MTjaybyrd
Newbie
First off, thank you Lindsay C. Blanton III, for hosting this forum! A fellow Montanan. Figures...
I guess I have 50 years of short-wave listening -- and radios -- under my belt since a Christmas in the early 1960s when my parents gave me a kit for Christmas that I bolted together and wound plug-in coils and ran off a 9-volt battery and started listening to the world, on headphones. You learn a lot that way.
Today I'm an old man, anxiously awaiting the FedEx guy to deliver a Tecsun 380 that I just ordered (about four years late, but I wanted something from this century) and I feel like a kid at Christmas.
I pick up most of my transistor sets at yard sales and thrift stores now and rarely pay more than $5, and there's two console tube sets in my living room. A little time spent online for advice and you can fix anything.
Of course the downside is the decline in international broadcasting, and even the medium wave pickings are slim with the concentration of station ownership.
But I still can tune into Radio Australia every morning and Havana in the evening. There's still farm news coming in from locally owned stations in Iowa and really good Canadian programming from Alberta on MW. And it's all bouncing around the atmosphere and not coming through an inter-tube that I have to pay to tap.
So, keep the faith, SWLers, and hope that there's enough young-uns around the world who still get a kick out of radio.
-- Jay in Butte, America
I guess I have 50 years of short-wave listening -- and radios -- under my belt since a Christmas in the early 1960s when my parents gave me a kit for Christmas that I bolted together and wound plug-in coils and ran off a 9-volt battery and started listening to the world, on headphones. You learn a lot that way.
Today I'm an old man, anxiously awaiting the FedEx guy to deliver a Tecsun 380 that I just ordered (about four years late, but I wanted something from this century) and I feel like a kid at Christmas.
I pick up most of my transistor sets at yard sales and thrift stores now and rarely pay more than $5, and there's two console tube sets in my living room. A little time spent online for advice and you can fix anything.
Of course the downside is the decline in international broadcasting, and even the medium wave pickings are slim with the concentration of station ownership.
But I still can tune into Radio Australia every morning and Havana in the evening. There's still farm news coming in from locally owned stations in Iowa and really good Canadian programming from Alberta on MW. And it's all bouncing around the atmosphere and not coming through an inter-tube that I have to pay to tap.
So, keep the faith, SWLers, and hope that there's enough young-uns around the world who still get a kick out of radio.
-- Jay in Butte, America
