I grew up in the 1960’s on the outskirts of Morton, a small central Illinois town about ten miles from Peoria. One of my father’s hobbies was listening to the local area police and fire departments on his radio. I don’t really remember there being a dedicated radio of sorts back then for reception of these frequencies, and as such he had a few different multi-band radios. I was only about eleven years old at the time, but I guess that I had a natural interest in his radios, and I can remember asking him what the "SW" bands were for, as he never seemed to use them. "Short-wave" was the brief answer I got back in response. Sensing that I wasn’t satisfied, I can remember him briefly switching onto one of the "SW" bands, then quickly rotating the large tuning knob back and forth, just to prove to me that there really wasn’t anything of interest there. And sure enough, we heard absolutely nothing.

But occasionally, Dad would change the band away from the mostly quiet police and fire frequencies. I can remember one hot summer night when the family was sitting on the driveway; he was casually tuning around the "AM" band, stopping briefly to hear some of the stations that he told me could only be received at night. One station in particular drew his attention, and I couldn’t help but notice that the announcer said that his station was located in Winnipeg. I still remember how foreign and distant that name sounded to me, so far removed from anything I had ever heard about before. At my insistence, he tuned around some more, finding stations throughout the Midwestern and eastern United States. But listening to remote stations was not his thing, and he decided to leave it on a local station, even though I could have tuned around on it all night long just to hear what I could find.

But I hadn’t forgotten about the "SW" bands. There just had to be something of interest there, I thought. Why else would they be on the radio? So one time when Dad had brought his latest multi-band radio to a family picnic, he changed over to one of the "SW" bands at my request and started scanning around. As he reached a particular point on the dial, we started hearing what sounded like people having conversations with each other. He stopped on a particularly strong signal, and I listened in fascination to both sides of the conversation as it went back and forth. One guy was in Michigan, and the other was in California! I was amazed. I asked Dad what on earth we were listening to, and he briefly stated "they’re hams". Hams? He proceeded to tell me what little he knew of the hobby of amateur radio, that these folks owned their own receivers and transmitters, and could talk to other "hams" all around the world. But again, this wasn’t Dad’s thing. Too much talk about "shacks" and "rigs" and "propagation" had lost his attention. He wanted action of the type only to be found on the police and fire frequencies, so that’s where the radio got retuned.

Dad realized that I was interested in radios, so he invited me to go to Peoria with him to a radio store. As nice as it was looking around the store, I soon realized that the purpose of the visit was for him to trade in his multi-band radio for a new crystal-controlled scanner. I remember being disappointed that his new radio could not be tuned, and could not even receive regular broadcast stations or the "hams" that I had recently discovered.

But all was not lost. While exploring around, I had noticed that stored in our basement under a sheet and a bunch of boxes was an old, large wooden console made by a company called Blaupunkt, and it had some kind of radio built into it. This thing was pretty large – it was definitely a piece of furniture first, and a radio second. But it did have some neat pushbuttons, and gazing at the markings on the glass dial, I discovered that it had several "SW" bands! The glass dial was large and very ornate, being part of a piece of living room furniture. Besides the band and frequency read-out information, there were the names of cities in various places on the dial. London, Moscow, Paris. Even at my age, I knew that these places were a lot further away than Winnipeg. I also noticed a few areas labeled on the various bands as "Amateur Radio", so I was just dying to find out if I could use this to hear more of the hams and their interesting conversations.

At dinner that night, I asked my parents about the mystery radio in the basement. "Doesn’t work anymore", was Dad’s response. "Doesn’t belong in a kid’s room", was Mom’s response. But I didn’t take either of those for an answer. I kept badgering them, like only an annoying 12-year old child can do. Finally, Mom gave in and looked the other way, but there was still the fact that it supposedly did not work anymore. And like any other kid of that age, I thought my father could fix anything, and I must have gotten his confidence to an all-time high, because he reluctantly agreed to give it a try. Either that, or he thought that total failure would shut me up once and for all. So he got one of the neighbors to help him lift the console up from the basement, and up to my bedroom on the second floor of our house.

Mom was right – it looked ridiculous in a kid’s bedroom, but I didn’t care. And when we turned it on, I also found out that Dad was right – it didn’t work. But I knew in my heart that he was a master at the art of fixing complex electrical equipment. It didn’t really matter that I had never seen him take anything apart – he was Dad. Not only was he an expert, but he wasn’t afraid of anything, either. He stuck his arm in the back of the cabinet with the power on and started jiggling the various glass tubes that arose from the bottom of the dusty circuit board with his bare hands. I was confident of success, so while Dad was risking his life behind the cabinet, I pushed one of the "SW" buttons and cranked up the volume from the front of the console. Suddenly, the magic connection was made, and everybody in the room jumped as we instantly went from dead silence to a cacophony of voices, static, and heterodyne tones blaring out from the console’s large speakers. Dad had done it; it worked! Looking back on this now, I guess we were pretty lucky that the only injury from this amateur repair job was the bruise that Dad got on his arm when he leaped half out of his shoes.

I went on to discover the world beyond Morton from my "new" radio, learning about QSL cards, eventually getting some from short-wave stations in England, Ecuador, and South Africa, and even hearing some more amateur radio operators. But there was a reason that this radio was in our basement all this time. Not long after having miraculously witnessed its rebirth, whatever problems the radio had became fatal, and no amount of death-defying tube jiggling was going to bring it back to life. Sadly, my short-wave console went back down to the basement to gather some more dust from the air, instead of the glorious long-distance signals that I now knew were out there just waiting to be received.

But Dad would occasionally go to the Peoria radio store to buy crystals for his police scanner, and it was during one of those trips that I fell in love with a Midland 11-500 SW/AM table radio that I found on a shelf as I wandered around the store. Like the old Blaupunkt, it had the names of various international cities inscribed on the tuner readout, as well as several highlighted areas marked as "20M", "40M", etc. I knew from my experiences with the old Blaupunkt that these were the amateur bands that I wanted to listen to. But unlike the large console, this radio might actually be more appropriate for a child’s bedroom. I ended up getting it for Christmas when I was in the seventh grade, and with the soft glow from the three front panel lamps lighting up the corner of my room, I stayed up almost all night tuning around the bands on my very own radio.

At the same time, I had a pair of walkie-talkie radios, the ones with the Morse code pushbutton, and a copy of the code printed out on the front of the radio. My friend Warren who lived a couple of blocks away also had one, and we started an after-school radio "sked" just to chat. I learned quite quickly that by hooking my walkie-talkie up to my short-wave radio’s long-wire antenna, performance could be dramatically improved, especially when Warren did the same thing on his end. After awhile, we were literally pretending to be amateur radio operators, and of course the next step was to do what it took to actually get into the hobby for real, extending our range of communication from a couple of blocks to the rest of the world. I started by gathering as much information as possible at the radio store. I bought several of the ARRL publications, such as "How to Become a Radio Amateur" and "The Radio Amateur’s License Manual", as well as copies of QST magazine. I also had several catalogs from companies of the day, such as Allied and Heathkit. Soon, I knew what I wanted, and I boldly announced my intentions to my family.

"Too expensive", said Dad. "Too weird", said Mom. Brought back down to earth like Ralphie in "A Christmas Story" when he announced to his parents that he wanted a BB gun for Christmas, I quickly realized that I had to rethink my plans for a Collins station with a rotatable multi-band beam on a 100-foot tower in the back of my family’s house. After all, my allowance was about $1 per week, and my supplemental income from mowing the neighbor’s lawn was still just enough to guarantee that I needed to scale back my high aspirations just a bit, at least if I wanted to purchase a station within my expected lifetime. It was then that I found an ad in the back of one of the ARRL publications for a Ten Tec Power Mite, a radio that promised to solve all my problems.

Although about as far removed from a Collins as one could imagine, I nevertheless loved the looks of that radio from the moment I saw it in the book, just like when I first saw the Midland short-wave radio. Simple, hard-edged lines with a bunch of neat little controls. The knobs were starkly labeled with a multitude of abbreviations right out of a science fiction movie – "RECV", "REC", "VFO", "XTAL", "OSC", "ANT". And just in case the operator felt bored, there were three separate switches that needed to be set for 40-meter operation! A drawback for me was that it didn’t do phone, but I could certainly live with that for a while. After all, my grand plans had me upgrading to that Collins station just as soon as my parents saw how adept I would quickly become at the art of amateur radio. And anyway, who could argue with the catch-line from the ad – "Where excitement begins. The wonderful world of CW is yours for a fraction of what you’d expect to pay!" Obviously, this was a company that spoke my language. I quickly decided that the little Power Mite was my ticket to success, so I tore the coupon from the bottom of the Ten Tec ad, and mailed it away, anxiously awaiting my catalog. And when it did come, I cut out the pictures of the Power Mite, and thumb tacked them to the wall over the desk where my short-wave radio resided.

But I was still not quite there yet. I knew that I was still going to be spending a lot of money, at least for a 13-year old semi-professional lawn maintenance man, and I had to convince myself that I could really get a license. But the sad reality was that I had no idea what the theory questions in my license books were asking for, and I was unable to learn more than a few Morse characters from the series of vinyl records that Dad had bought me during his latest trip to the radio store. And it certainly wasn’t for a lack of trying. I read everything about radio electronics I could get my hands on, but I just didn’t have the background yet to put it all together into some coherent sense. But there was hope. I knew from reading my books and QST that it was important to find a local "Elmer", somebody to mentor me into the hobby, somebody to help me get that ham ticket so I could explore the world from a two-way street instead of the one-way street of short-wave listening. But other than the radio store in Peoria that I only occasionally went to, there was nothing in the way of resources to help me out. I was literally on my own, trying to get into a hobby that required a fairly significant level of basic knowledge that none of my family or friends possessed.

But then I found it. I noticed that several blocks away on a street that I rarely went down was a house that had a large, bizarre-looking antenna fairly high up on a tower. I knew from my books that it was a cubicle quad antenna – this guy just HAD to be a ham! Surely he would help me by becoming my Elmer. I told Warren of my discovery, and after we got our courage up, we hopped on our bicycles and pedaled over to his house to introduce ourselves. Since I was obviously the expert, I rang the doorbell and did all the talking. When the owner of the house answered the door, he patiently listened while I introduced Warren and myself, and I explained that we were future amateur radio operators, and we needed someone to guide us in the process. I thought he was just making clever conversation when the first thing he asked us was, "What makes you think I am a ham?" Showing off my knowledge, I proudly told him that it was his cubicle quad antenna. He then looked at us in a somewhat annoyed fashion, and said, "It’s for a CB radio. Sorry I can’t help you boys." And he proceeded to close the door, as we stood there dumbfounded.

After the emotional letdown from the CB guy, I couldn’t even think about amateur radio for quite some time afterwards. And to add insult to injury, not long after that my parents announced that my father’s company had transferred him, and that we would be moving to Florida. I wish that I could say that I met my Elmer while in Florida and that I worked the world with my little Power Mite, but quite to the contrary, I never even met another friend like Warren who was interested in radio. Being a growing teenager, my life was now being pulled in different directions at a fast pace, and the dream of becoming an amateur radio operator was quickly fading away. Eventually, dirt bikes, friends, and other interests came on the scene, and amateur radio got put on hold for a while. Almost fifteen years, actually.

Throughout the years, though, my Midland radio stayed with me. It went away with me to four years of college, and it was on my nightstand after I got married. And it went with me as my young family and I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to start a new job. It was there at my company’s cafeteria that I started hearing bits and pieces of conversations, obviously from amateur radio operators, and hard-core ones at that. One of the most committed and knowledgeable was Dave Benson, now of QRP and Small Wonder Labs fame. At the time, he was a systems engineer for the project that I was working on, and I quickly got taken in under his wing when he saw my level of interest. I went to the local radio store that Dave directed me to and bought some beginner Morse code tapes. At the same time, he lent me a "real" receiver so that I could practice with actual real-world signals. As to the theory that had baffled me when I was a young child, well my college education in electrical engineering, along with my electronics experience at work made the Novice written test a mere formality. When I was ready, Dave gave me the written test at my desk after work one day. Soon after, we went to the parking lot during a lunch break, where I copied the 5 wpm code that he had copied from W1AW onto a portable tape recorder while sitting in his pick-up truck. Not long after accidentally running head-on into my Elmer, I had become KA5WTO, and was ready to communicate with the world. And just like I had learned when I was 13 years old, the way to start was with simplicity. I bought a relatively inexpensive Heathkit HW-99 CW rig that I built myself and soon had on the air with a wire dipole and an antenna tuner.

Fast forward to 2003. I had been fairly active in QRP homebrewing for several years up to this point. What a thrill it was to work stations with a radio of my own design and construction! Then the nostalgia bug hit. I still had my original Midland after all this time, but it had been collecting dust on a shelf and hadn’t worked well in years. Cleaning over 30 years of dust out of it, changing all the electrolytic capacitors, realigning the tuned inputs, and fixing a broken AM antenna succeeded in bringing the old radio back to life, in full splendor.

At the same time, I had been searching around on eBay for some parts for a minibike project that my son and I were working on. Glancing around in the amateur radio section, I saw a new listing for a mint condition Ten Tec Power Mite 2, only superficially different than the one I had wanted so many years before. There were still six days left in the auction, but I decided right then that this radio was destined to live in my shack. I had never used eBay, and hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing, so I asked my wife for some guidance as to what to do. Six days later, after a final flurry of last-second bidding, it was mine for $142.50.

It was in better shape than I hoped for when it finally came, in its original box, with the original manual and schematic. Like an episode from the Twilight Zone, I thought for a moment that I was 13 years old again as I went through the long-elusive package that had been delivered to my door. Over the next few days, I cleaned it up, fixed a few crusted over switches and aligned the oscillator with my oscilloscope and frequency counter. My original expectation was that I would use the radio as a mere shelf decoration, but then I came to the conclusion that this thing might just work after all. All systems were go, when I measured it putting out a whole 1-watt peak power on 40-meters. Then reality hit me when I really started listening around the band. First of all, I quickly found out that the terms sensitivity and selectivity basically did not apply to the Power Mite receiver. And besides, in all of the years that I had used radios of some kind or another, I had never used a direct conversion receiver before. Zero-beat the signal? Receive on the upper sideband? I had certainly been spoiled by superhets for too long! Obviously, operating this rig was going to take some getting used to on my part.

So I practiced zeroing in on strong signals, and again hand-tuned the oscillator with the front panel knobs so I could hear the receiver and transmitter oscillator on a close-by Icom rig. It seemed to me that this thing was alive, and ready to try on the air. But I turned it on at night, and WOW! Every short-wave broadcast station on 40-meters came blaring through. And not just in one spot, but across the entire band. I could hardly hear any CW at all, and could certainly not hear enough of anything to zero-beat with. Obviously this simple receiver was not of the quality of even my first homebrew. I figured I could try 80-meters, but my antenna was only tuned for 40-meters, so I decided to wait for a daytime opportunity.

Of course on the next Saturday afternoon, things were much better. The band was fairly active, with lots of east coast stations on, and the broadcast QRM was at a minimum, so I figured it was the right time to jump in. I started calling CQ with my old hand key. After only my second try, I was stunned to hear W2BVH return to me. I was so floored that this thing was actually working, that my code copying speed instantly lost over 5 wpm, and I barely got his call, even though he repeated it three times! He patiently explained to me that other than a random 100 Hz. frequency shift, all else seemed well with the little rig. Thanks Lenny for putting up with my nervous fist banging away on a straight key!

After tuning around a bit, I came across a very interesting sounding CW signal that had quite a bit of chirp to it. I got the call as NX2ND, and looked it up on the Internet with my shack PC. Interestingly enough, it turned out to be a WWII-era submarine, the USS Ling, now permanently based as a museum in northern New Jersey, and with all restored original radio equipment. I just had to work this one with the little Power Mite, so I called him when he finished his current QSO. Again, success was mine, as he came right back to me on my first call. I found it quite appropriate that our two aging radios were managing to do quite well together. One can just imagine what we sounded like together, with his chirp and my random frequency shift and shaky fist!

But what a thrill it was! Thirty-three years later, to actually get my Power Mite, and to successfully put it on the air has been one of the highlights of my radio days. But as I thought about it, I realized that this radio was not easy to use. There was NO WAY that I could have used this radio successfully as a 13-year old child! I never would have figured out the nuances of direct conversion, or how to tune the oscillator successfully. It’s probably just as well that I never did mow enough lawns to afford the little Power Mite way back in ’70.

Over the years since I finally earned my ham ticket, I have done a lot of neat things with amateur radio that I never dreamed I would do when I was 13 years old. I’ve worked exotic, far-off destinations that I had not even heard of before, such as Pitcairn Island. I’ve used the more traditional modes such as phone and CW, as well as newer technologies such as PSK31 that were not possible back then. I’ve designed, built and operated a couple of homebrew transceivers from the ground up, incorporating advanced technologies such as DSP and FPGA chips. I even use a portable 2-meter rig while flying my hang glider, to communicate with fellow pilots while soaring thousands of feet above the mountains of Pennsylvania. And you can be quite sure that if my parents had ever imagined THAT, they never would have let me go on those trips to the radio store in Peoria!

But now I’ve come full circle in the hobby, not only finally owning that elusive Ten Tec Power Mite, but successfully operating it on the air as well. And now it resides in a place of honor in my shack, along with my fully restored, original Midland radio, as well as several other homebrew and appliance rigs that I have accumulated over the years. But a glance around gets me to thinking that maybe I should go back and start looking around on eBay again. There is just enough room in my shack next to the bookcases to fit a Blaupunkt console…

Return to John's Home Page

Email John