SCORE!!! I found it, I found it!
When I was about 10 years old, my Part 15 broadcasting hobby/career started with a Remco Caravelle, a combo AM RX/TX Jetson looking toy.
SCORE!!! I found it, I found it!
When I was about 10 years old, my Part 15 broadcasting hobby/career started with a Remco Caravelle, a combo AM RX/TX Jetson looking toy.
Not being satisfied to be an Appliance Operator, I found a book at the libray full of simple projects.
“Using Electronics” written by Harry Zarchy contained a one transistor AM transmitter. I’ve been searching for this book for sometime now to complement my Radio collection.
Some kind sole has made the complete book available online. Follow This Link to check it out. Circuit number 20 is the one that captivated me.
Very Nice Book
That is a good book for learning from the start, or, if you’re a regular part 15 person like I am, going back to basics to learn some blank bits of knowledge that flew away.
Remco Caravelle
I remember seeing the TV commercial
for the Remco Caravelle when I was about
six years old.
By the way, I believe Rush Limbaugh (I have no
opinion about him, but he is a part of broadcast
history) started out with one of those when he
was about 10. He would broadcast radio shows
in his house to his mother.
Somewhere on the net, I read that a fan had found
one and had given it to Rush as a keepsake.
Somewhere on the net is a nice letter of thanks from
Rush to this fan, for bringing back a Remco Caravelle,
many years later.
I don’t intend to start a thread on Rush Limbaugh, but he did the
same broadcasting experiments we did at that early age, I guess.
So – JUST for trivia’s sake this is:
Bruce, DOGRADIO STUDIO 2
Another Historic Radio Man
Another historic radio man is Alex Jones, and for about a year his radio programs have been absent from archive.org, where he was once posted under a Creative Commons License with commercials removed.
Starting yesterday, Alex Jones is again available at archive.org marked as “community audio.”
I don’t know how he started broadcasting in his beginning years.
Early Days
“I don’t know how he started broadcasting in his beginning years.”
Alex started out in Austin Texas on a local AM station (can’t remember the call letters) as a talk show host on outdoor stuff like camping, survival and hunting. I used to listen to his program on a regular basis from 88 thru 94. Around that time he slowly morphed the show over to news related stuff that had direct impacts on things like gun control, blocking off public lands and hunting zones..things like that. It may have been the first WTC bombing (parking basement) that triggered Alex’s itchy finger to revamp the entire show.
And eventually, it all morphed into what he is doing today..especially after Sept, 2001.
RFB
Remco Caravelle
Wow! I had a Remco Caravelle too! I remember saving up about eight bucks (a good-sized chunk of change for a kid in those days), and riding my bike to the grocery store to buy one. I could transmit from upstairs to downstairs all I wanted 🙂
I eventually ended up in commercial broadcasting. And now, having just inherited a retired computer from my current employer, I’m about to start a Part 15 AM station.
History really DOES repeat itself!
Beginner’s Tales
Several things have swirled together to remind me of an early day experience from around 1961. The several things include this thread about early memories, the nearby thread about measurement devices, and a streaming listener whose IP address is in Overland Park, Kansas.
Just out of high school I was on the staff of a new FM station and recall that about once a month the station needed to schedule 15-minutes of silence so a monitoring company in Overland Park, Kansas, could read the frequency tolerance from our station. Then they would send (I think by post card) the results for attachment to the station’s logs.
There were far fewer FM stations in those days, so I assume frequency measurement is no longer done over such a long distance (we were in St. Louis, Missouri).