How did your interest in electronics ignite?

[TonyDuell]

Originally Posted by rambo1152

I had a kit that used regular wire-ended components on a breadboard, which was a matrix of coil-springs. I can't remember much else about it, does anyone know what it was called?

If the components were loose (not already fixed to the breadboard) then this sounds like a Philips EE kit of some type. This site :

https://ee.old.no/

has manuals for some of them if you want to try to indentify it.

which was a matrix of coil-springs. I can't remember much else about it, does anyone know what it was called?

The Philips electronics sets (I had one).

[Graham G3ZVT]

Thanks guys it was this set
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vintage-Phi.../dp/B01EJR1H4C
I remember the kid on the box speaking into the crystal earpiece.
Surprised about the AF116 and AC126, I rather thought they were OC44 or OC71
I remember there was an LDR included but I imagined it was a larger ORP12
Is that a dice (or should that be die) in the top right?
I don't remember that, and I can't imagine why it was included.

https://youtu.be/Laz-eW4jLcA?t=115
That square Philips speaker, it was quite high impedance and I had it for years afterwards.

[Junk Box Nick]

I had this set. Even as a ten year old it baffled me why the lad was speaking into the crystal earpiece.

I had the add-on set which meant I could listen to the radio through a speaker. It was possible to build an intercom too - the only time I've ever used a loudspeaker as a microphone.

I think the impedance was 50 ohm.

[Graham G3ZVT]

It's odd, I must have built all the suggested circuits with that kit, and learned a lot in the process, yet apart from a few details I have little memory of how the breadboard actually looked.

[Maarten]

AC and AF transistors were usual for 1966. A few years later, silicon transistors were used in those sets.

[Diabolical Artificer]

Some great stories here...

"My (astro)physically-gifted colleague took on the job of destroying the "Cosmic Revenge Tyrants" star-base" I can tell that still rankles Guy, much like the time David Walker peed on my head whilst digging a den. I get the space bit, your description of your play is similar to the world I used to invent playing Lego, with running commentary.

Music got me into electronics at age 13 ish in the late 70's; I built a speaker out of old TV speakers borrowed from a local TV shop dump out back. then I got into building pedals out of Everyday Electronics when I got a guitar, then I stopped as I left home to live on a boat and travelled and lead an unsettled life.

Started again when I picked up the guitar around 2007 after buying a Revox B77 and Teac 4 track for a fiver at the local tip as well as getting a small mixing desk.

Electronics isn't just a hobby, it's replaced less savoury aspects of my life, given me focus.

Andy.

[ionburn]

Originally Posted by rambo1152

I remember there was an LDR included but I imagined it was a larger ORP12

I still have several parts from mine. I recognise the choke, transistor heatsink, and I still have the little rubber boots the transistors fitted into (presume to stop the leads shorting).

I aslo still have the LDR, although I have had to chip the plastic back from time to time to resolder a lead on as they broke after much use. It still works. Visually the case is quite different, but the internal element looks identical to an ORP12. As I have both I have been meaning to compare the two electrically, but have never got round to it.

The manual is still around somewhere too. I keep meaning to have a root round to find it, but I suspect somewhere in the loft.

[Graham G3ZVT]

Wasn't there a component called a "rain grid" (moisture detector)

I don't remember the transistor "boots" but I imagine they were to provide strain relief on the leads to prevent them shearing off.

[Graham G3ZVT]

Did anyone follow the ITV Schools series "First Steps in Physics" (1966) and have the accompanying book and experiments kit?

There were a pair of "Magnadur" magnets included, with the poles on their faces rather than their ends.
I hadn't encountered magnets as strong as those before.

[Refugee]

I had a kit of magnets when I was young that included several coin like magnets that were more powerful than almost all others I had seen at the time.

[G3VKM_Roger]

I wrote the following some years ago but it might be of interest:-

I like to think that I had a classic entry into Amateur Radio; short wave listener, meeting a local amateur, joining the local radio club and then sitting the RAE and Morse Test. But, when I look back further than the SWL phase, I can recall a number of significant incidents that “got me started” on the radio path.

I was born in Nottingham in 1949 and from school age had a general interest in “things scientific”. At first, my interests mostly lay with chemistry sets and all the concoctions I could make, some smelly, some amazing and others plain dangerous! An early interest in electrical things came from playing around with electrolysis but one day my sister’s fiancée gave me the innards of an old GPO telephone. I soon found out how to hook them up using old transformer enamelled wire and a 4.5 volt cycle lamp battery to make a one-way telephone up the length of our back garden. Later, by using a ground return, I cut down the amount of wire needed and found I could pick up radio and TV sound from the Rediffusion system - but all channels at once!

The “spark” (pun intended) for my making the jump from line to radio was when my father took me to “Charlie Town’s”, a surplus shop near to the Midland Station in Nottingham. There we bought a “Key, W/T, 8amp” (the first of many I would own) and a small buzzer and battery, which were fixed to a piece of wood. I soon graduated to sending telegraph messages over my phone wires, laboriously spelling out the words at about 2 wpm. My brother-in-law-to-be had modernised an old radiogram for my parents, fitting an auto-changer turntable for the new-fangled 33 and 45 rpm records that had replaced the old 78s my folks had been using. The radio section had a number of wavebands and, by chance, when I was sending on my buzzer indoors one day I heard my signals coming over the radiogram, loud and clear on the Short Wave. This amazed me and led to me experimenting with how to extend the range and finding that by hooking a length of my transformer wire to the buzzer close to the spark gap to make an aerial, I could get enough range to annoy next door by breaking in over The Archers.

My late father, despite being an employee of the local Electricity Board and working in a radio shop before WWII, had no real technical knowledge of radio or electronics but he did a great deal to encourage my new interest, probably as it was less smelly than the chemistry set! He showed me how to wind a coil of double-cotton-covered copper wire onto a jam-pot former to make a crystal set, although we made a concession to modernity by using a OA91 germanium diode, rather than galena and cat’s-whisker. Using a huge iron heated on an electric ring of the kitchen stove, he showed me how to solder, with flux out of a tin - none of that namby-pamby multicore stuff!

Soon, I managed to get my Dad to buy me an HAC (“Hear All Continents”) one-valve receiver kit based on a PM2 triode with three plug-in Denco coils; subsequently he took me along to Bill Redgate’s radio shop (his pre-war employers) to buy a replacement valve, after I had connected the valve’s two-volt heater across the 90 V HT battery. I never heard anything much on the HAC other than powerful Communist Bloc stations like Moscow or Prague on 49 metres - I can whistle their tuning signals to this day. I never seemed to quite get the HAC’s reaction working properly on the higher and lower Denco coils; hence the set was pretty deaf to weak signals.

The move of interest to Amateur Radio came about by a strange chance. My sister had a transistor radio, which I coveted. One evening, when she was out, I borrowed it and listened to Medium Wave stations from all over, using my HAC aerial plugged into a socket on the side of the transistor set. Long or Medium Wave were selected by an Off-LW-MW set of push-buttons and I managed to jam the LW and MW buttons down together. Not realising that the set would still receive if one did this, I was amazed to hear voices – but not a regular broadcast.

I heard several different people, all apparently talking to each other - but in long one-sided transmissions. One of the stations was also unintelligible and sounded like Donald Duck.

From the topics discussed, I quickly realised that these were radio hams and, of course months later, that Donald Duck was on SSB (G3SZO in fact) and that I was listening to the local Top Band net. I can only assume that what I was actually hearing was coming through second-channel breakthrough but of course knew nothing of that at the time. At this point my long-suffering father was badgered into getting me a “real radio” so I could listen to more hams. Eventually, so he could watch the cricket in peace, he relented and bought me a magnificent Wireless Set No 52 receiver, with a ZE12 power supply from A. J. Thompson of Codicote, Herts. From that point my interest soared and I became a fully-fledged SWL, even managing a couple of reports in Short Wave Magazine’s SWL column.

One morning Norman Down, G3SRX, called at our neighbour’s house to repair an appliance of theirs and spotted my long-wire running up the garden. On the look-out for Top Band pirate stations in the area, he knocked on our door and introduced himself. I was in shock at this point, to actually meet one of the voices I had listened to for months! Norman swiftly established my innocence of radio piracy and later he took me along to join the Nottingham Club, G3EKW. Tutored by Terry, G3OMK, a bunch of us teenaged SWLs became G3Vs, Ws and Xs. And, in July 1966, five days before my 17th birthday, I became G3VKM.

The rest, as they say, is history.

[dtvmcdonald]

I always loved complexity ... like the wiring in our 1949 Motorola "radiogram" (to use the British term). In 1950 we got a Magnavox TV that suffered (badly and repeatedly) from vertical linearity problems and was always being serviced, so I got to see the innards. (I was born in 1944).

Fast forward to 1953. My mother loved supermarket entertainment magazines. She mistakenly bought a Radio & Television News, a Hugo Gernsback creation.
That not being her cup of tea, she gave it to me. I was totally enthralled,
especially by a construction article for a tiny radio using four subminiature tubes, as well as the ads. Mother then broke down and subscribed me to the magazine.

The next year I was enthralled by the articles describing color TV, which had just arrived in our town. A friend at school, whose father was the station meteorologist, invited me to the studio audience of their very first broadcast of their kiddie's afternoon show in color ... so I got to see myself on the studio monitors in color!

I asked Santa for an RCA CT-100 color TV that fall, but he didn't deliver,
though I did get the Heathkit AR-3 I asked for. I did finally get the CT-100
in 2014. Sadly, its CRT went gassy last fall.

I've been hooked ever since. All my electronics served me well in my job! In 1968 I got my PhD advisor to buy us a PDP-8E computer and designed an interface with 2000 wirewraps and the program ... they worked the first try. I later (1972) designed and built a computer tape drive using cassette tape run at fast forward (unregulated) speed, as well as a DC-1MHz preamp with an input impedance of 10 megohms and a noise temperature of 6K (it is cooled by liquid helium.)

[TonyDuell]

Originally Posted by dtvmcdonald

I've been hooked ever since. All my electronics served me well in my job! In 1968 I got my PhD advisor to buy us a PDP-8E computer and designed an interface with 2000 wirewraps and the program ... they worked the first try.

Did you make a time machine too? More seriously, I suspect it was an earlier model of PDP8 as the PDP8E came out a few years after 1968 (1970?). Mine is in the next room (in a rack with a TU56, RX01, PC04 and RK05). Interesting little machine....

[dtvmcdonald]

No, it for absolute sure was a very early PDP8E. A Professor across the street (Norman Ramsey) already had an original PDP8 (no suffix at all) for his experiments. I don't recall the exact date, but I do recall that we got the
manuals well before the first one was actually delivered to somebody else. I had the interface wired and the program written before that. It output the data on the TTY.
So I must have been working on the project in 1969. (I checked the dates).
I vividly remember the very first time I tried it on an experiment it worked fine. Norman's was at the very beginning of the use of minicomputers by individual research groups. These were very exciting times.

[Graham G3ZVT]

Originally Posted by G3VKM_Roger

The move of interest to Amateur Radio came about by a strange chance. My sister had a transistor radio, which I coveted. One evening, when she was out, I borrowed it and listened to Medium Wave stations from all over, using my HAC aerial plugged into a socket on the side of the transistor set. Long or Medium Wave were selected by an Off-LW-MW set of push-buttons and I managed to jam the LW and MW buttons down together. Not realising that the set would still receive if one did this, I was amazed to hear voices – but not a regular broadcast.

I heard several different people, all apparently talking to each other - but in long one-sided transmissions. One of the stations was also unintelligible and sounded like Donald Duck.

From the topics discussed, I quickly realised that these were radio hams and, of course months later, that Donald Duck was on SSB (G3SZO in fact) and that I was listening to the local Top Band net. I can only assume that what I was actually hearing was coming through second-channel breakthrough but of course knew nothing of that at the time.

My story is exactly the same only the names and callsigns are changed to protect the guilty.
Ever Ready Sky Master, the family radio borrowed from the kitchen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5T_SvMCeWE
All three buttons unlatched if I remember correctly, and on Sunday mornings up popped Jim G2DBV and Eric G3UKZ who I later found out were about 100 yards from my house.

[Peter.N.]

My first experience of ham radio was similar. I was only a kid but someone had given me a small mains radio and with my limited knowledge at the time I thought that perhaps if I connected a couple of short wave length coils across the the gangs of the tuning 'condenser' it would pick up short wave.

Although my theory was seriously floored in fact it did! The first and possibly only thing I heard was a ham conversation, I subsequently found out that the ham was only about 200 yards away, renting a room in a house, from the conversation I gathered his landlady didn't know about his activities.

That was in about 1950 and although I started my 50 year stint in the radio/TV trade in '54 I didn't actually get my radio ticket until 1983 and that was a result of CB rather than my interest in radio.

Peter G1EFX/G0HET

[Damien VK3RX]

Coming in late to this thread.

My start was with a Philips EE kit (EE20 I think) at age 13, given to me by a friend who had built all he was interested in and had moved onto something more elaborate.

One thing I remember was the legs breaking off the transistors due to all the use by my friend and then me, and a somewhat character building exercise with the local Philips spares/service centre to get replacements, which is another story.

I was a tech for a few years, got my amateur radio ticket then a career change to air traffic control, from which I retired recently after 36 years