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Front Cover

The Australasian Radio World

SEPT. 1, 1937; Vol. 2 - No. 5; Price, 1/-

Registered at the G.P.O., Sydney, for transmission by post as a periodical

Cover Photo: Photo of Repogle World Globe and Amateur Communications Eight (See Page 45)

Highlighted Contents: "Tom Thumb Portable Two": DX Junior Two-Band C.C. Transmitter: More about the "Sky-King Dual-Wave Five": 13-Watt Amplifier: Results of First Shortwave DX Contest.

P.02 - Editorial Notes

Editorial Notes . . .

Nil

P.02 - Contents Banner

The Australasian Radio World

Incorporating the

All-Wave All-World DX News

Managing Editor - A. Earl Read, B.Sc.

Vol. 2. - SEPTEMBER, 1937 - No. 5.

P.02 - Contents

CONTENTS:

Missing

P.02 - Publication Notes

The "Australasian Radio World" is published monthly by Trade Publications Proprietary, Ltd. Editorial offices, 214 George Street, Sydney, N.S.W. Telephone BW6577. Cable address: "Repress," Sydney. Advertisers please note that copy should reach office of publication by 14th of month preceding that specified for insertion.

Subscription rates: 1/- per copy, 10/6 per year ( 12 issues) post free to Australia and New Zealand. Subscribers in New Zealand can remit by Postal Note or Money Order.

Printed by Bridge Printery Pty. Ltd., 214 George Street, Sydney, N.S.W., for the proprietors of the "Australasian Radio World," 214 George St., Sydney (Footnote P.48)

P.22 - 25 Years in Amateur Radio (5)

25 Years In Amateur Radio . . . (5) By DON B. KNOCK Radio Editor, "The Bulletin."

In this instalment the author tells of an impulse that brought him halfway across the world to Australia, and of his early experiences in amateur radio here.

MY own fly-power gear wasn't powerful enough to reach the Antipodes, and so I teamed up with a pal, Bloxam of G5LS, and punched the key from this South London station for a while until once again, business affairs demanded a move.

From "ham" radio I graduated to the more serious side of radio transmission by securing a position with the old British Broadcasting Co. as maintenance engineer, being appointed to the Leeds-Bradford relay in Yorkshire. This relay centre fed two transmitters about 15 miles apart, from the control point and main studio in Leeds, and apart from regular station and control duties, much of the work was in connection with OB's.

I was often to be found lugging amplifiers and microphones about, to Harrogate, York, Scarborough, and various theatres. The work proved interesting, and broadcasting apparatus as used to-day brings a smile at the thought of the antiquated gear of those days.

An amusing but rather disconcerting incident occurred one day, when my duty schedule called for the day at Bradford. The transmitter there was housed on the top floor of a dilapidated warehouse, and once the engineer on duty started up at 11 a.m., he was marooned there without a break on his lonesome until midnight. A motor-cycle combination was available for transportation, but this was such a "grid" that one preferred to use the train and travel comfortably.

The Wrong Train! That morning was a murky, foggy one as I waited on the Leeds station platform for the train. It was due out at 10.25 a.m., but no train showed up until nearly 10.40 a.m. Taking a seat along with morning paper, I glanced up to note that the train was apparently making up for lost time, as, contrary to usual, she hurtled straight through Shipley junction, just outside Bradford.

Then along the corridor came a ticket collector. I handed over my Bradford ticket, whereupon the gold-braided one remarked that I "would be a h-- of a time getting there, as this was the Carlisle express!" Carlisle – non-stop – about 150 miles north, and I was due to get that transmitter radiating before 11.30!

At Skipton, north of Bradford, the express stopped to pick up two special passengers, and I nipped out. A train was just leaving for Bradford on the opposite platform, and I made it. Alas, it ambled into Bradford at 11.50 a.m., and I reached the station at almost mid-day.

All land-line indicators from control in Leeds were down, and when I got through to the Chief, his observations were sulphurous to a degree. Furthermore, an ambulance was screaming its way toward me in case I had been electrocuted. Anyway, I never did know whether Chief Engineer Eckersley in London believed the faithful report I returned regarding the fog and the train mixup, but things never seemed to be the same. Complete silence from a B.B.C. station with dealers waiting to demonstrate receivers, to say nothing of housewives missing their morning cookery chat, was akin to sacrilege!

Back To Australia. A year of broadcasting experience passed, and once again I sought a change. Radio was moving ahead quickly, but somehow the wanderlust had not worked off since war service and subsequent seafaring.

Back in the home town in Lancashire, I passed one day a shipping office. Australia loomed large on a poster, and without hesitation in I walked and booked a passage on a ship leaving London in three weeks. It was an adventurous step, inasmuch that by the time I had worked out all it would cost me, I would arrive in Sydney with a sadly depleted pocket-book.

Again I spent most of that passage "upstairs" with "Sparks." Out of odds and ends I conjured up a short-wave receiver, and we had much fun logging amateurs from everywhere. By the time I reached Sydney in April, 1926, the radio business had been through a bad slump for some reason or other. Nevertheless, through the agency of a Sydney friend I had met in London, I stepped into a job of sorts in a little wireless business in the city and began to look around.

Amateur radio naturally came up again. Many of the early Sydney amateurs were already known to me by QSL correspondence, and in short order I was invited to attend a W.I.A. meeting in the old rooms in Elizabeth Street. It was there I met a really fine bunch of fellows, simply brimming with hospitality, and in those days a "G" ham was a novelty. Here was amateur radio plus good fellowship as I had always imagined it to be.

On The Air As A2NO. After that meeting, two members approached me and asked if I intended getting on the air. Could a duck swim? These two were brothers; one was the original A2TM, Haswell Turner, and the other, Harry. The latter had no "ham" ticket, couldn't punch a key, but had a lot of apparatus and enthusiasm. The result was that I joined forces with Harry and quickly approached the P.M.G.'s Department for a licence.

After due consideration, Mr. Malone, the genial Chief Inspector of Wireless in Melbourne, granted me a special licence on the strength of my old English licence, on condition that I took the A.O.C.P. in the prescribed time. There was not much argument regarding power for Australian amateurs in those days, and in mid-1926 A2NO went into action with 250 watts at a location in Cremorne, Sydney. Since then the call 2NO has hardly ever been off the air in various locations.

That pioneer station piled up some good work. Harry did the engineering, and my job was handling the dials and key. In short order I was yarning away on 32 metres with old friends back in England, and life took on a very pleasant aspect. It was at that station that much experimentation was done with antenna systems, and soon there sprouted between the two lofty sky-sticks what was really the first "Zepp" feed antenna in this part of the world before "QST" began to deal with the idea.

Try as we would, we could never clean up the note from the Hartley transmitter, despite expenditure of much cash on filter condensers. We even made up a huge "electrolytic" with aluminium pie dishes, glass strips, and borax, and it withstood 2,000 odd volts!

It was only long afterwards that we discovered the reason for that bad note, which sounded something like tearing silk, but reached all over the world. The high voltage transformer stood hard up against the "shack" wall, which carried a shelf holding the transmitter, with large diameter copper tube coils on glass rods.

It was a massive ex-navy transformer, and it had loose laminations that chattered. The vibration was carried up the wall to the tank circuit, and as the coils merely rested on the glass tubes, they shimmied slightly, but quite enough to modulate the signal almost as if raw A.C. were applied to the plates of the old T250's. If we had only rested that transformer on shock-absorbing material away from the wall, the note would have been at least smooth R.A.C.

Two Years Of Key Punching. That year and 1927 I seldom slept. The DX bug bit hard, and the week-ends particularly would find me glued to the operating table, hardly deigning to look up for a cup of tea. Lasting world-wide friendships were made, and there was always keen competition between A2TM, A2BK, A2YI and A2NO. From 32 metres we explored 20 metres and worked Europeans all through the day, particularly during 1927.

I well recall the occasion when Belgian 4AU told me to inform A2DY up in Gordon, N.S.W., that he had been "R7 here for three or four hours." A2DY had a lone 201A-Hartley outfit, with about 10 watts input in comparison to our 250 watts or more. My own signal report was R7! Don Lindsay (now in A.W.A.'s laboratory) got remarkable efficiency from his little station of those days.

My First C.C. Transmitter. Then came a new era. "QST" (my bible for years) had been talking crystal control, and it was decided that something ought to be done about it. Harry Kauper, of Adelaide (A5BG), had made a start, and his 32-metre crystal signal was a source of joy and envy. Through the late Clair Foster (W6HM), a crystal was obtained from U.S.A., and the job of building the gear began. That crystal, incidentally, cost us around £10 in those days.

Starting off with a 210 oscillator, 210 doubler, and De Forest H tube buffer, driving a T250, we eventually got on the air. It was the first C.C. amateur station in N.S.W., though we only beat Chas. Maclurcan (A2CM) by a day or two.

Then came disaster. Experiments were undertaken with various forms of crystal oscillators, using our lone and expensive piece of quartz. One day Harry · left a partly completed breadboard oscillator on the workbench with the crystal in the holder, which consisted simply of two polished pennies.

Another man who used this bench for odd jobs picked up the breadboard unit and placed it on one end on the floor. Later in the day somebody brushed out the floor of the shack and swept all the debris into the dustbin. Unfortunately our crystal had slipped out of the holder, and had been among all the odds and ends of spaghetti, wire, etc. Wild thoughts of a visit to the Council incinerator were uppermost, but were ruled out as being too much like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The man who shifted that unit was most unpopular!

We visited various opticians in search of suitable spectacle lenses. While the process of examining, cutting and grinding was proceeding, the fact of a silent station chafed, and back went the old 32-metre "rock-crusher." Again that raspy note tore across the seven seas, and all was well.

Nearly a Silent Key. Around this time I nearly came to an untimely end, when sleepily, somewhere around 3 a.m., I put my hands where they would have been safer in my pockets. For a fraction of a second I took the full kick from the H.T. transformer, 4,000 volts across the outside. I came back to earth about half an hour later, lying across the shack floor, very groggy about the knees, and a little burnt at the fingers. The transmitter was still radiating merrily; The house was about 30 feet distant from the shack, and nobody would have been any the wiser until hours later if anything serious had happened.

Old timers of those days on 32 metres will recall some of the unusual and outstanding DX stations – for example, JKZB in Tokio, SK2 in Borneo, the original OP1HR (Manila, Philippines), and LA1X in Stavanger, Norway. (This latter station I kept skeds with every morning at 6 a.m. Sydney time for months, and never failed to make contact). QRM from thousands of "ham" stations as in these days was almost unknown. FO5X in Johannesburg, G2NM, G2OD, G5XY, NU6HM, NU6AM, NU9DNG, and hundreds of others remain in the memory, and the contacts show in the old log book.

It was in 1927 that commercial radio decided that the amateurs had too much to themselves, and that fateful Washington Conference resulted in the allocation of the bands mainly as they are to-day. With the passing of 32 metres, the Australian amateur lost the finest DX medium that ever was. Those who remember, and now listen occasionally to the overseas broadcasters around the 31/32-metre mark, know that it was the amateur and nobody else who paved the way.

I often wonder what would have been the position if, when in the early days, "200 metres and below" was thrown to amateurs had been taken by them in conjunction with International legal agreements that this should for all future time be strictly amateur territory! Amateur radio might have been very wealthy to-day by sub-letting shortwave channels to commercial interests! Instead of which, despite any assertion to the contrary, amateur radio is literally fighting for International existence. There are people who would take from the amateur entirely what little is left to him.

But wise governments encourage their amateurs as much as possible, and in this respect Australians are indeed fortunate. The VK amateur of to-day enjoys many privileges barred to his fraternity overseas, and the Wireless Institute of Australia plays a big part in this respect.

During 1927-28, I had taken to writing occasional pars for the radio publications of the day, dealing mostly with DX achievements from A2NO.

The published description of my pet receiver led to the permanent filling of a staff vacancy on the old "Radio in Australia and N.Z.," together with the "Wireless Weekly" of those days. That receiver was rather queerly named the "Go-Getter," and how it caught on! Probably many readers of these words well remember that receiver and the subsequent "All-Empire." The latter was the first metal chassis receiver in this part of the world, and the first to realise the advantages of the screen-grid valve as a T.R.F. amplifier for high frequencies.

Photo of 2NO's station in 1926

The old original A2NO station in 1926, then located at Cremorne, Sydney. Immediately in front of the author are the crystal oscillator and buffer stages, with a T250 final and MRI rectifiers on the right.