A blast from the past

Like many, I started my hobby as a short wave listener (SWL) on medium and short waves. Hearing the sounds of the interval signals of distant broadcast stations was very thrilling. Gradually this changed to listening for amateur signals.

See https://sites.google.com/site/g3xbmqrp3/hf/interval

Short Waves

As a child, we had low noise levels (apart from LORAN on the top part of topband) and lots of shortwave broadcasters, many in English. These days many (most?) are plagued with very high manmade noise and there are few English language broadcasters. I enjoyed QSLing many stations. Some sent me gifts too as recently as the 1970s.  Much was communist propaganda. Most of this was ignored. What was more important was that QSL card.

As I have said before, you can take a nostalgic trip into the past. The shortwave bands are not the same!

See https://sites.google.com/site/g3xbmqrp3/hf/interval

Historic adverts?

Thanks to Phil G4HFU (see earlier post) I have been reacquainted with the old PW adverts that got me dreaming over 50 years ago. I wonder if other blog readers can point me in the direction of old UK magazines and adverts? I was first interested in radio and SWLing in the early 1960s.

Back then, the world was a very different place. The Beatles were still in the future.  We lived under the constant fear of all out nuclear war (I was terrified in the 1962 Cuba crisis) and most amateur DX was by CW or AM. Although RTTY was around, most digital modes were not. Magazines like Practical Wireless, Radio Constructor and Short Wave Magazine were filled with goodies I drooled over, but could not afford. Even now I do not like parting with money for amateur gear unless there is a good chance of getting very many years of good service from it.

SWLing in the 1960s

Back in 1961/62, when I first got interested in shortwave listening, a friend of mine and I had an intercom across our back gardens with a long piece of twin flex and a couple of DLR5 headsets. Now my friend's dad was a bank manager and he was "rich". Paul's dad bought him a Perdio 102 multiband receiver which made me green with envy! So, late at night, under the bedclothes, we'd both share listening on the Perdio102: Paul would put it to listen on 2.182MHz (the trawler band calling frequency) and we'd often hear an emergency and the local lifeboat being called out. We'd listen for hours. On this same receiver I recall being amazed at hearing South America hams on AM. We both became hooked and not many years later got our licences. See also the radio museum pages at http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/perdio_multiband_102.html

Monitoring Monthly - gone

Monitoring Monthly, the UK magazine catering for SWLs and scanner enthusiasts, ceased publication last month with May 09 being the last edition. Their website is still in place for electronic copies to be retrieved.

One wonders, in current market conditions, how well (or not) some of the other ham radio and SWL magazines and ham equipment traders are managing. Anyone know?