Watson's Radio Club
GM3PSP - Early Days
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This is a short record of your scribe's early days playing radio, from Short Wave Broadcast - and Amateur bands listening in the late-1950s to building valve equipment and making a first QSO as GM3PSP in early 1962.
My First Year on the Air
by Alan J. Masson GM3PSP,
from “The Lothians Radio Amateur” March 1963
On a cold January morning in 1962, in the middle of the Post Office work-to-rule, my licence arrived. The same day, by the courtesy of Tom Simpson GM3BCD and John Hughes GM3LCP of the George Watson’s College radio club, I made my first contact, with the luxury of a 150 watt AM transmitter and a cubical quad antenna, with I1LCX.
However, this state of affairs did not exist at the home QTH. My first (CW) transmitter was a single KT66 crystal oscillator operating on 7 mc using a piece of wire thrown across the shack as an aerial. The KT66 was running at about 15 watts, and I was pleasantly relieved to find that the crystal did not fracture in spite of the current being taken from it. MY first QSO with this rig was with John Kelly GM3POK, about a mile away, who gave me a report of 599 – a good start. After a week or two I found that there were far too many unanswered CQ calls in my log, and decided that VFO control was essential.
About this time I agreed to try to clear up a number of faults in the Geloso VFO – PA transmitter which had been acquired by the Lothian Radio Society for use in Field Day. I managed to make it work fairly well initially only on 3.5 and 7 mc. By way of a test I called PA0GD at about noon on 7 mc and was pleased to receive a 569 report from him.
Recently it was decided to give Top-band a try and a small transmitter was built for the band. About a minute after the completion of the construction the rig was on the air and I had my first top-band QSO with GM3LIB. Can you imagine my consternation that his QTH was only about 200 yards from my own!
Plans for the future are numerous. Operation on the VHF’s, RTTY, mobile etc are contemplated although only 144 mc has actually been attempted, and indeed only a few experiments have been made with converters.