Category: History

  • AMR100

    A few weeks ago at the ARNSW Dural site I was talking with Mark Blackmore about the classic radios incorporated into the VK2WI broadcast building. He showed me some beautiful Collins receivers and some Racal sets. Also occupying a position on the equipment rack was a very shiny Kingsley AR7, the famously unauthorised copy of…

  • Australian Code Breakers

    On Wednesday evening I went along to a talk at a nearby library by David Dufty about his recent book ‘The Secret Code-Breakers of Central Bureau – How Australia’s signals intelligence network helped win the Pacific War’ published last year by Scribe. It’s a great story that does uncover previously unacknowledged contributions. Dufty’s interest was…

  • Learning morse and touch typing in tandem

    I’ve been wondering whether I should try to synchronise my most recent efforts at learning and improving my morse with a similar complementary neural mapping exercise of simultaneously learning to touch type as I practice copying morse code. I was googling around – on the off-chance someone had developed the ultimate piece of software which combined…

  • Grandmaster Flash

    Last night I watched two more episodes of The Get Down on Netflix with my daughter. About 6 minutes into episode 3 of the first season where members of I think the Notorious gang visit Grandmaster Flash to show him the bootleg cassette, you see Flash sitting at a desk with a fat old 2…

  • Sputnik 60 years ago today

    Sputnik 60 years ago today

    One of the clearest memories of my childhood is being taken up our steep driveway to the roadside out the front of our house from where there was a commanding view of the western and the southern sky. Sixty years ago today the Russians launched Sputnik and it would have been a few days after…

  • Walter Winchell

    I was meandering around the web this morning and stumbled on to a page where famous key collector and curator Tom Perera W1TP had re-created the morse key setup used by Walter Winchell to introduce and punctuate his radio and later TV broadcasts. They were a pair of Vibroplex bugs. I grew up in Sydney in the…

  • Roll your own valves (tubes)

    A few weeks back – in the post about wartime crystal production – I made a tangential reference to my all time favourite YouTube video – Claude Paillard F2FO distilling down to less than 20 minutes his meticulous work making a triode valve, effectively by hand to create a very cute looking valve wearing blue shorts. F2FO,…

  • Grinding quartz and holding a frequency during World War II

    I’m a great fan of the Prelinger Archives which is home to so many items like this video I’ve heard about recently from various ham radio email lists. I like how the components of the earliest electronics and wireless were so basic and ‘natural’. Think of hand made capacitors and resistors using traces of graphite on paper.…

  • Hidden heroes

    The BBC have just broadcast and put on YouTube an excellent hour long documentary about two people whose wartime work is credited with shortening the war and saving millions of lives. Yet because of the cold war and the climate of secrecy, credit came late or not at all. UPDATE: The YouTube video has been…

  • Winnie the war winner

    The other day I noticed a very interesting photo on a fellow Australian ham blogger, Peter Mark’s site. The blog entry was titled a “Radio nerd’s tour of Canberra“. The first photo is described as ‘a transceiver with a nifty antenna tuner’. But the instant I saw it I sensed there was slightly more to it.…

  • Overland Telegraph – 140 years ago, yesterday!

    An ABC News story today tells of the celebrations in Darwin this week marking the start of the Overland Telegraph on 20th June 1870 when the South Australian parliament voted to dedicate about half its annual budget to building the telegraph line! Barrie Barnes of the SA & NT Morsecodians and others appear in the video accompanying…

  • It is, ah, not raining here also!

    A pointer to the classic Hancock episode, ‘The Radio Ham’. Painfully hilarious!