The Classic Military Radio Blues

I worked for, and with, John Wilson for about twelve years up at the Matlock Emporium. They say you only get eight for Aggravated Burglary but I digress. In that time John demonstrated a life-times radio engineering experience allied to a powerful sense of the aesthetic. I, on the other hand, have a somewhat shorter life-times experience married to a sense of the faintly ridiculous.

What John has missed entirely is the value of the oversized Military wireless as a replacement for furniture and as a fashion statement. The first radio to have pretensions toward being a bedside table was a SETS RECEIVING: CANADIAN NO 52, a rather large Christmas present given as a bribe for peace back in 1963. Our house already had things the grown-ups called occasional tables. OK then, the 52 was occasionally a table and mostly a radio. It was smuggled into the house under cover of darkness after delivery from Everybody's Store in Coxbench - a Derbyshire village name first to fall foul of my schoolboy humour. They were glad to see the back of it, no doubt.

It came with an enormous power supply, the on/off switch - based on a design stolen from the set of an early Hammer horror film - placed jauntily above the power output socket. This was a Bakelite casting, an International Octal surface mount with the pins standing proud above the front panel. If you switched on without the plug in, your finger would come down on the HT pin, initiating an early form of aerobics. Health and Safety legislation has taken so much from the hobby.

The 52 SET got me cricket from the antipodes, merry greeting from Tirana and the start of a lifetimes listening to World Service. Then the Empire and General Overseas Service of The BBC, now World Service Radio and almost unlistenable.

Remembering those early days, we recently set off on a pilgrimage to Coxbench - only to find that Everybody's Store is now a part of the elevated section of the A38. The pub is still there, though. We were able to test that.

Among the things the 52 SET lacked, apart from sensitivity, selectivity, frequency accuracy or stability, were the broadcast bands. If you were an AM DX'er in those days it meant the only receiver to have was an R1155. John likes those. Mine had a vibrator power supply, a curious electro-mechanical method of producing the high voltage needed for the valves from a car battery - and not what you are thinking. Receiving at maximum gain drew thirteen amps or more, requiring an overnight battery charging session if we were to catch the jazz next day from Allouis. We must have listened in a constant heady atmosphere of hydrogen and oxygen from the fizzing cells which probably explains this writing style.

You see, the R1155 had no audio stages. You either listened on an ex-Army headset (the original design based on a wireless operator who had ears in a different place to the rest of us) or you ripped out the DF or Radio Direction Finding part of the set and fitted a little amplifier. This was a 6J5G, a 6Q5G if you wanted bags of gain and microphony, into a Class A 6V6G. These are classic valve types that will mean nothing to a generation brought up on MOSFET current-dumpers and long-tailed pairs. I belong to a generation that regarded the sub-miniature 6V6GT as a form of hi-tech. Anyway, this power duo got you two-and-a-half watts of pure distortion.

The height of technical snobbery at that time was to strap the anodes together with a 1.5M resistor so each one of us who did this could lay claim to be the inventor of negative feedback. Being a good old fashioned self-publicist, I invented my own form of negative feedback. This was to connect the secondary of the output transformer in series with the output valve's cathode by-pass capacitor. Yes, I know Quad was doing it at the output of their Series 2 amplifiers, but the self-taught will never acknowledge plagiarism.

I digress, again. Then there was the R107. This was a seaman's chest of a radio, doubling as a larger bedside table than the 52 Set. Power was presented to an R107 via a Mil-spec connector that was nearly the size of the old two-pin kettle plug. The writer, as a young man, thought they had simply got hold of a duff kettle socket so applied the plug with a toffee hammer. This was the node for all the electrics, the table lamp atop the R107 and a fan heater. You could get all the wires in if you removed the cable clamp from the kettle plug - and all this with no earth, Health and Safety take note. How we made it to adulthood, I'll never know.

At least the R107 had plenty of room inside for modifications. In those days, a man was judged by the size of his output stage. Build bigger, better - get the maximum wattage into your cottage. By the time the R107 got its new output stage, we were dicing with death. It had ultra-linear push-pull KT66's with four hundred volts on the plate. When Radio Caroline came on-air, the whole street knew about it.

The case was painted a satanic black. Two breeze blocks got the same treatment and went underneath as legs - a bedside table weighing in at about two hundredweight. The nights were lost listening to King Crimson on Big L's Perfumed Garden with one John Peel. No one could have heard the doorbell. The man wanted to buy The Radio From Hell, cost no object. For a fiver, the R107 made its final journey. It had fought and won a war for us - on the beaches, in the air and in my bedroom. Never before had so much been done for so little.

A month later it was spotted in a recce by my troops. Seen in a garden near Brailsford, the black case sans radio, the lovingly restored front panel replaced by chicken wire and two rabbits. And at the going down of the sun and in the morning, I still remember it.

Then there was the AR88D. Mine came in an oak case with the offer of a free hernia. Even then, there was a curious kind of inverted snobbery. If you were a proper short wave listener who listened to Hams and anything that was not Radio Moscow, you had the AR88D. If you enjoyed long-wave listening you were but a pretender to the hobby and had the AR88LF. These were seen by the hard-core as not a real communications receiver and people would turn their backs at radio rallies. I always wanted one. My AR88D is remembered for its excellent audio on which Radio Northsea International accompanied exam revision.

Remember Kenny Everett, who never quite got up in time for his Kenny and Cash breakfast show at Capital Radio, then on 539m - that's metres, by the way - on the Medium Rave Band.

To have that audio quality available for the music stations on long-wave would have been utopian. The Moscow Home Service then on 173 - that's kilohertz, by the way - played doom-laden pieces of the Russian classics that matched my teenage angst to a tee. (Short pause while broadcast antenna designers fall about at that last pun. I could be waiting a long time)

Anyway, Monday evenings ritual walk from The Rose and Crown pub - no drink problem, we used to live there, honest - lead to G3PTT's farm and a chance to drive the coveted AR88LF. There was (and still is) not a power on earth that would make him part with it.

Space does not allow for all the radio stories. If I am to suffer arthritis in the hands in later life, it will be down to tuning an HRO with a Top Band bandspread coil-pack. The real HRO men would scour the rallies for the wooden case that held the coil-packs and spend a dog's age restoring it with teak oil as the rest of the furniture in the house fell apart. The rites of passage when you get your first Racal RA17 with the rites of massage as the chiropractor tries to fix your back. The defensive remarks when you tell them down at the club that your other radio is an Eddystone 840C. The career-long friend who took you to the Derby Rally where you picked up a 62 SET, the same friend who hit the talk-bar as you rigged the aerial to see if you had a future as a dummy load. The games master who made you Net Controller for Derby School CCF Operations; Map Exercises, who could not understand why Geneva was concerned that Radio Silence was filled with Pink Floyd albums on three NATO frequencies. Had enough?

We won't see radio like that again. All I wish is that the new generation of listeners get the same sense of pioneering fun we did. Perhaps in forty years time, SWM will carry a nostalgic piece about the day the wife used an AOR AR7030 as a door stop. Oh, how we all laughed.