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.
Hand made triode
F2FO, radioamateur depuis 1959, montre ici les différentes étapes de la construction d’une lampe triode réalisée par ses soins. Cette lampe a permis d’établir des liaisons avec d’autres radioamateurs situés sur 4 continents. Si vous souhaitez en savoir plus, visitez son site web personnel : http://paillard.claude.free.fr
Watching it again, this time I spent a bit more time looking over the many pages of background information he had posted on his website detailing his research into triodes of the 1920s, the techniques he used and the equipment he used or made to complete this project.
This prompted me to start a more methodical reading of the documents, and to work through the translations to ensure I understood what he had done. (Google translate is great, but it missed a significant amount.) If you’re vaguely interested in the technology of the earliest days of radio, and have ever wondered how these valves were made, the documents take you on a special journey through the eyes of an explorer with a brilliant workshop and skills to match. His research is comprehensive. By way of exploring how early valves were made he produces a full detailed and illustrated life story of the evolution of valve types and introduces important valve families like the 6L6 and its descendants like the 6V6 and the 807 of the late 1930s. He also takes you on an excursion to discover the history of creating an effective vacuum, critical in the creation of the valve aka the vacuum tube.
It’s also an enjoyable way to build up a French vocab for the terminology of valve radio gear. Along the way I stumbled across the Electropedia, a brilliant resource for translating technical terms from French to English with a number of other languages included. But some of the terms Claude Paillard uses reflect an earlier era and vocabulary. He talks about the plaque (plate) of a valve rather than l’anode. I’d love to find online versions of the French radio engineering references he cites from the 1920s.
Edouard Cliquet wrote a number of books explaining radio
Another plus of this experience is reading the history of radio from the perspective of a country other than Britain or the US. The French version of radio history introduces interesting characters and stories to the familiar names and places. An inspiration behind the work of F2FO is the history of the triode TM (Télégraphie Militaire). A good outline is at Michel Siméon’s website.
Pratique et théorie de la T.S.F by Paul Berché
Paul Berché was another prolific author of French radio texts.
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.
Winnie the war-winner seen in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It was named after British wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
The fact that it was built on a beaten up old kerosene can prompted me to google “Winnie the war winner” and the results confirmed Peter’s photo is of this most famous piece of Australian ham homebrew ingenuity. Max (Joe) Loveless’ skill to be precise. The photo prompted me to find out the story of this iconic wireless set that’s an inspiration to a generation of Australian radio hams proud of their traditions of ‘making-do’.
The wikipedia entry on the Battle of Timor gives detailed historical and military background to this little radio’s moment of fame in April 1942.
As a result of British intrigue Australian troops were sent to Portuguese East Timor to disrupt any Japanese invasion on Australia’s northern doorstep. By April the 2/2nd Independent Company had been fighting a guerilla campaign for four months. Many were ill and they were low on supplies, and had had no contact with Australia since February.
For weeks a team had been trying to build a transmitter from salvaged parts from damaged radio gear. Before the war Max Loveless was a radio amateur in Hobart with the call 7ML. He became a Signaller with “Sparrowforce” on the Dutch part of Timor with the Australian Infantry Forces (AIF).
Report on Winnie the war winner in the Melbourne Argus for 1 Jan 1943 – page 12
Bill Marien reported the story in the Melbourne Argus of 1st January 1943:
“Force Intact. Still Fighting. Badly Need Boots, Money, Quinine, Tommygun, Ammunition.”
This was the first official message received in Australia from the lost AIF commandos of Portuguese Timor who, for 59 days after the Japanese landing on the island, had been written off as missing or dead.
The signal came to Darwin on the night of April 19. It was transmitted by “Winnie the War Winner,” a crazy contraption built from scraps of wire and tin, and pieces of long discarded radio sets.
When the commandos showed me the incredible Winnie recently, it was easy to recapture the scene of that night of April 19.
In the thin air of a Timor mountain hideout, 4 bearded, haggard Australians were working by the smoking, stinking light of a pig-fat flare. Three of them watched anxiously as the fourth thumbed a Morse key. Weak batteries sent the dots and dashes of the morse dimly across the Arafura Sea to the Northern Territory of Australia. The tension was something physical as the operator strained his ears for a reply. At last a reply came.”
The AIF commando force which had been in Portuguese Timor were joined by other Australians from Dutch Timor including two signalmen, Cpl John Sargeant, of Bonshaw, NSW, and Lance-Cpl John Donovan, of Lindfield, NSW. Under leadership of Capt George Parker, of Earlwood, NSW, they joined Sigs Max (Joe) Loveless, of Hobart, and K. Richards, of Victoria, both of the original commando force.
“On March 8 the 4 men got to work — Loveless just out of sick bed and Sargeant just recovered from malaria. Three days later a Dutch sergeant, exhausted, stumbled in. He had carried what he thought to be a transmitter-receiver 40 miles through some of the roughest country in the world. It was an ordinary commercial medium-wave receiving set – and out of order.
CORPORAL WENT SCROUNGING
Loveless, whose knowledge made him No 1 man of the team, thought he could build a one-valve transmitter from parts of this set and of another small and weak set. He planned a circuit, and all the commandos were asked to be on the lookout for anything that might serve as a radio part.
Cpl Donovan went scrounging at Attamboa, on the north coast, to see what he could salvage, while his companions recovered an abandoned army set. The parts of the 3 sets were unsoldered, and a bamboo used to catch all the melted solder for re-use. Loveless had carefully preserved 2 small batteries, but they needed recharging. A generator was taken from an abandoned 10-year old car and rigged to a series of wooden wheels, which a native was persuaded to turn. The set was complete on March 26.
It would not work!
Three of the team who helped Max Loveless build Winnie the war winner re-enact transmissions from a hill in East Timor – Signaller Keith Richards, Corporal John Donovan and Lieutenant Jack Sergeant. Photo by Damien Parer.
The only tools available were a tomahawk, pliers, and screw-driver. They had no test equipment to determine the set’s frequency. The coils were wound on pieces of bamboo.
On March 28 Donovan returned from Attamboa – laden like a treasure ship. He had the power pack from a Dutch transmitter, 2 aerial tuning condensers, 60ft of aerial wire in short lengths, and a receiving set. Next day the men had to move all their precious gear, for the Japanese were getting too close.
Loveless got to work on a second transmitter twice as big as the first, and built it into a 4-gallon kerosene tin. A battery charger was recovered from enemy-held territory. To get it 14 commandos went through the Japanese lines to the old Australian headquarters at Villa Maria. There, within 100 yards of Japanese sentries, protected only by the dark, they dug up the charger which had been buried when the headquarters were evacuated.
HEARD DARWIN WAS SAFE
On April 10 the signallers heard Darwin on the receiver, and knew then that Darwin was still in Australian hands. But their second transmitter was also a failure.
Loveless had another idea, but he needed more batteries. Four were found. Then the petrol ran out and the charger could not be kept running. So they raided the Japanese lines and carried off tins of kerosene. Finally the charger was started on kerosene and run on diesel oil.
With batteries at full strength they signalled Darwin on April 18, but got no reply. They did not know that their message had been picked up on the Australian mainland and passed on to Darwin, that all transmitting stations had been warned to keep off the air and listen to Timor the following night.
You can get a good sense of the story from this video of the documentary ‘The Men of Timor’ filmed in Timor by Damien Parer in late September 1943. You can see a reconstruction of the building of the radio about 3’16″ in from the start.
On the 19th April they heard Darwin but their batteries failed again.
On the night of April 20 they again got Darwin. But Darwin was suspicious; demanded proof of their identity. So questions and answers like these were rushed across the Arafura Sea:
“Do you know Bill Jones?”— “Yes, he’s with us.”
“What rank, and answer immediately?”— “Captain.”
“Is he there? Bring him to the transmitter. . . . What’s your wife’s name, Bill?”— “Joan.”
“What’s the street number of your home?”
Once they provided the correct answers, help was on its way.
I found the newspaper report on the National Library of Australia’s brilliant Trove, where digital versions of many Australian newspapers have been put online courtesy of crowd-sourced editors across the global internet. Truly astounding!
An article appeared on the WIRED site recently about the re-branding of RadioShack, a mirror of the same change happening to Australia’s iconic Dick Smith Electronics stores. The subtitle sums it up: ‘Tinkerers Search for New Spiritual Home’.
” The new bosses want to turn RadioShack into a hipper, more mainstream place for “mobility” — which is what they insist on calling the cell phone market. (In an interview, RadioShack’s marketing chief used the word mobility an average of once every 105 seconds.) Selling phones is central to the new RadioShack. And so far, it seems to be working. Per-store sales are up, and corporate profits jumped 26 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009.”
The article identifies ‘a small subculture of RadioShack nostalgics’ and their feelings of betrayal and loss. The author asserts that
“in a single generation, the American who built, repaired, and tinkered with technology has evolved into an entirely new species: the American who prefers to slip that technology out of his pocket and show off its killer apps. Once, we were makers. Now most of us are users.”
It sketches the history of the brand, the importance of the high profit margin and how in a way the introduction of the TRS-80 the first mass-produced PC was the beginning of the end for the DIY mission of owner Charles Tandy. The up to 500% markup of tiny electronic components has been replaced by the cell phone which is “like a tiny slot machine that pays off month after month.”
The WIRED piece features eight pages of old Radio Shack catalogues scanned by fan Mike D’Alessio
In Australia the Tandy chain was established in 1973 and finally purchased by Woolworths in 2001. Woolworths also own Tandy’s one-time competitor Dick Smith Electronics (fully owned as of 1982). In 2009 Tandy stores began morphing into DSE outlets. Jaycar now remains as the most likely place to purchase electronic bits and pieces, with a wide network of stores across the country. Hunting down rarer semiconductors, components like toroids, hardware and even wire is often easier via US speciality suppliers like ‘The Wireman’ etc.
Kristen Haring’s book “Ham Radio’s Technical Culture”
Kristen Haring’s book “Ham Radio’s Technical Culture” is a fascinating coverage of an activity that gets precious little coverage in the mainstream.
“”Although approximately one million Americans operated ham radios in the course of the 20th century, very little has been written about this thriving technical culture in our midst. Kristen Haring offers a deeply sympathetic history of this under-appreciated technical community and their role in contributing to American advances in science and technology, especially the electronics industry. In the process she reveals how technical tinkering has defined manhood in the United States and has powerfully constituted ‘technical identities’ with often utopian, even, at times, revolutionary, notions about the social uses of technology.”
Susan Douglas, Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Communication Studies, University of Michigan, and author of “Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination”
