This one was just too good to pass up!
Written By Stan WB2LQF:
I searched many shoe boxes up in the attic over the last week to find this card. I knew I had it; just didn’t know exactly where. Look closely at the comment about me having had my foot in a water bucket. Sam was referring to the fact that I was actually loading my bedspring for this contact. It was 1966, I was 18, and this was one of my last contacts before I headed off to the Navy. I had a Knight-Kit T-60 transmitter that used a hardy 6DQ6B for the final. I had no antenna at this time so I just connected the chassis of the T-60 to the dial stop on our old black rotary phone. I knew from experience that the phone company had a good ground because my crystal radios always worked better when connected to the phone’s dial stop. Then I attached a piece of wire to my bed’s steel spring and stuck the other end into the SO-239 on the transmitter. God only knows what the SWR was. I had 60 watts input and no idea of what the output was. But as the card confirms, we had a nice long CW chat during which I got to tell Sam exactly what was sending my signal to him.
Dumb ass that I was at 18, I actually thought it was *possible* to load a bedspring.
People often joke about “loading a bedspring”. I actually did it!
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One response to “Loading Up A Bedspring?”
Your mention of bed springs reminded me of growing up. I used a whole bed of springs for an antenna for a pre WWII am radio it worked great!
Later, while in the USN ,HM2, I bought a very small Toshiba transistor radio. It was the worst radio receiver that I ever had. I would plug in a heating pad and with it turned off lay the radio on it and increase the receptio greatly!
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