*  The Heathkit AR-3 receiver (much better than the National SW-54 I had
with its ersatz bandspread tuning and cheaper as well.  Sure felt my buddy
with the AR-3 had a better deal than the hard earned $60 I shelled out for
the 54)

*  The Hammarlund Superpro receiver (really impressive with all those knobs
and dials - absolutely "profesh" ...short for professional)

*  The Heathkit Apache transmitter (real AM plate modulation at a price you
could afford, but definitely hernia time when it came to doing work under
the chasis)

*  The Johnson Viking Valiant transmitter (Cadillac of the airwaves....The
Collins was the Rolls Royce... - a friend spend a full year cutting lawns
to buy one)

*  The Heatkit DX-40 transmitter (only had screen grid modulation.  The
transmitter for novices and less affluent generals)

*  The Hammarlund HQ-100 receiver (my second receiver.  General coverage
with ham bands calibrated on  REAL bandspread tuning.  Even had a Q
multiplier for QRM.  Big improvement over the SW-54)

*  The Hammarlund HQ-145 receiver (big brother to the HQ-100.  I believe it
even had a crystal filter)

*  The Hammarlund HQ-170 receiver (Ham band only, but like the Valiant, was
a Cadillac.  The Valiant, HQ-170, and Mosely TA33 - yep, the TA33 is that
old - made a dream rig.)

*  Homebrew 813 transmitters with 866A mecury vapor rectifiers (I used to
operate with the lights off just to experience the warm deep blue glow from
the 866s.  Great on a cold winter night.)

There were a number of retired OMs (originally from the NYC area) living in
south Florida on 15M phone who I used to chat with after school.  This was
in the early '60s.  I remember one was Moe Stabin - I forget his call.  He
used to run occasional phone patches to my grandmother who patiently
endured the QRM and QSB so her grandson (then about 13 years old) could
show off.  Did anyone else on the net work the south Florida retired crowd?

73

Bob, I'd say that to a 15 year-old kid, there were few better
gut-level reinforcements linking electronics and said kid for all
time than watching the plate color of a pair of 813s or 826s
instantaneously changing while pumping your own voice out to
someone a couple of hundred or more miles away on one of those
cold winter nights.  And no repeaters - just you and all the
effective radiated power you can muster for your own personal
RF beacon into the dark beyond.

My OM, now part of that South Florida retired crowd, never really
understood the big deal about working hard for DX, when he could
leisurely ragchew about the weather and his problems with his rig
with some other guy he actually knew a few miles away who was
having the same weather and same problems with the same rig.

But he indulged my 6-meter DX thing with bemused tolerance -
along with complete insensitivity to the protocols of the
pursuit.  I recall him early one Sunday morning shaking me from a
sound sleep, saying only, "Hey, wake up, I got someone on the air
wants to talk with you."  I rolled over, convinced it was one of
his local buddies we could probably ~drive~ over to see in five
minutes, and mumbled, "Can't we do it later..?"  "I don't think
so..." he said, dragging me off to the rig.

What I next heard was sheer chaos, a veritable DX feeding frenzy
of at least a dozen local VHF DX freaks, some of whom I
recognized instantly, pitifully screaming "BREAK, BREAK,
BREAK..." to a callsign with some indecipherable prefix I was
sure I'd never even heard of, let alone worked.

With about the same nonchalance he would've mustered for a Lenny
or a Frank in Flushing, the OM hit the xmit/rcv switch and said,
"Okay, Fred, hope you're still with us here.  I got the Jr. Op
with me here now, and I'm sure he'd like his own QSO with you -
like I said, his handle's Bruce and his call is K2VDR - so I
guess I'll just say thanks and 73 for now, and turn it over to
him," just like he was passing the baton to the anchorman in our
own personal two-man relay race.  I still wasn't sure what I was
doing up, or whom he was talking with, but I had an ominous
feeling I was about to find out, and I did:  "HC1FS, in Quito,
Ecuador, this is W2SCA in New York, over and out."

There was about five seconds of more frantic screaming from even
more breakers, enough time for me to start to turn red in the
privacy of my own home, wondering how long the OM had been
keeping this Rare One on the hook - probably asking him if he had
the same rig and the same weather down there, and what he was
doing about it.  I hoped perhaps it was just mass hallucination,
or at least a crazed bootlegger playing games from New Jersey.

And then, all of a sudden, there he was, with the patience, tact
and 30-over-nine signal strength of a God:  "Ah, W2SCA, this is
HC1FS.  Ah, okay, Art, starting to get a LOT OF QRM on you now.
Band must really be opening up now.  Never HEARD any north-south
path like this before - I'd better get going and take care of
some of these other guys while I can.  But roger on the Jr. Op,
and I'll stand by for him now.  So, Bruce, if you're there, ah,
K2VDR, this is HC1FS, over..."

He had that inimitable long, slow F2 QSB, and I knew this was no
hoax.  I couldn't stand to hear the anguished cries of the
exponentially increasing number of breakers anymore, and hit the
switch instantly.  No meteor-burst QSO ever took place faster -
signal report, thanks, break, and OUT of there.  I wouldn't have
had the guts to hang him up one more second if it didn't take.

But it did, and he confirmed, nice and slow, that I was
thirty-over-nine, too, and I started to get the feeling the OM
had found a soulmate who just happened to live in Ecuador before
anyone else even realized the band was open, and that Fred would
just as soon have just kept chewing the rag with the OM that
morning.  I never heard another South American on six - that
morning or ever again - and in about ten minutes the band went
dead, but not before I heard Fred work a bunch of folks I
couldn't hear all over the Eastern US.

The OM was glad THAT was over, and hooked up with Lenny and Frank
in Flushing to talk about their rigs and the weather and the
craziness of DXers.  I went back to bed and pulled the covers
over my head, full of new dreams of a WAC on six that would never
happen.

And I guess when the QSL came in a few weeks later with a real
Ecuador stamp and Quito postmark, it was the first time I knew
for sure that the whole thing hadn't been one big dream in the
first place.  And that I owed a big one to the OM - even if every
6-meter DX head in the New York metropolitan area thought he was
a complete lid that Sunday morning.

Even Lenny and Frank could understand that.

73, Bruce

Bruce Steinberg, N6LZ
uunet!sco!bruces
--
It's not what you look like when you're doin' what you're doin',
it's what you're doin' when you're doin' what it looks like you're doin'.