M0EDU

Mike Wade - Introduction to Communications

My first memories of radio are of using a battery valve set when we lived in the country and finding that the battery had a limited life. As we couldn't afford the batteries my mother sent for a crystal set. After connecting to an aerial and earth we were unable to hear any reception as we never realised headphones were needed as the advert showed a little radio. Had my father been present this would have been overcome.

Later at boarding school where reading was encouraged during long weekends, I found a project for building a crystal set from a razor blade and pencil. After connecting this to an aerial thrown over a tree and a screwdriver pushed into the ground, this time with borrowed headphones I was amazed to hear a local broadcast station. There were several activities encouraged like stamp collecting through cheap stamp albums being made available, as the cost of stamps to pupils was almost negligible as several received regular letters from their parents in different countries creating a thriving swap market. This made us more aware of the countries from which different families came. Interest in good literature was encouraged through issues of Classics Illustrated being available, which certainly provided competition to the usual diet of comics.

Being aware of the expense of batteries I was very interested to see a transistor radio for the first time in 1959 and noted the very small battery of only 9 volts. I was soon able to benefit from this when I was given a multi-circuit kit based on a crystal set and transistors, which enabled transmission as well as reception on medium waves, though this always needed a wire aerial. An exception was when I modified the crystal set to receive the AM sound channel for BBC television which worked with a VHF dipole and some AF amplification. The tuning range allowed one to hear what the vision signal sounded like though it could not be displayed. My interest in television increased in 1962 after reading an article in Radio and Electronics World about how the new Telstar satellite had enabled the first transAtlantic television transmission, up on unheard of frequencies for us.

The new transistors which worked on medium wave enabled me to get a cheap kit in 1963 for a genuinely portable radio using a ferrite aerial, which I could now carry with me for use during the day. One soon realised that the BBC did not really feature pop music, which was only heard from abroad in the evenings on Radio Luxembourg, which even included a pop record celebrating the Telstar satellite. But the BBC and other foreign stations were good for general listening and I wrote a school magazine article featuring this including a programme about the new space activities taking place. HF transistors were still too expensive and did not yet feature in short wave kits, which were still all valve and needed long wire aerials as well as usually being more expensive.