G4FPH's Amateur Radio Pages - The pre-transmitting years

I first became interested in listening to short wave radio off the back of my brother's interest in same, which he began around 1971. I remember him having space in a shed in the garden at the rear of our parents' house in east Birmingham, one end of which was given over to electronics and radio. His principal receiver was a Codar CR-70A, connected to a 80 ft. wire aerial which ran down the garden to a pole at the bottom. His receiving log book from those days survives. He enjoyed listening to both far away broadcast stations and radio amateurs. By today's standards the CR-70A was a terrible receiver, especially for trying to listen to narrow-band signals, and would have required much skill to do so successfully.

Here's page one from my brother's receiving station logbook: [Need a picture adding here!]

I recall him building an oscilloscope using an ex-WD cathode ray tube (VCR-138, or 9) and, possibly, a Heathkit LW / MW car radio. I also recall the brightly coloured knobs of a Marconi T1154 transmitter in one corner of the bench, but think this was just a display piece.

Our mutual interest in radio did not overlap in time much, if at all, sadly. My brother's attention moved to vintage / classic cars and he disposed of all his electronics and radio equipment. It was only after he did this that I became serious about radio and wanted a 'station' of my own.

Serious reception

My receiving station logbook has a 'from' date of 9 July, 1974, on its front cover. Also written on there is 'A9008', which was my associate member number of Radio Society of Great Britain. As I recall, only licenced radio amateurs were allowed full membership. At the time I applied, it may have been the case that your membership application had to be proposed by someone that was already a full member too. If this sounds like the trappings of a stuffy old gentlemen's club looking to keep out the riff-raff, then that's because it probably was. Well, what do you expect when your offices are in central London and your society patron is a member of the royal family?! There was also something calles a 'BRS' (british Receiving Station) number - BRSnnnnn. I think this was something allocated if you wanted to send and receive QSL cards. I never had one.

RSGB, Radio Communication and other magazines

I must have joined RSGB after deciding that Amateur Radio held some serious interest for me. Doubtless my prime motivation for joining back then would have been same as for many then and now, i.e. to gain access to the members' only monthly magazine - 'Radio Communication'.

The RSGB magazine (RC) was hard-focused on the hobby and all its aspects. Other, non-membership, over-the-counter, monthly magazines were available from other publishers, notably Short-Wave Magazine (SWM), Wireless World (WW) and Practical Wireless (PW). I purchased these from time-to-time, as funds would allow and depending on my interest in their content. SWM was amateur radio focused and had great technical articles that matched the quality of those of a practical nature in the RSGB magazine. It had none of the society administrative 'fluff' that RC was obliged to carry as an overhead that I, and I suspect many other, just used to skip over.

WW articles seemed to have a more theoretical and deeper technical leaning but, to someone with a thirst for knowledge as to the 'why' and 'how', it was a wonderful resource. I didn't mind reading about Hi-Fi amplifiers and such at all, it was all electronics to me.

PW was all about building stuff. A few other general electronics magazines existed too. It was a rich landscape for reading! My brother was a PW subscriber. PW always had great, colourful cover pictures of whatever the project of the month was. Now that I think about it, he must have kept his subscription up for a while after his interests moved from radio to cars, as I recall he built himself 'windscreen wiper delay' and 'electronic ignition' units for his car (MG Midget) from the pages of PW, as crossover into his new hobby. In the early 1970s, such high-tech. electronic gadgets in cars were quite a rarity!

My first receiver was even worse than the CR-70A used by my bother. It was another Codar model, this time a 'Mini-Clipper', which was a battery-powered, single-valve TRF set, which produced feeble sound in a pair of cheap, Japanese headphones. The receiver had four, or five, plug-in coils each one for a different frequency range. As I recall, the combined 1.5 and 63 Volt battery it used did not last that long and these were non-rechargeable. The joy in using the Mini-Clipper was getting it to hear anything interesting, especially those narrow-band, hard to tune in amateur signals, that I was definitely more interested in.

Logbook extracts

Here's page one from my first ever receiving station logbook: [Need a picture adding here!]

In addition to my logbook capturing stations heard, I also made the odd note in mine regarding upgrades to my station appartus. Looking back, I'm glad to have had this chronology. As a teenager, I never kept a diary, so this is the nearest daily record I have:

• 7/9/1974. "Bought Heathkit RA-1 receiver from GW3TMH." The entry doesn't say how much I paid, but the sum of 30 pounds rings a bell. I recall making the car journey with my parents to Welshpool to collect this item. The RA-1 was my first proper amateur bands only receiver. It was a good performer, had a crystal calibrator and a half-lattice crystal filter for, to me, unheard of degrees of IF selectivity, well suited to reception of stations using SSB mode. This receiver was my number one in the shack until I got my transmitting licence.
• 8/11/1974. Bought a Collins TCS-8 receiver from my brother's friend - the one that used to do tests on 27 and 108 MHz with (see elsewhere on this site). I paid the princely sum of five pounds for this receiver, which was a great buy! I don't recall whether a mains power supply had been added internally to this receiver, or whether it had an external one. Quite recently, a friend from back in those days - Noel, G8NDT - told me that I had sold him this receiver, which I had quite forgotten.
• 25/12/1974. Christmas! Was does every boy want for Christmas? Well, I wanted and got a two metre converter made by Microwave Modules of Liverpool, England. Tye MMC-144/28, or some such model. This took in signals in the 144 - 146 MHz band and transposed them to 28 - 30 MHz band, such that I could now receive VHF as well as HF on my Heathkit RA-1.
• 29/12/1974. My brother built me a rotator for a two metre band aerial, made from an old car wiper motor with a steel shaft brazed to it. Quite odd this. The rotator never did get installed outside the house underneath a directionl aerial. My recollection is that it just sat on a shelf in my bedroom, with a square halo (duh - onmi-directional!) atop. The rotator was fed with DC current from an old model railway control unit, which was good as it supplied variable current and the polatity could be changed for clockwise and anti-clockwise rotation.
• 1/3/1975. Built a two metre band half-wave aerial out of an old TV aerial. I don't recall this. Must just have been a dipole. Doesn't seem like much of a constructional challenge now. Maybe it was for a boy aged 14.
• 16/3/1975. Logbook entry reads: "Put up a long-wire aerial. All contacts logged on 160 and 80 metres now on the long-wire. 30 ft. long / 20 ft. agl." I don't quite understand this entry. If accurate (and why would it not be) what aerial would I have been using for HF up to that point?! I'm guessing that the 130 ft. Inverted-L type aerial I distinctly remember erecting - drilling holes in the brick wall and installing a short mast; untwisting hard drawn copper wire; putting up a pole in one of the damson trees at the bottom of the garden - must have been in the run up to my gettimg a transmitting licence in 1976.
• 5/4/1975. "Bought a [second-hand] Codar T28 Receiver from G4BKM in London. 12 pounds paid. Good condition." This receiver was a 'small object of desire' for me. It was small, solid-state, designed to accompany the Codar AT5 tranmitter, particularly in mobile installations. It covered 160 and 80 metre amateur bands. Performance was not great. The design was basically that of a MW broadcast transistor portable, with an added Beat Frequency Oscillator (BFO) to allow resolving of SSB and CW signals. After slating the performance of the Codar CR-70A receiver that my brother used and the Coadar Mini-Clipper that I first used, it might sound like I have it in for Codar. I really don't! With hindsight, their low-priced receivers had a definite place in the market and their performance encouraged users' to find innovative ways of using their controls to receive and resolve signals. I think it was the T28 that I often had to use the 'RF Peak' control for fine frequency control in the presence of strong SSB signals. Who would have thought! I recall the T28 was pretty much a shelf-queen, as either of the Heathkit RA-1, or Collins receiver performance knocked spots off it!
• 4/5/1975. "Got the 'G5RV' up. 5/9 signals on all bands." So, confirmation bias clearly existed back then too! It had obviously got to me that the G5RV aerial was somehow magical and its performance automatically better than any similar length(s) of wire that might be erected. Anyway, I'm pleased that it worked so well for you, young Mark. I can't say I have ever put one up at any point since 1975, as other aerials are available.
• 6/12/1975 (or therabouts). "Bought Pye Cambridge from A.J.H. Electronics" [Rugby]. Crystals for 145.0 MHz. Six-channel, dash-mounting, 'flat' type microphone. AM." This purchase was to have a significant impact on me in the hobby. It would give me my frst ever contact as a licenced radio amateur and lead to an enduring love affair with radio telephone equipment produced by Pye of Cambridge, England. I have distinct memories of seeing the advert in Radio Communication for this. A.J.H. was a firm fixture on the rear cover over every month's magazine. My parents drove me over to Rugby on a Saturday, or Sunday, to collect the radio. Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen was in the charts (may even have been number one at the time) and was playing on the radio. Tony, the propieter of A.J.H. took me up some wooden stairs into his workshop. Wow! It was crammed full of the good stuff and I could have stayed their for hours. In addition to buying the Cambridge, I also bought a 100 yard drum of UR57 coax cable. Some of this is still hanging up in my garage! Quite why I bought an AM Cambridge and not an FM one, I'm not quite sure. The price I paid seems a little steep now, but it did come already fitted with crystals and tuned up for what was then the nationwide mobile calling channel, 145.0 MHz. VHF high-band ('A' band: 148 - 174 MHz units, that would tune down to the 144 MHz amateur band) FM radio telephone equipment was less common on the amateur market and generally more pricey, perhaps because much of this would have still been in commercial service in 1975. In any case, I must have figured that I could handle what was a fairly easy conversion of the radio from AM to FM mode of operation, so it did not matter much. That conversion indeed happened sometime later.

Looking back at the 18 months (mid-1974 to early-1976) documented in my receiving station logbook, three things are apparent: (1) The first six months of HF-only operations, capturing signals from local (very local and UK local) stations, mainly on the 160 and 80 metre bands, plus the obligatory 'DX'. Hearing signals from across the oceans was cetrainly a thrill and still is to this day. (2) The impact of adding VHF reception at Chrsitmas 1974 and the extent to which I switched my full attention to the two metre band for a few months and discovered a whole new bunch of people there, many of whom lived quite locally around Birmingham but, as they had Class B licences, were hitherto unknown to me. (3) Once the two metre band became familiar territory to me, it simply became another band added to the overall mix of reception enjoyment.

Copyright 2026 Mark Hill, G4FPH.

Last modified: 17 August, 2026.