Listening on my first, awful, HF bands receiver, some stations were heard more than others. Unsurprisingly, these stations turned out to be those in closest proximity to my parents' house in Castle Bromwich, East Birmingham. Most often, I would hear them on the 160, 80 and 40 metre bands. My near-neighbour amateurs' were:
Sometime soon after starting in the hobby, I discovered my nearest two local radio clubs, where like-minded people got together and geeked-out.
I should say some more about SARS. It was a great club and is still in existence today. Current SARS website. I recall the club had just a few younger members' - Short Wave Listeners (SWLs) like myself - but the core of the membership comprised men of working age, with a few who had probably retired. A demographic not dissimilar to that of the hobby today, perhaps. Suits and tweed jackets (with leather patches on the elbows, in some cases) were in evidence and pipe and cigarette smoking popular! The club had an 'old school' (and HF) vibe to it, which I liked. I recall the clubs programmes of meetings and events as being vibrant. Inspiring talks and demonstrations from own or visiting speakers; great 'junk sales', where you could pick up (or get stuck with) all manner of useful radio items for pocket (or no) money; and a good variety of club external events. I enjoyed participating in the external events. I specifially remember the great portable weekends held at various Midlands locations, such as Wirksworth in the Derbyshire Peak District and Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds. At these, proper canvas tents would be erected, together with the 'big vertical' - a 90ft. tall, top-loaded radiator for the 160 metre band, with radials, made up of scaffolding poles. A serious amout of heavy metal to get into the air. Helping to put that up taught be all I know about the 'falling-derrick' method of erection and the importance of guying / mast stays. The vertical was masterminded by Ralph, G3PYR, who was most keen on good old AM phone and CW operation on topband, using homemade transmitter(s), operated at strictly not a Watt no more than the legal maximum 10 Watt DC input power to the final RF stage. None of this new-fangled SSB for Ralph! With such a good aerial and the low noise levels of the rural locations chosen, stations over the whole country could be worked with ease. In addition to these club weekends, Scout Jamboree on the Air (JOTA) was an enjoyable annual weekend as was the temporary, multi-club operation put on at the annual Town and Country Festival (special callsign GB3TCF), near Warwick.
Among the calls I remember from those SARS days are G3PYR (Ralph); G3PLP (Bob); G3RGD (Ray); G4AXW (Stan); G3VPE (Henry); G3NXC (Tony); G4BBT (Roger); G8JMB (Ken). Stan, G4AXW, turned up in his estate car one Saturday while I was browsing the shiny radio equipment at Amateur Electronics shop. I belive Stan's occupation was as a Service Engineer for powered handling equipment, such as fork-lift trucks. If I've remembered that correctly, then he was doubtless never short of work in the industrial suburbs of Birmingham! Stan gave me a tour of the mobile radio installation in his car, which comprised a Yaesu FT-75 (or 75B) HF SSB transceiver, with a G-whip multiband aerial rising up off the rear bumper. Flicking through the bands, I took no convincing that he regularly worked stations overseas while driving around the streets of Birmingham. One day, I just might be lucky enough to find an FT-75B to try for myself.
The Slade Radio club has a long and proud history going back to possibly the late-1920s. Now if that's not old school then what is? For many years, Slade Radio was renowned for its organising of Direction Finding (DF) contests (on the 160 metre band). Oddly, I have no recollection of going on any of these, maybe because I lacked transport and suitable portable equipment. The club membership demographic was possibly similar to that of SARS, but the average age may have been quite a bit lower due to a higher proportion of younger members. Unlike SARS with it's distictly 'HF' vibe, many of the members of Slade Radio were keen on VHF (and even UHF) operation, which gave the club a complementary position in my head. Slade members' were keen to embrace up-to-date technology - much of which had started to flood in from Japan - and new concepts, such as VHF and UHF FM repeaters and VHF SSB operation, including while mobile.
Among the calls I remember from those Slade days are G4FGF (John); G8FTU (Chris); G8JFR (Colin); G8HBE (Bob); G8NDT (Noel); G8FHB (Sam).
All of the above Slade members' showed me great kindness and patience, helping me to find may way into exploring the VHF and UHF spectrum. I'm still in regular contact with Noel, both on the air and in person. Colin was instrumental into getting me transmitting (legally!) on the HF bands, as mentioned elsewhere on this site.
There's a great book that used to be available in print, entitled "Wireless in the Midlands", by William Moorwood, G3CAQ. It charts the rise (and fall) of many of the amateur radio clubs and societies of the region, of which there were far more than the two I attended regularly, above. In fact, that's another thing that's very different about the hobby today: There are fewer radio clubs and you generally have to travel a greater distance to find one. A bit like trying to find a real butchers shop!
I was trying to recall how often the above radio clubs met. Maybe only monthly at the time. In between club meetings, it was common to meet other radio people in one, or both, of the two main shops in Birmingham that served the hobby:
So my local 'world' in my early days in the hobby was informed by hearing amateur stations on the lower HF bands. Later, when I acquired equipment capable of reception on the two metre (144 - 146 MHz) amateur band, my world would expand.
Back then I was 14 / 15 years of age, none of my school friends were interested in amateur radio. We all did mathematics and science / physics at school and I'm sure I would have tried to recruit some, but without success. A short distance away from our house lived a boy who, I think, must have been at the different (Grammer) school my brother attended. I recall we hit it off talking about radio-controlled models. I was less interested in the models, but very interested in the radio transmitters and receivers used to control such.
At the time, these transmitters and receivers operated with AM modulation in the 27 MHz frequency band, adjacent to the 28 MHz amateur radio band. I was aware that 27 MHz was also a band used by made-in-Japan walkie-talkies that were advertised widely in the UK, but always with a disclaimer suggesting they were either illegal to use here, or that a licence was required to use them, but that you could not obtain such a licence! Of course, these walkie-talkies were made for the CB radio market in the US. As pocket money was tight and both of us already owned receivers that covered the 27 and 28 MHz amateur bands, my friend and I decided we would each build a transmitter to allow voice communications between our houses. It was entirely legal to buy crystals for model control transmitters and they were relatively inexpensive, so a pair of these on the same channel / frequency (27.145 MHz?) formed the basis for our respective projects. The minimum (transistor) parts-count design transmitters (from some electronics magazine) worked well. My friend made a deluxe unit, in an aluminium case with a telescopic whip, and I think it had a receiver in the same case. My transmitter was a rat's nest on my workbench, so definitely fixed station only!
After 27 MHz, my friend found a design for a single-transistor Band II VHF (88 - 108 MHz) FM transmitter 'bug'. I beleieve this came from an electronics kit produced by a company called 'Josty', most likely available by mail order. The simplicity and performance of this design - and that it worked with a standard VHF broadcast portable radio - made us forget 27 MHz AM. The bug had a small microphone attached and it's operating frequency could be adjusted to an unused part of the broadcast band. Considering that the frequency of operation was determined by a simple coil and capacitor arrangement, it was remarkably stable and certainly good enough! I found a reference to 'Jostykits' - Danish, apparently, here: FM Radio 'Bug'
With the bug, I had branched out into using VHF before I had any receiver capable of amateur signals on that band. Perhaps it was the use of a broadcast receiver, or maybe my growing interest in rock music, that led me to experiment with transmitting on the Mediim Wave (545 - 1605 kHz) AM broadcast frequency band. I already had a long-wire (about 130 ft.) aerial running down the garden. For Christmas 1973, my parents' gifted me a Philips cassette recorder (model N2204). This came with a microphone and I, like thousands of other teenagers, used to record music broadcast on radio and TV thereby saving money on buying records. I was quite a keen cyclist at the time and thought it would be a great experiment to set up a MW transmitter at home and ride out on my bike with my transistor portable receiver to see what sort of coverage I could achieve.
For some reason, the MW transmitter I built was a valve, rather than transistor, design. Back in 1975, between the technology generations of valves (hollow-state) and transistors (solid-state) it was common to learn about and work with both. The transmitter I intended to build would not have been out of place were it to be used on the 160 metre amateur band. Probably my design inspiration was from the many such designs by F. G. Rayer (G3OGR) and plenty of others that featured in the pages of the electronics and amatuer radio periodicals. I parts-reduced my design in a couple of ways I was proud of. Firstly, I elected to use crystal-control, rather than build a complicated VFO (Variable Frequency Oscillator). I suspect this decision may also have been influenced by someone giving me a crystal with its fundamental frequency somewhere in the medium wave band (1154 kHz?). Secondly, rather than build a fancy, multi-stage valve modulator, I hit on the idea of using a standard receiver audio output transformer - the sort that would transform, say 5 kOhm down to 3 Ohm to drive a loudspeaker from a valve stage - but operating it in reverse. My Phillips cassette recorder had a socket on it for connecting to an external loudspeaker. Feeding this into the low-impedance winding of the audio output transformer and putting the high-impedance side of the winding in series with the high voltage feed to the RF power amplifier in the transmitter worked a treat! The completed transmitter had only two valves - an ECC81 (12AT7) double-triode as crystal oscillator and buffer stages, followed by a 6AQ5 as RF power amplifier stage. Power supply - 6.3 Volt AC for the valve heaters and 250 Volt DC for the valve anodes - was obtained from an old transformer and other components housed in a shoe box!
Excursions on my bike, listening to my own personal radio station were most satisfying. Connecting the long-wire aerial to the transmitter and tuning for maximum current in the wire (with the help of a light bulb) gave excellent coverage out to a good couple of miles in any direction. must have measured the DC input power to the transmitter power amplifier and it cannot have been more that a few Watts. At the time, the cassettes I was using only allowed for a maximum of 30 minutes air time in any one session. This was probably fortunate though, as I was conscious that the experiments I was engaged in could be viewed with distain by the authorities.
Copyright 2026 Mark Hill, G4FPH.
Last modified: 17 August, 2026.