It all started innocently enough, I gotten Marcus one of those old “unsafe†electronics experimenter kits that Radio Shack used to sell in the 80s and 90s. Happily you can still find them unopened occasionally on eBay. The manual was written by Forrest Mims III, an icon in the hobbyist circles. He wrote a series of “Engineer’s Notebooks†for Radio Shack in the 80’s. These thin and inexpensive books were/are very accessible for the teenage mind. They contain just enough explanation and theory to let you build the circuit diagram that followed. Letting you learn experientially the theory that makes it all so dry from any other source. As it turns out, this is how I learn best. I spent countless hours building stuff on a solderless breadboard.
The watershed moment was when my mother discovered the freezer had been wired with a light sensor and an alarm…yeah I forgot to take it out, oops. Well, we had moved to Severna Park by that time and it turns out that the retiree living next door was the president of the local Amateur Radio club, AARC. He was more than happy to redirect the energies of a curious 14 year old from scaring the crap out of his parents to learning about radio and satellites.
I had a lot of fun hanging out with Mr. Bill (Bill Cooke, K3CN). His TV was a Heathkit, meaning he built it out of parts and they *expect* you to be able to fix it, that was fun. And of course he introduced me to amateur radio. Under his tutelage I learned Morse Code (required in those days) and was enrolled in one of the first Novice Class training sessions held at AARC. In due time I passed the Novice exam and was licensed as KA3ERM; this was about 1980 or 1981.
Time moved on and Mr. Bill developed some health issues that necessitated a series of surgeries that took him out of circulation for about 2 years. In the meantime I the license every *other* teenager dreams about: my driver’s license. And the voices in my head started chanting stuff about girls and as we all know, cars are like a gateway drug to girls. So… I never really got any further into the radio hobby.
It was something I’d always wanted to get back to, but never really seemed to have the time or money. I still don’t have the time, really, but in my next post, we see how cheap it can be to jump into HAM Radio.