.
The 198 kcs. (used to be Droitwich on 1500 metres) BBC is especially very weak and the signal not readable. Also currently coveting an AR88LF but it's a lot of money and heavy to move from central Canada if I won it on eBay!
I am dipping back into your (May I say 'ramblings' about matters radio) with great interest and some reminiscent glee!. First time I've seen a definition of the word 'radio', or even thought about it for that matter. But of course Shakespeare or Chaucer wouldn't have understood the word at all!
Couple of days ago on CBC (Can. Broadcasting Corp.) here was listening to an interview with the British editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. A new edition is being worked on; to be issued in 2037 apparently!
Fascinating talk; about 198,000 words in the English language; although even to reduce it to that many there are certain rules. Also that new words are being added at the rate of at least 6000 per year! Apparently a word like, say "Modem" (my example) comes into common use and 'becomes' part of the language.
I have no idea why you get little/no response from the 'non ex-patriates' (by the way a guy called Bry has an CCF memories site. He's an expat. and is now in Sanford Florida). Most of the posting on it are from a little later time even as late as the 1970s! There also some 19 set aficionados including a Canadian site.
I'm not sure what the British do nowadays except complain about the Euro and follow the Americans into Iraq. And it really made me wonder when I saw the London Police riding Honda motorcycles, very few British made cars on the roads and half of Britain seem to not only take holidays in Spain and Portugal but actually own property there!
Going out now to snow blow and shovel. Winter recently finally arrived!
My son is working in a technical capacity in Qatar and we literally 'talk', with a headset at least once a day over the internet, today's equivalent, I guess, of short wave. It's 26 Fahrenheit here and 26 Celsius where he is and that's their winter!
Must go.
Cheers and thanks again.
My warm regards.
Terry Sanford. Torbay, Province of Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada. 
PS. A few miles from where in 1901 Marconi received the first Transatlantic wireless telegraph signal at St. John's, Newfoundland, then a British Colony and not part of Canada until 1949.

Just wanted to say I think the site's great...

...I've just been getting back into SWL'ing after some absence, as my collection of vintage radios now incorporates a few Grundig "Satellit" sets which are eminently suited to the job.
My introduction to SWL was in 1982 with a (then) 30 year old Murphy TA160, a huge valve table radio made for export only and still one of the best, followed by some real fun with a 1938 Murphy 15-valve console with dual conversion (it was this set where I first heard Australia on eight feet of wire) and then it sort of slipped a bit... but now I have a Grundig Satellit 500 to go cruising the ether with.
I did also want to write to you about one other thing though: on the site you ask "Whatever happened to '...ol' cardboard shoes himself, Keith Skues"? The answer is (and I'm sure I'm not the first person to tell you this) he's on Radio Norfolk - and very good his show is too! I live on the Lincolnshire/Cambridgeshire border so it's easy to receive when the BBC 'locals' join up.
The site is a real gem - keep up the good work. I must have a go at making a VLF receiver myself now, I'm fascinated by what you wrote about VLF 'whistlers'. I suspect an op-amp would do to replace the OC71s these days!
Regards,
Mike Izycky