Chapter 2
By Michael Stevenson
To continue the story, I was grateful to my Grandfather for seriously introducing me to shortwave with his old valve (tube) wireless (from the 1950's), it worked well until the batteries went flat, however, being a single shortwave band from 4.7 to 22 MHz, it certainly was not what you would call bandspreading and it did have image problems being only a single conversion superhet design (and very simple at that!)
By the way, an image mostly occurs in single conversion receivers due to their single intermediate frequency (usually around 455 KHz) which mixes with strong incoming frequencies that the stations are on and produce an image of these stations above and/or below the actual real station frequency.
Thus the 19 metre band stations if they are strong enough can also be received 455 KHz lower or higher, thus if you are not an experienced shortwave listener then you would be fooled into believing that there are more stations to be heard then there really is!
Anyway, the batteries went flat on this old radio and I was not going to waste anymore of my money on importing more from New Zealand, so I saved my pennies.
In the year 1970, I purchased my very first real shortwave receiver which was a Sony TR-1300 medium sized portable that also worked from the mains, it had (I think from what I can remember) 5 shortwave bands plus a separate fine tuning knob and a combination battery condition and signal strength meter.
This radio worked much better than the old valve job, it was much more sensitive, selective and easier to tune with.
It also had an external antenna and earth terminals on the rear, so, I put up my first decent outside antenna, a 20 metre "inverted L" type and connected a thick wire to the house copper earth stake and hey presto, there were stations all over the place including ones I had never heard before, there were also images because this Sony was only single conversion but I quickly learned which were images and which weren't!
I had a lot of fun with this Sony and did an awful lot of DXing and SWLing as well as quite a lot of QSLing with my first from Radio Netherlands via Bonaire, second from HCJB (yes!), third from DW, fourth from Radio Canada Int. etc etc.
It was 1973 before I run out of breath with this great Sony radio, I kept buying the very popular Australian magazine, "Electronics Australia" and kept seeing all these wonderful other radios called "Communications Receivers" such as Eddystone, Hallicrafters, Drake, Realistic, Trio (Kenwood) and Lafayette as well as the super expensive commercial ones such a Collins, Plessey, Racal etc.
I just had to have a Communications Receiver and this will be part three of the next Chapter.
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