Nostalgia? Probably.

[Paul_RK]

Nostalgia doesn't quite seem the thing at work for me either. I started buying radios at Fakenham auction when I was nine, first in the hope of better reception of AFN, but very soon because the things being chucked from people's homes seemed to me more visually engaging, better made, and generally far more interesting than the objects of desire that were taking their places. Fifty years haven't much changed that impression.

Originally Posted by McMurdo

Sometimes i find myself bidding autonomously at an auction because I think a particular radio/tv deserves to be saved by me.

Maybe it does, there's no telling what the other bidder would do to it I'm not sure I've often had such a motive for bidding on a radio, but there are certainly a few Belling Champion heaters here beyond our requirements, in order that while I have any say in the matter they won't become grotesquely inefficient lamps. And I do treasure now and again having been the only bidder for something that, with any luck at all, will still be knocking around long after I'm gone.

[HamishBoxer]

My interest is not just nostalgia, as I started into radio at an early age. Then being rubbish at school made a career out of it.
Though my school did state that I might well do just that.

[Richard_FM]

While I'm a bit younger then most on here but old enough to be nostalgic for the period I was growing up.

It seemed in the 1980s & 90s that technology was changing a lot of things in the home, and while my family was a little behind the curve we eventually bought a lot of items that were a status symbol at the beginning of this period, but all but the poorest had by the end.

Also I've been interested for as long as I know about how things work, even if my ability to make things from kits & such has been a bit hit & miss.

Most of my collection is from the 1980s, mostly because it's in a sweet spot of reliability & relative cheapness, as well as the nostalgia factor.

[dave walsh]

What you are describing there certainly has the appearance of nostalgia Kevin post39* I think Gerry Wells epitomised that! He was very aware of the modern world but seemed to have decided to largely stay in the 1930's, having the appropriate house and good manners to facilitate the experience. I'd met him at Shifnal Radio Meetings a couple of times, judging competition entries, so it amazed me to suddenly find this mild mannered man describing his war time arrest. [He couldn't resist salvaging a fuse box from a bombed out house]. I think he was 14 at the time and [technically] could have been shot for looting. This was in a glossy book about collecting Bakelite which had just two or three radios featured. When he wrote his own book, much later, he called it Obsession and described the urge to "rescue" things in much the same way you have Kevin. I think it's very common! The Magistrates sent him North to the Red Bank Detention Centre at Newton Le Willows [probaly a Borstal then] to be rehabilitated. I used to go there in the Seventies. When the "Headmaster" found out Gerry's "offence" he made him assistant to a teacher who had the same interest and had set up a workshop on site that repaired Wireless Sets for the local Cheshire/Liverpool population.

Where did you see that Home Office Film David. Is it in one of the BVWS DVD's. If so I must have had it. Perhaps he will turn up on Talking Pictures one day? I've just seen a, very wooden, short on there "Ferry Pilots" 1941 about the men and women who delivered post production Aircraft to the RAF. These needed fitting out and lack any comms. They can't stop one plane taking off in the direction of the enemy and the S Leader says "perhaps we should have had the Radios after all"?

Dave W

[HamishBoxer]

The film with Gerry as far as I know, I got off Gerry himself and like a few articles off Gerry it is on VHS tape.
If I can locate it I will donate to the BVWS for release to members.

[dave walsh]

That would be good, especially as I've been a member for a long time now myself. There are quite a few Gerry items in my archive, including his appearance on a Quiz Show when he had to date I think 10 or 12 sets and amazed the audience by getting them all right [of course].

Dave

[HamishBoxer]

No, I do not have the quiz show one. Maybe my missing tape is with my Sky interview from many years ago talking about vintage tv and radio.

[FStephenMasek]

I was born in 1957, so it is not really nostalgia. Rather, it is a challenge which requires concentration, a good distraction from work (environmental consulting). I have a business degree, and the history of the companies and the various ways they did things are also interesting. It is fun to get one working which may have been silent for many decades, perhaps as long as I've been alive. It is interesting to wonder who previously owned them, and to contemplate the things they heard on them (WWII, landing on the Moon, ...). Some of them are very nice objects which were quite expensive when new. There are also interesting people in the hobby. By the way, in southern California in the USA we have an AM (MW) dial full of stations, with music in several languages, talk, news and sports.

[dave walsh]

I have a Nems-Clarke 1500 receiver Stephen. Information about it seemed very scarce but it has a very specialist/expensive front end. Then I realised. they had been used in the US Space program mid sixties!

I meant that I have the Quiz Show clip and a couple of others David. I didn't make that clear enough. I'm hoping that the work I'm doing on my "stuff" and the archive contents will able me to access things like that fairly soon. A work in progress as they say

Dave W

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

Whenever I come across one of those people who say they wished they were living in some specific byegone age, I have just one word to say to them:

DENTISTRY!

And, for those born with two X-chromosomes, ovaries and uteruses...

OBSTETRIC MEDICINE.

[G6Tanuki]

Being able to listen to the likes of AFN and VOA as a covert after-dark respite from the dreary BBC was for me a big thing: hell, they played *JAZZ* and gave **live** commentaries on baseball-games and boxing-matches! Your ordinary British man[woman]-in-the-street would only get to discover this stuff days later when it was eventually printed on the back-page of their newspaper.

As an example: even in 1975 the UK media's parochial mindset really didn't register the loss of SS Edmund Fitzgerald

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Edmund_Fitzgerald

whereas Radio Canada International on shortwave had hourly updates on the search - and eventual sad acknowledgement of loss-of-all-hands.

Equally, 30-ish years ago despite my "Schoolboy German" I spent many an hour listening to Deutsche Welle and its 'Ossi'-equivalents on shortwave as the Berlin Wall fell.

To me, that's 'real' radio-nostalgia. The trumpet-dirge of Albania's "Radio Tirana"

https://youtu.be/B2mBP40w_hU

was an everpresent background distraction...

[Richard_FM]

I remember on another site someone mentioning one of their hobbies used to be listening to short wave radio.

He mentioned that Radio Tirana's English broadcasts used to an announcer he nicknamed "Countess Dracula" due to her "I vont tu dreenk yor blud" accent.

['LIVEWIRE?']

I, too, used to be an avid SWL, and often tuned in to the likes of VOA, R. Canada, Deutsche Welle, Deutschlandsender (The DDR SW Service), R. Prague, etc. plus stations from further afield such as R. Australia, Brazilian & Argentinian SW, Venezuela (Ecos Del Torbes & R. Barquismeto), Ghana, etc.-these latter two on the 'Tropical' bands after midnight GMT or BST. All were heard on either a 2-valve TRF (The PW 'Denette') or a multi=band Home Built Transistor receiver - again from a PW Published design and an indoor aerial in my ground floor flat. Besides Broadcast stations, I also used to listen to amateur bands - The transistor set had a BFO & Product detector, used Denco plug-in coils and 1.6Mhz IFTs. Today all the man-made QRM would probably render such listening impossible. or very difficult, but in the '70s and early 80s there were no Switch-mode PSUs and other noise generators about!

[G6Tanuki]

Today all the man-made QRM would probably render such listening impossible. or very difficult, but in the '70s and early 80s there were no Switch-mode PSUs and other noise generators about!

No SMPS back then but we had the "Russian Woodpecker" and the dreaded TV-timebase harmonic-rasp wiping out a 5KHz block every 15KHz across the HF bands. . .

Nostalgia works both ways.

[dave walsh]

I've still got a Woodpecker Filter that came from a silent key situation Tanuki-a chap who'd had a high performance TR/RX with an aerial set up to match! As a SWL the Russian interference was sometimes a problem but I wouldn't have been able to purchase a bit of kit like that back then. I was able to listen to a station across the Atlantic in NYC on Saturday mornings though and get advance notice re the American Charts! This goes to your post at 51* and mine at 37* [Independence 3]

Dave W

[G6Tanuki]

Yes, it was always fun to be able to tell your fellow kids at school what the hot new records in the US were: in my schooldays I had a "Monatone" one-knob cassette-recorder which used to get regular night-time workouts recording snippets of US chart-shows and AFN stuff to circulate to my fellows in the sixth-form common-room. This sort of stuff gained you serious bragging-points !


WINS [1010KHz] in New York was my go-to station for the-news-the-BBC-didn't-tell-you-about.

[Radio Wrangler]

It was quite nice to go into school humming something which hadn't yet hit the British charts, and to have heard reviews of 'moovies' which hadn't yet graced our shores.

If there had been any truth in Psych powers, curses and things like that, with the amount of hatred aimed at the Russian woodpecker, Chernobyl would have blown many years earlier.

David

[Richard_FM]

In the early days of 24 hour TV my Dad & Brother used to record America's Top 10 off ITV Nightime, which gave us a nice taste of what was doing well on the Billboard charts & a preview of many songs not released over hear.

The show also had a 10 ten best earning films, again with a clip or 2 from films not yet out in the UK.

[Graham G3ZVT]

In the spring of 1968 we holidayed on a cabin cruiser called "Tamarisk" on the Norfolk Broads. I took along my one valve (1T4) battery SW receiver and spent much time listening to "Radio Free Prague, the Legitimate Voice of Occupied Czechoslovakia".

[McMurdo]

I think in Gerry Wells 'obsession' he was arrested for 'rescuing' a Belmont radio from the sales counter of a local radio shop which he said he simply found too irresistible.
I've got his reform-school film on DVD somewhere.

I also admit to cycling around landfill sites (too young for bombsites!) as a child to 'rescue' bakelite switches which were often placed in my saddlebag attached to a chunk of plaster or brick or a few rusty screws still in their rawlplugs. What's not to enjoy about hacking off layers of wallpaper from a crabtree toggle switch with a stanley knife or rubbing it along a concrete flagstone to get the plaster off?

For me, those art deco radios are a little rosy window into the world of open fires, Neville Chamberlin and Winston, Pipe and Slippers, Dick Barton, Doodlebugs and Al Bowlly. No need to think about dentists, ricketts or draughty crittal windows