Retro Radio: W8CDX Takes Field Day Back to its Roots – “Some younger radio amateurs may not realize that ARRL Field Day has been a staple operating event for more than 80 years.”
“We had a lot of fun putting up another 1930s-style station for Field Day 2017,” said Eric Tichansky, NO3M, the trustee of W8CDX, the Karns City Amateur Radio Club station. The transmitter was based on an August 1934 QST article, “A Medium-Powered Phone-C.W. Transmitter with Pentode Power Tubes,” the receiver on a May 1934 QST article, “A De Luxe Crystal Type S.S. Receiver.” Tichansky has documented the receiver project from start to finish.
Just recently helped a neighbor put together a RetroPie and learned a bit about the current state of emulation for some of the computing machines of the 80’s. Now, it’s about radios with vacuum tubes and homebrew nearly everything in the station.
Then there’s Mr Carlson’s Lab on YouTube. His latest teardown and refurb effort was a ca 1940 device to switch between two inputs so as to to provide dual channel capability to a single input oscilloscope. He reverse engineered the circuit and explained some of the peculiarities of the circuit and the components in the switch. The switch and an old Heathkit oscilloscope are part of the ‘retro bench’ he’s putting together to show how radio repair used to be back in the ‘good old days.’