Ham Radio Memories
It's summer and time to daydream a little.
Sweet, sweet summertime. Ever since I was a small kiddo growing up in southern Minnesota, I've cherished summer. A lot of it had to do with getting out of school for summer vacation. I never had any problem keeping my grades up, and never had to serve a sentence in summer school. So I had the summer free, and nothing was sweeter than collecting my stuff from the desk on the last day of school and walking home with my neighborhood friends knowing that the whole summer stretched before us!
But summer did have hot, humid days and sometimes during the heat of the day it was better to stay in the basement and work on some project, play board games, or read comic books. One of my projects was a Knight-Kit Span Master 4-band AM and short-wave radio. Dad bought it for me and gave me some pointers on soldering, which I had never done before. When the Span Master was completed, it worked like a charm. The simple circuit was pretty foolproof, and in spite of its simplicity it performed amazingly well. The circuit was a regenerative design that could produce a lot of gain without a lot of parts. I put the radio on the headboard shelf of my bed and ran a wire antenna out the nearby window of my second-floor room.
