Now speaking of moving forward in life, here's Bob Jewsbury. What Bob did as he moved forward is known. Bob was interested radio electronics while at O.B.H.S. When he moved forward in life, he did electronics for a while and then moved on to journalism.
The author attended Bob's wedding in what is now another century and even made a movie film of the event at Bob's request. (You see, young'uns, there was a time before the c.c.d., video tape and m.p.e.g. file compression. In the olden days people used chemistry, not electronics.) The last information available on Bob was that he was married with children and employed by one of the newspapers in Victoria.
Bob was a hamateur and a member of the Victoria Short Wave Club, one of the premier clubs in the Province and one of the first to be established. Perhaps he shares the author's contentment with his original call. Those who have nothing to prove don't need a two letter call, do they, Bob? A guy who started with a dynamotor running on six volts to power a two metre taxi radio has nothing to prove.
For technoids only: Bob had an early fifties Ford. On that Ford he had a very rare item indeed, a six volt alternator. Now just how many of you can claim to have seen a six volt alternator? These were very early days for alternators but Bob had an alternator on that six volt Ford. More interesting still, this alternator used an "outdoor" rectifier. You see, silicon diodes were not up to the current produced by alternators in those days so an alternator like this fed its output to an external three phase selenium bridge. It was a big stack.
One of the many evils of selenium rectifiers was the poor I²R characteristic. Down at six volts, twice the I is required that 12 volts would require to provide the wattage desired. Twice the I, of course, means four times the P. Heat was a big concern for just that reason alone but then there was the lossy old selenium to consider. Accordingly, the selenium rectifier bridge was mounted on a special frame which held the stack right behind the radiator fan.
Dynamotors, 50 amp. contactors, vibrator supplies, i.f. strips with umpteen tubes and as many stages to tune: those were the days of EQUIPMENT. "Radio transceiver" in those days did not refer to a dainty little object that one could slip into a shirt pocket.
The author is especially indebted to Bob for it was in Bob's basement that he made his first very tentative steps along the road that led first to a hobby of radio electronics and then, many years later, to making a pleasant and remunerative living from practicing that hobby. Hobby became vocation in the Xerox Corporation during its days of greatness before the disastrous advent of the "Ford men". Intermingled with other jobs, it wound through a variety of positions in electronics and high tech. companies and concluded in the last few years as a Scott Adams character, a technoid, inhabiting a cubicle in the Systems Engineering Department of a high tech. company in Vancouver. (Attention: some of Scott Adams' material is not at all funny: it is just too damned true.)
Bob's basement room conformed to ham standards even before he had a ticket. Among other delights in Bob's educational basement was a Gibson Girl. Of course, the Gibson Girl was never cranked, eh, Bob? Bob probably remembers leading the naïve on about the efficiency of speaker grille cloth.
Educational items down there included many console broadcast radio receivers in various stages of disassembly scattered about the floor. One of these had a ground fault in the insulation of the choke of the electrodynamic speaker. That meant that if Bob could induce a mark to move the chassis with one hand and the speaker with the other, his mark would then receive the full benefit of the plate voltage. Bob thought that that was a huge joke and so he only told visitors about it after they had made the discovery for themselves. On the occasion when the author made this discovery, Bob added a complaint; under the duress of 275 volts, the author had dropped his precious electrodynamic speaker onto the floor!
Wasn't Michael Forster another victim, Bob? Maybe James Godfrey received the treatment, too. If Michael Forster received the treatment, he was no more cured of electronics by the experience than was the author. In Michael Forster's case, he went on to U.B.C. and took an engineering degree in...electronics.
To those of you without a background in radio electronics, don't invest your time in learning about the pursuit from the writings of such lightweights as Maxwell, Hertz, Heaviside, Armstrong or Nightingale. The subject was reduced to its uttermost simplicity by Albert Einstein: You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
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Wireless Set Mark 19 ..................................... Dial Detail, Cyrillic Characters
Michael Forster had distinguished himself in radio long before taking a degree in electronics, however. He had had a Wireless Set Mark 19 in his bedroom. He worked it into a cat's cradle of blasting wire strung about the ceiling.
The Mark 19 Set1 had been engineered to quick and dirty wartime standards. The v.h.f. receiver was, for instance, a superregenerative. The 19 Set had little to recommend it in ham service but low price. Though some had success with the equipment at the time and a few dedicated operators persevere with it to this day as an antique, it became notorious to many for instability and harmonics. It was rapidly abandoned in favour of the more sophisticated, postwar, designs.
The "unusual" antenna and sketchy ground arrangements in Michael's first station did little to help matters. As a consequence, Her Majesty in Right of Canada became aware of Michael's operation and found Herself compelled to dispatch a Radio Inspector from the Department of Transport to visit Michael. Michael closed his station.
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1A superb example, shown here, of the Wireless Set Mark 19 is on display at the Museum of Antique Radio (S.P.A.R.C.) in Vancouver, Canada. It is not only in pristine condition but it is rare in that every single one of its many accessories is present. The "19 Set" is part of Canadian history. It was made in Canada in vast quantity, as many as a thousand a month in the Second War. These transceivers were intended for mobile use, particularly in armour. It provided h.f. radiotelephone and radiotelegraph, v.h.f. radiotelephone (on a good day) and voice intercom within the vehicle. Much of the production was destined for the Soviet Union but had not yet been shipped by VE day and some equipment shipped was returned to Canada. It was this war surplus equipment, complete with luminescent Cyrillic characters on the front panel, that found its way into some postwar ham radio stations. See S.P.A.R.C. Museum's website for a fascinating look at old military, broadcast and marine equipment, the latter dating back continuously to 1901. (991028. The author has just learned that the 19 Set was still in occasional use by the Canadian Army into the early sixties. How embarrassing for Canada, that should have been kept a military secret! Say, it's a good thing that the post war Canadian Army didn't know that there were some of those 1901 Marconi spark coils still around!)
