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BE INFORMED No. 41 MY NOVICE RIG My initial license, KN2HHR,
is dated March 15, 1954. The Novice Class operator examination had been passed several weeks earlier at the imposing New York
City FCC Field Office in lower Manhattan. Having already acquired a used Hallicrafters S-40 receiver, it was in the Spring
that I began the construction of my Novice transmitter and erected a 40 meter half-wave dipole antenna.  In place of the pilot-lamp indicator I1, a 150 ma meter was incorporated. Also the output feed line was not coaxial cable; it was the common twin-lead of the type practically every neighborhood TV tinkerer had on hand. In fact, the antenna was comprised of 66 feet of such twin-lead with both ends twisted together into a folded dipole configuration. One conductor was severed at its mid-point for making connections with the feed line. Instead of the SO-239 output connector, therefore, the feed line was simply haywire attached directly to the ungrounded balanced link. The rig looked something like this photo from the Handbook.  My Novice rig did not, however, house the depicted power transformer, rectifier tube, electrolytic condenser, tuning lamp, and coil can. In spite of the horrific interference to broadcast television it created, it did make numerous late-night, early-morning QSOs until the Fall of 1954, including my very first QRM-burdened one with WN1ZMF on April 27, 1954, which brought this QSL card:  With some fledgling telegraphy experience under my belt, in
May it was back to the imposing New York City Field Office to fail the General Class 13-wpm send-receive error-free for at
least one-minute-out-of-five code test for the first time; and for a second time in June. The third attempt in July was successful
and only then was I permitted to take the written examination. Sometime in August, therefore, station K2HHR of a new General
Class operator appeared on the air; obviously a greenhorn because of the K-prefix call sign rather than the almost-universal
W-prefix call signs. Soon my Novice rig was to be replaced with a less-TVI-causing Eldico TR-75 assembled from a kit. The
chassis and some of the component parts from the Novice rig were morphed into an AM modulator.
It was to be nearly another ten years, however, before the existence of ham radio's then best kept secret - the Amateur Extra Class operator license - even came to my attention. Then K3BNS, the ham radio curriculum was henceforth completed with a trip to the impressive Philadelphia FCC Field Office for the 20-wpm code send-and-receive test and the top written examination before another dispassionate examiner. To authenticate that achievement, the three levels of commercial operator examinations were also passed. My station has subsequently been home to more transmitters than I can even hope to remember: homebrews, kits and factory-made units. Their evolution has been far beyond anything most of us could have imagined. It has been a pleasure to experience. But none of them stands out in my mind as being quite as significant as my Novice rig. Although missing by at least one generation from becoming another of the original amateur operators, it marked the time when the apprenticeship trial established by them was mastered. January 31, 2011 |
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