The fact that I can type this story out on a keyboard is due only to the
sheer luck of good timing.
In my early days as a young and clueless
guy in my 20's, I had rented a house with a yard and put up a used
tower to support my 2-element Gotham quad antenna. The antenna had been
on a tower at my parents' house, and I had managed to disassemble it
and get it down to the new location. As most of us know, when you have
just started out on your own you have a very tight budget, and at that
time I felt pretty lucky to be able to have a multiband transceiver and
an antenna. At that stage of life there is no alternative but to watch
every penny. I'd built the radio, a Heath HW-101, from a kit. The Gotham
quad was just plain downright cheap, made with the lightest, cheapest
aluminum alloy, wooden dowels, and cheesy plastic standoffs for the thin
single-conductor aluminum wire elements. It covered 10, 15, and 20
meters, though - three bands that I liked using almost every day. (This
was pre-internet, of course.)
Read or listen:
http://handiham.org/drupal2/node/242
