The Ten Commandments of radio hobbyists:
(with apologies to the faithful and humorless)
Icom Envy:
My friend Bob had an Icom R7000 40 years ago when we first met. That was my first experience with a commercial grade receiver like that. Paired with a Grove Scanner Beam on the roof with a rotator I spent hours drooling on that thing at Bob’s house. He started providing me with a bib when I came over after work. He also had a military surplus UHF aero radio, my first experience with the Mil-Air band.
With that R7000 and the Scanner Beam we were able to pinpoint transmitters’ directions from his home, it was a blast. We both worked the evening shift so would play radio late at night when the noise floor was lower.
Shortly thereafter I met Matt, he also had an R7000. He had a scanner antenna on the roof of his home, so it too worked great. For several years I tried to convince either Bob or Matt to sell or trade their R7000 to me without success. It was several more years before I could afford to get one myself and even then, it was used. I am pretty sure they both still have their R7000’s to this day, that’s the kind of guys they are.
Eventually I had several R7000’s, along with R71’s, R8500’s and now an R8600. I have drooled over the R9000 and especially the R9500 but there is no way I am going to spend the cost of a new car on a radio, at least as long as my wife is alive.
PRO2004 covetation (is that a word?):
During my days as a young police officer money was tight and I was using mostly Bearcat or Radio Shack scanners at the time. I did have a PRO2004 when they first came out, but I had a friend who lived in the Madison WI area that had 6 of them, each connected to band-specific antennas. One was dedicated to low-band, another on VHF-High, one on the civil aircraft band, one on the UHF Mil-Air band, one on UHF and the last on 800 MHz. Each was connected to a recorder and the non-aircraft ones to PL tone detectors. It was a sweet layout for the 80’s! I drooled over that set up for years.
Eventually I was in a financial position to do similar tricks of my own. I had a boatload of BCT15’s, BCD996’s and similar scanners. figured out what was best for what bands and paired them with proper antennas. This allowed me to better target specific communications. I still do the same thing now, decades later. Most recently I discovered that a Diamond dual-band antenna in my attic is the only one of my antennas in my attic that can receive a railroad defect detector about 10 miles away, so it is connected to the radios I use for railroad stuff.
Mr. Micor and a pair of TADS:
Years ago, I had a fully tricked out 4-channel UHF Micor with a Systems 90 Alternate Control Module, inversion scrambling, MPL, DTMF, Talk-around and scan boards in my car. I used it for GMRS. If you are familiar with Micors then you would know how these accessories boards worked. Each accessory was one or two cards, two cards fit in a S90 housing. You could stack two or more housings as needed; I had 4 housings so stacked. Micor stuff was all white but there was compatible chocolate brown plastic housings intended for the early Spectra’s that were the same size but looked so much cooler.
My Micor was put together mostly by hamfesting for the parts and accessories. I bought the radio itself and control cable from a friend. The radio itself had been sold as surplus by a sheriff’s department downstate, it still had the inventory sticker. Over the summer I acquired all the other stuff, much of it at Dayton. I spent a lot of hours putting together the control cable. If you have ever done this in a 1970’s vintage Micor back in the day you will know how much work is involved in putting together the control cable, there were several dozen different wires and every module required specific wires to specific pins, and adding other modules would alter the prior ones.
There was a guy who owned a radio shop in the far north suburbs named Wally Mitchell, he was also known as “Mr. Micor”. I only met him a few times, but he had worked on the radios at my fire department and his reputation was impeccable when it came to Micors. He helped me with copies of the manuals and when I finished putting it all together, he got that radio tuned and peaked. It had a fantastically sensitive receiver and, well, let’s just say the power output of the transmitter was more than sufficient. Yes, I know 50 watts is the limit for GMRS but 120 or so will set off car alarms at 200 yards or more. That was a lot of fun, but I had to have the power dialed back after I ruined an alternator in my car.
I had a lot of friends covet that Micor. I had some pretty decent offers for it, but nothing really ticked my boxes until a couple years later when I met a couple of Chicago PD Tac officers who were also into GMRS, ham radio and scanners like me. One of these Tac guys had a pair of TAD M8’s, one on UHF and one on VHF. These things were awesome. They were 50 watts, 99 channels, wide-banded (136-174 MHz. on VHF and 400-520 MHz. on the UHF one) and field programmable. This was in the days when many two-way radios were still using crystal elements. I had never seen these TADs before, they were uncommon in the US but apparently popular in Canada, he got them from a dealer in British Columbia, where they were as common as CB’s back in the 80’s.
I loved and wanted these two TADs, they were compact (for the era) one-piece rigs and had very sensitive receivers. I offered to buy them, but he wasn’t interested in selling until he saw my Micor. His eyes lit up like a fat kid given a truckload of candy. I knew exactly what he was thinking but I wanted to make sure I got BOTH the VHF and UHF radios, so I tried to play it cool and contain my excitement. He eventually offered and I accepted a straight trade, my Micor (along with the manuals and a box full of parts and accessories) for his pair of TADs. While I had spent many hours and dollars over a span of several months putting together the parts and the hyper-complicated control cable for that Micor I went home, borrowed a buddy’s garage, and pulled the Micor out that night and the next day we made the trade. While we both coveted each other’s radios, I felt it was justifiable by the “wow factor” we both experienced. I had those TADs in my car for several years until they were replaced by Spectra’s. I then gave them to a friend of mine who I suspect still has them some 30-odd years later. He himself had tried to pry them off me several times over the years they were in my car.
Nebraska, a radio nirvana causing covetation:
On one of my many road trips out west in the 1980’s or early 90’s I ran across a store in Omaha that specialized in Collins ham radios. I think it was called Ladd Electronics; it was right off Dodge Street, west of downtown. These Collins radios were the huge black metal boxes with Bakelite knobs, big tuning dials and vacuum tubes to keep the house warm at night. This place was floor-to-ceiling with every Collins radio conceivable. The prices were phenomenally high, and as I talked to the proprietor, I suspected there was an emotional attachment to the radios and that the place was intended more as a museum than an active marketplace.
I suppose the prices were appropriate, but they were way out of reach for me. I spent a couple hours in there drooling. The owner was more than welcoming and allowed me to try the working ones out, knowing full well I was not going to buy any even if he was willing to sell.
Later on that trip, after I laundered out the drool from the Collins store, I visited the FCC Monitoring Post in Grand Island. I had called ahead and asked if I could get a tour and they agreed with a few rules; no pictures, arrive on time and call the day before to confirm. I followed the rules and arrived at the appointed hour. I first scoped out the yard. There was a long wire antenna mounted on half-height telephone poles surrounding the facility. I am pretty sure this was at least a half-mile long. There were also a couple of towers in the back as well as one out front. The building was a nice brick structure that would have been right as a home on the Maryland coast someplace.
When I arrived and was granted access I was led into the main monitoring room. It was all high-end Icom, NRC and Collins type stuff, most of which I didn’t recognize. They did have a couple common scanners; I don’t recall if they were Regency or Bearcat off the top of my head. There were a couple Icom R7000’s and R71’s (or perhaps R70’s) in the racks. The techs that were there said they used the scanners for local investigations, such as when someone was interfering with a sheriff’s office system near Cheyenne a year before.
All the radios were programmed or tuned to the local weather station, WWV or some other innocuous frequency for my visit. One was set to 121.5 and while I was there an ELT popped up for a couple seconds. They said that happens often at the local airport.
The drool was dripping the entire time I was there. I offered to help mop it up, but they said they were used to it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had some sort of robotic drool eliminator device for cleaning up after visitors. The following year my friend Scott and I visited the FCC Monitoring Station in Allegan Michigan. It was similarly equipped.
On that same Nebraska trip, I stopped by the old Plectron factory in Overton, NE, a 90-minute drive from Grand Island. Of course, Plectron was long gone by then, but the factory building was still there, and on Plectron Street to boot. The building was used at the time by other businesses, and I have been there several times in the following years, the last time in 2015. I tried to find someone around to see if I could get inside to see if there was anything left from the Plectron days but being a Sunday there was no one.
Antenna Envy:
It isn’t just the radios I covet but I also suffer from antenna envy. Living in apartments, a condo and now an HOA home, I have not been able to deploy the big outside antennas I would like to. Several friends with big antennas or big towers have allowed me to see how good things could be. Aside from Bob and Matt, I have tried several other friend’s setups and dreamed of having something like that. My friend Denny (RIP) used to tell the story of when he was an engineer for a TV station in his native South Dakota, he would take his scanner and connect it to the transmitter antenna after they went off the air for the night (which they did back then). Imagine a scanner connected to an antenna at 1200 feet! He would hear stuff from 5 states away and when conditions were up it got even crazier. Of course, he had to have the squelch cranked up, but it really worked well.
Matt and I did connect our R7000’s to a VHF base station antenna 110 feet up a tower after work at the police station several times, this was always fun. At home Matt had an Antenna Specialists MON-31 base-station scanner antenna. This was basically a MON-51 radiating element with an NMO base and 3 or 4 4-foot-long ground plane radials. It wasn’t the sturdiest thing, but man, it worked great! He had this on a TV mount on the roof of his townhouse and could pull in skip better than anything I ever saw before. I had the later MON-58 base antenna, it used shorter (18-inch) ground radials. It did not seem to work nearly as well. I tried using stiff wire as ground radials in my attic but that didn’t seem to help.
My best friend, Will, has an ST-2 on his roof. While I have a few ST-2’s they live in my attic so don’t perform as well, but his does. I talk to him on the phone daily and often remote in to his computer running ProScan and watching the tuff he can hear always makes me jealous. I often think about my next house after I win the lottery, and the tall tower loaded with antennas!
Shack Envy:
I have run across some other radio shacks, in person and on the Internet over the years. Shacks from guys with callsigns of G0SEC, KC4NX, W9EVT and W0AIH will bring tears to the eye of the most hardened radio hobbyist. These guys make my shack designs with upwards of 40 radios look pedestrian. Google these call signs and drool over the pictures.
I have drawn inspiration from several people posting here in the RadioReference Pictures forum. KC1UA and I compete with pretty similar setups, I mercilessly copied many of his ideas and vice-versa over the years. TJX400 has a great setup, so does WA8PYR, Nitroturbo4u, Phillydjdan and others. I like to look at other people’s shacks for inspiration. Some of the stuff I see in some of these shacks once belonged to me or belongs to me now.
I may well have plagiarized many of my ideas, but I have no issue with others copying my ideas, some I came up with independently, but I have no shame copying from others.
(with apologies to the faithful and humorless)
- Thou shall not have any hobbies before Radio
- Thou shall not talk bad about the radio hobby, except if it is about Baofeng
- Remember the Field Day, make it memorable
- Honor the brands of your parents, except if it is Baofeng
- Thou shall not destroy a radio, at least not on purpose, except if it is a Baofeng
- Thou shall retain loyalty to your chosen brand, except if it is Baofeng
- Thou shall not rip another hobbyist off unless he sold you a Baofeng
- Thou shall not lie about your buddy’s radios
- Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s radios, especially a Baofeng
- Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s accessories, antennas etc.
Icom Envy:
My friend Bob had an Icom R7000 40 years ago when we first met. That was my first experience with a commercial grade receiver like that. Paired with a Grove Scanner Beam on the roof with a rotator I spent hours drooling on that thing at Bob’s house. He started providing me with a bib when I came over after work. He also had a military surplus UHF aero radio, my first experience with the Mil-Air band.
With that R7000 and the Scanner Beam we were able to pinpoint transmitters’ directions from his home, it was a blast. We both worked the evening shift so would play radio late at night when the noise floor was lower.
Shortly thereafter I met Matt, he also had an R7000. He had a scanner antenna on the roof of his home, so it too worked great. For several years I tried to convince either Bob or Matt to sell or trade their R7000 to me without success. It was several more years before I could afford to get one myself and even then, it was used. I am pretty sure they both still have their R7000’s to this day, that’s the kind of guys they are.
Eventually I had several R7000’s, along with R71’s, R8500’s and now an R8600. I have drooled over the R9000 and especially the R9500 but there is no way I am going to spend the cost of a new car on a radio, at least as long as my wife is alive.
PRO2004 covetation (is that a word?):
During my days as a young police officer money was tight and I was using mostly Bearcat or Radio Shack scanners at the time. I did have a PRO2004 when they first came out, but I had a friend who lived in the Madison WI area that had 6 of them, each connected to band-specific antennas. One was dedicated to low-band, another on VHF-High, one on the civil aircraft band, one on the UHF Mil-Air band, one on UHF and the last on 800 MHz. Each was connected to a recorder and the non-aircraft ones to PL tone detectors. It was a sweet layout for the 80’s! I drooled over that set up for years.
Eventually I was in a financial position to do similar tricks of my own. I had a boatload of BCT15’s, BCD996’s and similar scanners. figured out what was best for what bands and paired them with proper antennas. This allowed me to better target specific communications. I still do the same thing now, decades later. Most recently I discovered that a Diamond dual-band antenna in my attic is the only one of my antennas in my attic that can receive a railroad defect detector about 10 miles away, so it is connected to the radios I use for railroad stuff.
Mr. Micor and a pair of TADS:
Years ago, I had a fully tricked out 4-channel UHF Micor with a Systems 90 Alternate Control Module, inversion scrambling, MPL, DTMF, Talk-around and scan boards in my car. I used it for GMRS. If you are familiar with Micors then you would know how these accessories boards worked. Each accessory was one or two cards, two cards fit in a S90 housing. You could stack two or more housings as needed; I had 4 housings so stacked. Micor stuff was all white but there was compatible chocolate brown plastic housings intended for the early Spectra’s that were the same size but looked so much cooler.
My Micor was put together mostly by hamfesting for the parts and accessories. I bought the radio itself and control cable from a friend. The radio itself had been sold as surplus by a sheriff’s department downstate, it still had the inventory sticker. Over the summer I acquired all the other stuff, much of it at Dayton. I spent a lot of hours putting together the control cable. If you have ever done this in a 1970’s vintage Micor back in the day you will know how much work is involved in putting together the control cable, there were several dozen different wires and every module required specific wires to specific pins, and adding other modules would alter the prior ones.
There was a guy who owned a radio shop in the far north suburbs named Wally Mitchell, he was also known as “Mr. Micor”. I only met him a few times, but he had worked on the radios at my fire department and his reputation was impeccable when it came to Micors. He helped me with copies of the manuals and when I finished putting it all together, he got that radio tuned and peaked. It had a fantastically sensitive receiver and, well, let’s just say the power output of the transmitter was more than sufficient. Yes, I know 50 watts is the limit for GMRS but 120 or so will set off car alarms at 200 yards or more. That was a lot of fun, but I had to have the power dialed back after I ruined an alternator in my car.
I had a lot of friends covet that Micor. I had some pretty decent offers for it, but nothing really ticked my boxes until a couple years later when I met a couple of Chicago PD Tac officers who were also into GMRS, ham radio and scanners like me. One of these Tac guys had a pair of TAD M8’s, one on UHF and one on VHF. These things were awesome. They were 50 watts, 99 channels, wide-banded (136-174 MHz. on VHF and 400-520 MHz. on the UHF one) and field programmable. This was in the days when many two-way radios were still using crystal elements. I had never seen these TADs before, they were uncommon in the US but apparently popular in Canada, he got them from a dealer in British Columbia, where they were as common as CB’s back in the 80’s.
I loved and wanted these two TADs, they were compact (for the era) one-piece rigs and had very sensitive receivers. I offered to buy them, but he wasn’t interested in selling until he saw my Micor. His eyes lit up like a fat kid given a truckload of candy. I knew exactly what he was thinking but I wanted to make sure I got BOTH the VHF and UHF radios, so I tried to play it cool and contain my excitement. He eventually offered and I accepted a straight trade, my Micor (along with the manuals and a box full of parts and accessories) for his pair of TADs. While I had spent many hours and dollars over a span of several months putting together the parts and the hyper-complicated control cable for that Micor I went home, borrowed a buddy’s garage, and pulled the Micor out that night and the next day we made the trade. While we both coveted each other’s radios, I felt it was justifiable by the “wow factor” we both experienced. I had those TADs in my car for several years until they were replaced by Spectra’s. I then gave them to a friend of mine who I suspect still has them some 30-odd years later. He himself had tried to pry them off me several times over the years they were in my car.
Nebraska, a radio nirvana causing covetation:
On one of my many road trips out west in the 1980’s or early 90’s I ran across a store in Omaha that specialized in Collins ham radios. I think it was called Ladd Electronics; it was right off Dodge Street, west of downtown. These Collins radios were the huge black metal boxes with Bakelite knobs, big tuning dials and vacuum tubes to keep the house warm at night. This place was floor-to-ceiling with every Collins radio conceivable. The prices were phenomenally high, and as I talked to the proprietor, I suspected there was an emotional attachment to the radios and that the place was intended more as a museum than an active marketplace.
I suppose the prices were appropriate, but they were way out of reach for me. I spent a couple hours in there drooling. The owner was more than welcoming and allowed me to try the working ones out, knowing full well I was not going to buy any even if he was willing to sell.
Later on that trip, after I laundered out the drool from the Collins store, I visited the FCC Monitoring Post in Grand Island. I had called ahead and asked if I could get a tour and they agreed with a few rules; no pictures, arrive on time and call the day before to confirm. I followed the rules and arrived at the appointed hour. I first scoped out the yard. There was a long wire antenna mounted on half-height telephone poles surrounding the facility. I am pretty sure this was at least a half-mile long. There were also a couple of towers in the back as well as one out front. The building was a nice brick structure that would have been right as a home on the Maryland coast someplace.
When I arrived and was granted access I was led into the main monitoring room. It was all high-end Icom, NRC and Collins type stuff, most of which I didn’t recognize. They did have a couple common scanners; I don’t recall if they were Regency or Bearcat off the top of my head. There were a couple Icom R7000’s and R71’s (or perhaps R70’s) in the racks. The techs that were there said they used the scanners for local investigations, such as when someone was interfering with a sheriff’s office system near Cheyenne a year before.
All the radios were programmed or tuned to the local weather station, WWV or some other innocuous frequency for my visit. One was set to 121.5 and while I was there an ELT popped up for a couple seconds. They said that happens often at the local airport.
The drool was dripping the entire time I was there. I offered to help mop it up, but they said they were used to it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had some sort of robotic drool eliminator device for cleaning up after visitors. The following year my friend Scott and I visited the FCC Monitoring Station in Allegan Michigan. It was similarly equipped.
On that same Nebraska trip, I stopped by the old Plectron factory in Overton, NE, a 90-minute drive from Grand Island. Of course, Plectron was long gone by then, but the factory building was still there, and on Plectron Street to boot. The building was used at the time by other businesses, and I have been there several times in the following years, the last time in 2015. I tried to find someone around to see if I could get inside to see if there was anything left from the Plectron days but being a Sunday there was no one.
Antenna Envy:
It isn’t just the radios I covet but I also suffer from antenna envy. Living in apartments, a condo and now an HOA home, I have not been able to deploy the big outside antennas I would like to. Several friends with big antennas or big towers have allowed me to see how good things could be. Aside from Bob and Matt, I have tried several other friend’s setups and dreamed of having something like that. My friend Denny (RIP) used to tell the story of when he was an engineer for a TV station in his native South Dakota, he would take his scanner and connect it to the transmitter antenna after they went off the air for the night (which they did back then). Imagine a scanner connected to an antenna at 1200 feet! He would hear stuff from 5 states away and when conditions were up it got even crazier. Of course, he had to have the squelch cranked up, but it really worked well.
Matt and I did connect our R7000’s to a VHF base station antenna 110 feet up a tower after work at the police station several times, this was always fun. At home Matt had an Antenna Specialists MON-31 base-station scanner antenna. This was basically a MON-51 radiating element with an NMO base and 3 or 4 4-foot-long ground plane radials. It wasn’t the sturdiest thing, but man, it worked great! He had this on a TV mount on the roof of his townhouse and could pull in skip better than anything I ever saw before. I had the later MON-58 base antenna, it used shorter (18-inch) ground radials. It did not seem to work nearly as well. I tried using stiff wire as ground radials in my attic but that didn’t seem to help.
My best friend, Will, has an ST-2 on his roof. While I have a few ST-2’s they live in my attic so don’t perform as well, but his does. I talk to him on the phone daily and often remote in to his computer running ProScan and watching the tuff he can hear always makes me jealous. I often think about my next house after I win the lottery, and the tall tower loaded with antennas!
Shack Envy:
I have run across some other radio shacks, in person and on the Internet over the years. Shacks from guys with callsigns of G0SEC, KC4NX, W9EVT and W0AIH will bring tears to the eye of the most hardened radio hobbyist. These guys make my shack designs with upwards of 40 radios look pedestrian. Google these call signs and drool over the pictures.
I have drawn inspiration from several people posting here in the RadioReference Pictures forum. KC1UA and I compete with pretty similar setups, I mercilessly copied many of his ideas and vice-versa over the years. TJX400 has a great setup, so does WA8PYR, Nitroturbo4u, Phillydjdan and others. I like to look at other people’s shacks for inspiration. Some of the stuff I see in some of these shacks once belonged to me or belongs to me now.
I may well have plagiarized many of my ideas, but I have no issue with others copying my ideas, some I came up with independently, but I have no shame copying from others.
