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| Thread ID: 109254 | 2010-04-30 03:19:00 | Radio pix for Billy T | John H (8) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 881240 | 2010-05-02 22:17:00 | Well, you are right about memories Billy. When I tried to dredge up 50 year old memories of my crystal sets, I found I was not too flash. Like the volume knob I mentioned - that only came along after uncle made me an amplifier. And he made me two actually - one was a one valve jobbie, then he later made one with one of those new fangled transistor thingies with three wires that you could destroy at vast expense by heat from a soldering iron. The knob was actually from one of those mysterious tuning capacitors. I can't recall now whether I had to use the bulldog clip to tags on the coil after getting the tuning capacitor, or whether the latter overtook the former completely. I came along too late for the cats whisker - I only ever had the crystal diodes in my sets. And like R2x1, most of my bits and pieces came from Lamphouse in Manners St in Wgtn when I was on holiday up there staying with my aunt and uncle. I am ashamed to say that some of those wee pieces found their ways into my pockets and out the door without being blessed by the cash register. They just seemed to fly out of the bins and into my pockets of their own accord... I would have been too young to prosecute at the time, but still... :o |
John H (8) | ||
| 881241 | 2010-05-02 23:41:00 | Great thread. When I was 12 years old we moved into a house in Rongotai, on top of the hill carved away for Wellington Airport. Poking around in the basement, I found a cardboard box from the early 1920s that contained some headphones and a bakelite object, shaped vaguely like an old fashioned telephone. It had a single knob on the front, and on top was a glass tube containing a rough cut germanium crystal at one end. At the other end was a cat's whisker mounted on a pivoting lever. The knob operated a simple wiper that moved over the tuning coil - no capacitors that I recall. To use it, you put on the headphones and poked the crystal with the cat's whisker until something happened - and it sometimes worked! No power supplies, no batteries, just a long aerial wire. It was no kid's toy, it was the real thing. According to the pictures on the box, you could buy an accessory to amplify the sound. It featured two terrifying-looking valves and a horn speaker. I wanted one, but my Dad told me they don't make them any more... |
Jayess64 (8703) | ||
| 881242 | 2010-05-03 02:11:00 | More reminiscences......during the war, ie WW2, when new books, toys etc were scarce or non-existent, my Dad bought a 1926 Chums Annual for Christmas. This had a series of wireless articles running through it called the Chums Wireless Club. These articles became the radio bible for me for many years :) The colour frontispiece used to fascinate me, especially the tuning coil with shiny enameled copper wire and slider tuning: www.imagef1.net.nz The articles started with simple circuits, like crystal sets and worked their way up from single valvers to multivalve neutrodyne sets with HF stages and speaker output. www.imagef1.net.nz Before germanium diodes, the post war government surplus shops in the UK had heaps of silicon diodes that had been used in radar sets. These were about the same size as a 22 cartridge case. Various assorted crystals could be bought in packets, comprising galena, corundum, iron pyrites, and other types I can't remember. Ebonite panels were de-rigeur for the front panels of baseboard built radio sets and for the terminal strip at the rear. Going just out from Birmingham City centre towards Snow Hill station was a shop with an incredibly dirty grimy window. By peering in closely it could be seen that it was a radio shop. The most amazing shop ever......all the stock was pre-war :banana It was run by an old boy who would emerge from the back...eventually... he lived there. I was probably his only ever customer since 1939.. This was where I bought ebonite sheet and other items..all at pre-war prices. This shop was there until around 1954 or so until re-development started. |
Terry Porritt (14) | ||
| 881243 | 2010-05-03 02:43:00 | Great thread. When I was 12 years old we moved into a house in Rongotai, on top of the hill carved away for Wellington Airport. (snip) How odd - we lived there too. However, our house was one of the ones knocked down when the hill was dismantled to open up the enlarged Rongotai Airport, so the family moved to Island Bay. |
John H (8) | ||
| 881244 | 2010-05-03 06:47:00 | Where Billy went wrong: As a wee lad in primary school, I had an abiding interest in all things electrical, so one Christmas my parents gave me a construction kit called "The Young Electrician". I soon out-grew that and started scouring the inorganic rubbish collections for anything useful looking. I recall coming out of Primary school one day when the inorganic was due and finding one of the old TRF radios with the three tuning knobs etc. I was very small and it was too heavy to carry, so to my eternal shame, I bashed it to pieces (yes, really...sob) and took home any bits that looked useful. The crystal set came along a year or so later, then later again my Father went to Fiji on a business trip with my mother and they brought back three very small six-transistor radios, one for me and one each for two of my three sistsers, heaven knows what the third one got. That lasted a few weeks until the battery went flat, and not having pocket money I couldn't buy a replacement, so next inorganic I got a timer off an old stove, souvenired an out-of-use bell transformer from school, sold enough soft-drink bottles to buy a copper-oxide rectifier (still have it) scrounged filter electrolytics from more old radios and voila! I had a radio alarm clock. After I left school I went into the wonderful world of electronics, and I've been there ever since, in one form or another, but now mostly industrial. So, now I'm back pottering around with old radios in my spare time and happy as a pig in swill. Where did I go wrong? There's never been that much money in electronics and the increasingly rapid changes in technology (read 'reliability') have effectively killed off the repair industry, hence my move to industrial electronics where they still value diagnostic skills. Pity mine don't work so well on computers! Cheers Billy 8-{) ;) |
Billy T (70) | ||
| 881245 | 2010-05-03 10:48:00 | And Mrs Billy? Does she cope I wonder? ;) | John H (8) | ||
| 881246 | 2010-05-03 11:00:00 | How odd - we lived there too. However, our house was one of the ones knocked down when the hill was dismantled to open up the enlarged Rongotai Airport, so the family moved to Island Bay. Our house was one of the ones put onto a trailer and shifted off the hill. It's still in Kemp St., looking sad and neglected. It seems to have shrunk since we lived in it... |
Jayess64 (8703) | ||
| 881247 | 2010-05-03 11:35:00 | And Mrs Billy? Does she cope I wonder? ;) Mrs T has adopted a strangely acquiescent attitude to my recent accumulation of vintage radios and miniature TVs, which has been going on for two or three years now. She is used to my instruments etc that I use for my work, and I've always repaired our appliances (fridges excepted) and the odd TV or radio and motormower etc. There's been no complaints and I think she's hoping I'll retire soon and that all the new (old) radio gear will keep me out of her hair. :devil No chance of me retiring though, I'm far too young and active, I enjoy working and quite frankly, like everybody else, we need the money. Cheers Billy 8-{) :) |
Billy T (70) | ||
| 881248 | 2010-05-03 12:14:00 | This is getting very strange. Our Family moved from Wanganui to Wellington to Strathmore Park and I went to Rongotai College before and during the Wgtn airport construction. The motor scrapers full of material went past with great regularity. When I first married at age 24 we moved into a house in Kemp St. |
Sweep (90) | ||
| 881249 | 2010-05-03 21:11:00 | Our house was one of the ones put onto a trailer and shifted off the hill. It's still in Kemp St., looking sad and neglected. It seems to have shrunk since we lived in it... Well, I actually don't know for sure that ours was "knocked down" - it might have been shifted too. I was too little at the time to know... Dad says the neighbours saw at least one landing plane touch its wheels on the roof ridge of that house - apparently they had to swoop in really quickly to get a decent length of runway in the old days! All the crockery in the house used to rattle like crazy from the noise of landing aircraft. |
John H (8) | ||
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