I remember when................
I remember the day when I first got my novice ham ticket.
I was out on the family farm driving an old International "M"
tractor pulling a 12 foot disk, disking up some ground in October of 1966 at 14
years of age. Back in those days there was no such thing as computers and
ONLINE license renewal etc. You took the test then waited around 6 weeks
to see if you passed or failed. In this case I passed and my call was
WN7GJE. What a TERRIBLE call...yuck. But I didn't
look at it that way...I was looking at it from the perspective that it was my
"password" if you will to FINALLY getting
on the air and talking to all those dit dah signals I'd been listening to for
such a long time.
But my reason for writing this is not to think about how excited I was when I got my license but rather to compare the size of the RADIO's from then until now. I had a very simple setup.....an Eico 90 watt transmitter (of which a novice could only run 75watts) and an National NC-98 receiver. Back then a transceiver was only for the very rich if they even existed. My two units took up an entire desk. In fact, it's the same desk that you see here in my current shack! They were very large by today's standards and heavy too! The had built-in AC power supplies. Mobile operation back then was much more complicated. You had to have a multivibrating power supply that supplied about three separate DC voltages. Now, you just plug it into the cigarette lighter.
Back then a simple setup like mine still took up quite a bit of real estate whereas now you can have a single transceiver with a built in keyer and small power supply on a single shelf inside a cupboard...shut the door an no one even knows it's there. I actually prefer the big heavy rigs with bright lights and lots of real estate! They are much more impressive. :>)
