My Adventures Over the Airwaves Part 4: Breaker Breaker One Nine, anybody got their ears on?

A side effect of that 70's kick I've been on this past year is that I came across this, from the second highest grossing movie of 1977 (pretty sure you can figure out what was #1 that year):

No, not the part of the scene with the cat house*, but all the usage of CB radio to communicate between truckers, the Bandit, Foxy Lady, and Cledus (and Fred the Basset Hound). While Citizens' Band radio --CB radio for short-- had a spike in use in the early 70s due to the speed limits created to fight the gas crisis, songs such as Convoy and movies such as Smokey and the Bandit and Convoy** caused CB radio to explode in popularity.

You know it's big when the President gets on a CB.
From Ridiculous 70s memes.

Even I, who wasn't allowed to watch Smokey and the Bandit (something about bad words and women doing "unladylike things"), knew of CB radio. I remember as a kid getting a brochure from a shoe store of all places*** that contained a conversion list of what all the CB "Ten Codes" were. At some point I also obtained a picture story about a kid who learns about CB radio and gets a base station as a gift, and when he hears a family friend (a trucker) call for help on the CB he gets his parents to call for help from the Fire Department. While both the book and brochure are long gone, they obviously left a lasting impression. 

I, like many kids of that era, had a pair of walkie talkies that were basically crap. The concept of having true portable communication was simply out of reach unless you owned a CB.

And no, we never owned a CB radio. 

From the 1978 Radio Shack catalog, page 160.
From radioshackcatalogs.com.

Although they were all over the place.

From the Amazon of 1978, the Sears catalog.
From the Fall/Winter 1978 Sears catalog, page 1174.
Yes, that was PAGE 1174.
From christmas.musetechnical.com.

Even at Kmart...

This was back when Kmart had a good reputation.
This is a 1976 Kmart at for CB Radios.
From 42444189@N04 on Flickr.

For starters, my parents weren't well off, and they considered items such as a CB radio an extravagance. I mean, we didn't get a color television until 1980, or a "nice" stereo system of any sort until ~1978. Our Christmas budget was $20, so my brother and I would comb through the Sears catalogs trying to find enough bang for the buck to stretch that $20 as far as it could go. Even then, my parents would nix certain presents, such as some of those Battlestar Galactica toys because they shot small projectiles. Later, when I had a job --and a car-- and I was told I could buy a car stereo once I saved up enough money, my dad flat out refused to let me get the stereo I'd saved for because "it was a waste of money".****

So you can imagine that my parents didn't want to buy a CB radio.

However, some family friends did have CB radios, and one year when we went on an extended weekend's vacation with them they offered to loan us one of their CBs as well as an antenna with a magnet mount and a felt bottom so as to not scratch the paint job on the car. The idea was that we would be able to coordinate on things such as stopping for lunch. Well, there was also just chatting while driving as well, the sort of thing that CB radio is really good at. The family friends talked up how great it was to chat like that and make the multi-hour drive that much easier.

Still, my parents refused to borrow a CB radio for the trip.

I suspect that my dad didn't want to risk scratching the paint on his then new station wagon, but he probably also thought that using a CB radio was "beneath" him for some reason. Or maybe he was concerned that I might hear some profanity, but given that I heard plenty of profanity all over the place (especially from my fellow Catholic students) I thought that possibility rather silly. But my parents kind of lived in an alternate universe where PG films were considered risqué.*****

As time went on, my interest in CB radio waned as my teen years went on and I gained access to a car and (more importantly) a car stereo. Well, there was also that thing about girls, I suppose, but to a geeky teen that was more hypothetical until I went to college.

***

When I worked at Radio Shack after college, I was less concerned about CB radio than shortwave radio and the burgeoning PC market, but we did sell our share of CB equipment. I used to get copies of Popular Communications magazine from bookstores, and I'd occasionally skim the CB Radio column, but it didn't have that much interest for me.

Ironically enough, I found out much later that the CB Radio craze of the 70s and 80s led to quite a few CB dedicated magazines across the globe.

Yes, even with CB Radio, sex sells.
From CB Action magazine out of Australia.

And in the UK, too.
From CB World magazine out of the UK.

Somebody alert the French that
sex sells CB magazines! From France CB
magazine, from... well, you know where.

Despite my history with radio as a hobby, I hadn't been that interested in trying out CB radio much over the years. I mean, I did own one for a while when I was "given" a cheap model as part of a yard sale purchase of a scanner radio, but I believe I gave it away to an electronics recycling event years ago.# It's just that CB radio does have its share of cranks and misfits and racists on the air, and despite that there's the perception that CB is an "old" technology and "nobody uses it" anymore.

Uh, yeah, about that latter part...

From a Loves Truck Stop in Indiana
in September 2024.

Loves is one of the places that I stop at while driving on the highway because I know I can usually find a clean restroom and a decent cup of coffee. So when I was inside, grabbing a drink, I saw some Cobra CB radios for sale and I quickly snapped that pic you see above. 

So if Loves considered CB radios important enough to truck drivers that they continue to stock them at their numerous stores throughout the country, then it's not so obsolete as I thought. 

Another thing happened over the past year that caught my attention was Hurricane Helene in the Fall of 2024. When the remnants of Helene hit the interior of the US, parts of the Appalachian Mountains centering around western North Carolina found themselves without power for well over a couple of weeks. In those situations, cell phones are useless without an active tower network, so it fell to CB radio and amateur radio to provide communications. I kept up with how things were progressing over that month, and I have to admit I was impressed by the response provided by both groups of radio operators (with some overlap between the two, to be honest).

With that knowledge out there, I began keeping an eye on YouTube for people promoting CB radio as a hobby. Again, there are the cranks and misfits out there, but there are plenty of people who keep the hobby alive. A lot of them are amateur radio operators (colloquially known as 'hams') who originally came from CB radio and still keep up with what's going on in CB.

I also found a recording of an actual LP made to explain how CB Radio worked:

Because that's what you did in the 70s to explain things

to people: you made a record of it.

While I'm not going to go out of my way to acquire a CB radio (at least not at the moment), I'll be keeping my eyes open if a used one comes my way. There's plenty of old radios around, so you never know what might appear at a local yard sale. And besides, an older radio could be yet another project for me to work on in my retirement years.

So no, I don't have a CB radio at the moment, but I think that'll change in the next year or two.

*True story: I was assigned in high school to read John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and the references of "cat houses" in the novel left me all confused. I finally asked in class just what the hell a cat house was, and boy did the class laugh at that one. (It's slang for a house of prostitution, if you don't know.) In my defense I knew I could never ask my parents, because they'd just get all offended or something. And yes, I have asked innocent questions about that sort of thing before and had it all blow up out of proportion, so I learned to simply not bring it up.

**Yes, the movie was based on the song and came out a couple of years after the song.

***The shoes I was forced to wear for school were Buster Browns. Damn, I hated those things. Sure, gym shoes weren't allowed, but surely my parents could have chosen something less dorky looking that those things.

****I had to get a Sears branded stereo that wasn't very good, but at least it did play cassettes. For a while I don't think they wanted me to get even a cassette player. Given that I played a TON of Heavy Metal in the car that I knew they wouldn't have approved of, they probably didn't want that cassette player.

*****I wasn't allowed to see R-rated movies, despite my ability to watch them on cable television all the time, until I went and saw Platoon with some friends (and yes, I was 17 at the time, so I was "legal"). As a college classmate once said, "Red needs to get out from under his parents' thumb."

#I tried hunting for it for this post, but no dice, so I figured it's long gone. If I stumble on it later, I'll provide an update.

#Blaugust2025

My Adventures Over the Airwaves Part 3: "This is 64 WDCR, Broadcasting from Kennedy Union..."

One of the goals I had when I went to college was to experience some things that I knew I wasn't going to have a chance to do again. That explains why I decided to minor in History and Philosophy despite being a Physics Major*, and also why I took a class in Fencing my Senior year.** I also participated in Model UN for a few years as part of the delegation that UD sent to New York for the National Model UN Conference.

It also explains why I became a radio DJ for my Senior year.

No, this is not me, it's the late Howard Hesseman
in his role as Dr. Johnny Fever on the late 70s-early 80s
television show WKRP in Cincinnati.
From the New York Times' obituary on Howard,
who died in 2022 at the age of 81.

Although it's long since been replaced by WUDR "Flyer Radio" 99.5/98.1 FM, UD had a student run radio station on AM radio when I attended. The university actually owned a commercial radio station at the time, WVUD 99.9 FM, which broadcast from Kennedy Union, but by the time I attended the university the student-run Rock format had become a purely commercial enterprise with a Soft Rock format, which very few students actually listened to.*** 

But there was another radio station nestled in the student union, and that was WDCR, AM 640.

It was designed as a completely student run station, inheriting WVUD's old student-run design, and although it was on AM --and was only broadcast via carrier signal on the power lines to the Union and the university's dorm buildings-- you could sign up for a DJ slot and spin the LPs. The only drawback was that by the time I did decide to sign up for a DJ shift my senior year, the format had changed from "you can grab an hour or two and play what you want" to "we're playing a primarily Rock and Alternative format just like a professional radio station". 

Alas, I couldn't imitate this scene from WKRP. I did
look into my yearbooks to see if there was anything
worthy of a scan, but nope. One yearbook had WDCR
as "FM 64", not "AM 64". /sigh

Since I didn't really have any ideas about what to play, only that I wanted to be on the radio, I was fine with that. My freshman year roommate (and current housemate) and I secured a slot for a couple of hours in the mid-morning once or twice a week, and away we went.

Two of my other housemates had been DJs on the station already, so that helped to ease me into the job. The knowledge that people mostly heard us when they crossed through the lobby area of Kennedy Union meant that I didn't really have to worry about putting myself on the spot.**** I did come up with a name --'Mister Physics', which was actually one of the nicknames given me by my friends at UD-- but really, nobody cared what I was called as long as I worked the playlist and had a bit of banter here and there with my housemate as co-host. 

Although I knew about 2/3 of the songs on the playlist, that other 1/3 were a real eye opener. You'd think that Album Oriented Rock stations were all alike, and maybe they are now in the era of corporate sameness and station centralization, but radio stations even within the same format all had their own little quirks. For example, WTUE-FM in Dayton had a different enough playlist than WEBN-FM in Cincinnati that I enjoyed WTUE much more than WEBN when I visited home. 

This was the first song I ever played as a DJ;

I'd never heard it until that moment.

By the time I had a DJ shift, radio had been changing. While albums did exist, and I queued up enough records over my DJ tenure, the music had already been migrating to tape machines. I knew CDs weren't too far behind, given that WVUD did have a CD system in place --we got VUD's hand-me-downs for equipment-- and when I was given a tour of the WVUD studios I got to see the new systems in action. 

***

You know, having that one shift wasn't a big time commitment, but having it that last year of college meant everything to me. It was fun, it was relaxing, and I got to enjoy the illusion of being in control of what people listened to on the radio. 

We did have a cast of characters there at the station. There was the conservative commentator who couldn't crack a joke if his life depended on it, the one station higher-up who absolutely loved Duran Duran to the point of her following them when they went on tour over the summer, the news reader who read the news impeccably and was always dressed to the nines but had such a conceited attitude I still remember her to this day, and the fellow DJ who --if given the chance-- would queue up only Van Halen.

"How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?"
From WKRP in Cincinnati.

Being a DJ meant I did have to do some work at the station other than just my shift. I was supposed to come up with a "promo" for my spot as well has do a couple of other odds and ends, but that never really happened. My mind kind of works in weird ways, and creative endeavors can take a while to finish. A common complaint about my projects over the years is that my projects look really disjointed and have huge gaps until I manage to pull it all together at the last moment. Yes, I know, it's crunch (to borrow the software development term), but it does work for me. However, I never got to finish up those other things as a DJ because I just never got a real deadline to work against. As for my promo, I had the idea of using Monty Python-esque voices over Sousa's The Liberty Bell March, but I never really sat down to work out how it ought to flow. The Station Manager wasn't pleased that I kind of half-assed it, but I had other priorities at the time and doing a promo wasn't one of them.

When I graduated, I explored working a shift at Dayton's local Fine Arts station, WDPR 89.5 FM (that was the frequency back then, I think it's 89.9 now), but I never got a callback. That was fine with me, since I had moved back to Cincinnati that summer and really never left. But still, I do have the radio bug in me, and it hasn't quite gone away.

In a quirk of fate, when my son went away to college, he decided to pick up a DJ shift at his university's radio station.***** Due to simulcasting over the internet, I got to hear his shift on Tuesday afternoons quite a bit while I worked. He kept that up for a couple of years until he spent a semester abroad at Lancaster University in England, but that my son walked the same path I did still makes me smile to this day.

*Yes, I minored in Math, because that was expected of a Physics Major. After all, you were going to take most of the classes to qualify for it anyway. As for Philosophy, the University of Dayton had a requirement of 12 hours (4 classes' worth) of either Religion or Philosophy, so it only took me two more classes to have enough to minor in it. History, however, was something I geeked out over and so I took as many classes as I could.

**I was told that if I wanted to meet girls I should take Ballroom Dancing, because the girls outnumbered the boys in that class by something like 2:1. As it turned out, I was already dating by then, so I didn't need that encouragement.

***Again, another acquaintance told me that girls really really loved listening to Air Supply as 'make-out' music, which... let's just say I was really skeptical of that one. But yes, he did have a cassette of Air Supply's hits, and yes there were times when I heard it coming from the door to his dorm room.

****Yes, you'd think that me being a shy introvert would mean that I couldn't do a DJ shift, but I found that being merely a voice behind a microphone made it much easier to deal with. I also got to hone my Kermit the Frog impression, although it does make my throat hurt when I do it for more than a few minutes.

*****The lucky bastard got to play whatever he wanted; I'm jealous. Here's a link to the station. Yes, you can listen live during the school year.

#Blaugust2025

My Adventures Over the Airwaves Part 2: On The Beautiful Blue Danube

 

I used to listen in at 5:00 UTC to Radio Österreich

International on 6155 kHz. It was broadcast to

Europe, but was an easy catch for those of us living

in Eastern North America.

All of the global events of the late 80s and early 90s led to a spike in shortwave radio interest. I remember during the beginning of the First Gulf War one of our local television reporters had a 3 minute piece on shortwave radios, and he demonstrated how they worked using a Realistic DX-440. I found out a bit later that the reporter was a shortwave enthusiast, so he was happy to promote the hobby, although he did tell me that the television producer had the radio around only because it had 10 memory selections, not because of its shortwave capabilities.

When I took a job at Radio Shack after my graduation*, I viewed it more from the lens of an electronics and radio enthusiast. Obviously anybody who has had to deal with Radio Shack over the decades can tell you I was fooling myself, as my naïveté was crushed shortly after starting there. Still, the best part of working at Radio Shack was when one of the ham radio operators dropped by to talk shop. Or when the CB or scanner fans came in for equipment. Or, on those rare occasions when someone shopping for a shortwave radio stopped by.**

After my time at Radio Shack ended (fired for low sales numbers) and I landed a job as a lab tech, I still kept up with shortwave radio.

While at UD, a friend gave me their old Knight Kit
Star Roamer. I tried and failed to get my dad interested
in shortwave; he listened to the radio all the time, 
but no dice on this. I honestly don't know what
happened to the old Star Roamer.
This pic is from Boatanchor Pix.

I joined the North American Shortwave Association (NASWA) and began receiving their monthly bulletins.*** Before that time I only knew of myself and a couple of other people who were interested in shortwave, but here was an entire organization devoted to shortwave radio. I also found the NASWA area on the GEnie online community, and I began participating in their forums.

I think I still have some of my old copies
of The NASWA Journal around (this is the cover
of one of them), but thankfully worldradiohistory.com
has PDF versions available for viewing.

***

During that time, I kept a log of my shortwave listening habits. 

Yeah, I know. My writing isn't the greatest.

Nestled among the "official" stations are a few stations that don't fit the mold of a traditional shortwave broadcaster: WFRC and WSKY "Whiskey Radio". Those are pirate radio stations. 

As long as radio has existed, there have been people who have wanted to skirt the rules and broadcast on their own. The reasons are myriad, from people wanting to hear their music played on radio (such as John Peel and Radio London of the 1960s), to people broadcasting with a political slant, to people just wanting to do their own thing. I knew of Radio Newyork International and its brief period of "free radio" broadcasting off the coast of New York City, but when I stumbled across this book at a local bookstore,

I suppose it was inevitable, but eventually Andrew Yoder
was caught by the FCC for broadcasting illegally himself.

I quickly snapped it up and began reading. 

From Pirate Radio Stations: Tuning in to Underground
Broadcasts (1st Edition) by Andrew Yoder.

When I realized there was a club that tailored to people chasing pirates and clandestine communications, The Association of Clandestine Enthusiasts (The ACE), I forked over a few dollars for an annual membership.

I actually have this copy! I haven't
stumbled across it lately, however.
From The Internet Archive.

***

So... why have I never mentioned any of this before? Outside of the obvious answer that this is a gaming blog, and this really doesn't have anything to do with gaming at all. Well, after that high point of the early-mid 90s, I haven't really listened to shortwave all that much.

The ICOM IC-R70, well known for being able to suss out
faint stations. I bought a used one in 1994, and sold it in 2000
when I bought the Grundig 800. From RigReference.com.

I got married, changed jobs (twice), and worked all sorts of crazy hours over the years. I became a parent, and as any parent will tell you, that sucks up a lot of your remaining free time. Shortwave radio isn't my only hobby, either, and those hobbies came more to the forefront in the late 90s and beyond.

There's also the little problem of money.

I don't have the money to keep up with all of my hobbies, so I had to pick and choose which hobbies to pay attention to. And in the late 90s, that meant giving up my memberships in NASWA and The ACE. Without that direct connection to the hobby, my interest began to wane. 

It also needs to be said that after that mini-boom of interest from the (first) Gulf War, shortwave radio began a steady decline.

I had a feeling that the shortwave boom wasn't going to last, and I was proven right as shortwave radio was eventually eclipsed by the rise of the internet. It took much longer than I thought it would, however, because audio and video communications were still limited by network bandwidth. Downloading the first trailer of The Fellowship of the Ring from ~1999 took most of the evening and night on our dial-up internet connection at home, and listening to the radio over the internet required faster speeds than dial-up. Eventually, however, various forms of high speed internet made their way across the globe, and with this new form of communication the old began to seem an antique.

The major shortwave broadcasters began to dry up. Here's just a few of the stations that you can no longer hear (or hear easily) where I live:

• The BBC World Service stopped broadcasting to North America and Australia in 2001, citing "changing habits", and relying instead on rebroadcasts on American radio stations.
• Radio Deutsche Welle dropped their English service to North America in 2003, and gradually reduced their shortwave footprint over the successive years to Africa only.
• Radio Österreich International (Austria), a favorite station of mine, discontinued broadcasts in 2003.
• Radio Nederland and Radio Poland ceased operations in 2012.

Some of the decline in the older broadcasters is due to the changing technology, but there are other reasons for the ceasing of shortwave broadcasts as well. Chief among them is the energy cost to broadcast via shortwave. 

Powering a shortwave station is not cheap. Running a 500,000 watt station takes a lot of energy, and if you don't have extenuating circumstances to keep broadcasting (the Cold War, for example) eventually the bean counters start to get antsy about "throwing money away". 

In a post-Cold War environment, the venerable Voice of America Bethany Station --about 15-20 miles from my house-- closed in 1994 and is now a park. The station facility itself is a museum, open to the public.****

***

Despite the decline of the traditional shortwave broadcasters, I kept up with shortwave radio when I could. As I mentioned above, my decline in free time meant that sitting down to actually listen to shortwave radio became a bit of a luxury. Moving to our current house meant I had the space to put up an outside antenna, but that took a back seat to house repairs and kids' play spaces.

And to be fair, I also got more heavily invested in video and board games as well. This blog, for example, came along at the end of the 2000s, but I'd been playing video and board games regularly for decades before that.

Still, I purchased a Grundig Satellit 800 when it was first released in mid-late 2000, because while I couldn't afford one of the $1000 professional receivers (such as the Japan Radio NRD-535 or the Drake R8), I could afford a $500 Satellit 800 which had similar capabilities to those kilobuck receivers. 

The Drake R8, made in Miamisburg, Ohio.
Definitely a "holy grail" radio among those in the hobby.
From the late Universal Radio's website.

I also bought a couple of tube radios along the way, thinking that I'd like to have one to putter around with as the kids grew up and I retired.

Such as the Hallicrafters SX-100:

It's much heavier than it looks.

I've had this radio since 2006, the last time I went to the Dayton Hamvention, and trust me, lugging this thing around was not my idea of fun. 

The old tube shortwave radios from the 1930s up through the advent of all transistor models in the 60s are nicknamed "boat anchors" due to their bulk and weight, and while the Hallicrafters SX-100 that I have above isn't the heaviest of those boat anchors, lugging a radio weighing 42 lbs/19 kg back to my car 3/4 of a mile away (~1.25 km) wasn't what I'd call fun.***** However, I'd bought the thing for $100, it worked, and I was determined to get it home as the centerpiece of my listening station.

Funny thing about that... I never got a listening station put together. 

I mean, I did get an outside antenna put up, complete with ground rod and lightning arrestor, by running a wire from our porch to the kids' wooden swing set#. That antenna really brought in the shortwave stations, but I never got the space in the basement to get a true listening station in place while that was my home office. 

There was also the little problem of Hurricane Ike in 2008, whose remnants of met a cold front coming down from Canada right in the middle of the Ohio Valley, turning what would have been 3-4 inches of steady rain into hurricane force winds over the course of 12+ hours. This area is used to tornados, but the houses and infrastructure here are decidedly NOT built to withstand hurricane force winds. Miraculously, the antenna survived Ike, but a few months later the weakened supports were brought down in an ice storm, and that was that.

By then, my wife had given me an ultimatum to move my home office out of the basement and up into the dining room, as I had a habit of getting bronchitis every winter since we lived in the house due to the chilly and damp conditions in the basement.##

My trusty old DX-440 became my go-to portable radio for the garage and the back porch, and it still behaves like a champ today. The Satellit 800 is still in the basement, and when I'm down there for any length of time I turn it on and listen to FM radio on it. That old Hallicrafers S20R that I first became acquainted with at UD I eventually took home with me, but it needs a complete rebuild, so that's relegated to basement storage for now. But the newer Hallicrafters, the SX-100, went onto a storage rack and stayed there until I began cleaning this Fall.

The Grundig Satellit 800, when I brought it out of the
basement to listen to while I was repairing the deck last fall.

When I brought the boat anchor upstairs and put it on the table as you saw above, I plugged it in and hoped that it would fire up. It did, kinda. Several tubes had blown, and it wouldn't shock me if I opened it up and discovered several resistors and caps were in bad shape too, but other parts of the radio did start up and bathed me in a yellowish glow. It is definitely going to be a project for me to restore it to its former glory, but in my retirement years I'm up for the challenge.

Oh, and the SX-100 is now permanently out of the basement. I am thinking about ways to configure my son's old room to create a listening station in there, as long as I share it with my wife so she can have a place to play her guitar.

So I've got a future with shortwave, it's just changed so much over the past 35 years or so that I have a hard time recognizing what it is today.

*Yes, the old Hallicrafters radio came with me when I graduated. I had to store it in my closet for a while until it found a home at my (then) girlfriend's apartment while she was at grad school.

**The worst part about working at Radio Shack? How long do you have, because I've a list...

***One of my History professors at UD strongly suggested to the class that if we were interested in history that we ought to join our local or state history organization. Typically you could join for a pretty minimal cost, and you could then gain access to and support research of all sorts of topics. I took his advice to heart and joined the Ohio Historical Society for several years, and when I got serious about Shortwave listening I joined clubs to support the hobby as well. Hence NASWA and The ACE.

****I bet if you asked the average park goer what the Voice of America was, they'd think you were talking about the Country Music Festival that happens there every year, or that it's some patriotic thing ala Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA". Or maybe the album (and lead track) from Sammy Hagar when he was a solo artist in the 1980s.

*****To this day I'm still amazed that I didn't injure my back.

#I used a piece of wood to both use as a makeshift flagpole for the kids so I could run up a pirate flag --pretending you were a pirate on the high seas is a rite of passage, Pirates of the Caribbean movies or not-- and to attach my random wire antenna to.

##The dampness problems were fixed by a dehumidifier. The cold... Well, I need to fix the foundation first before I'll put up insulation on the walls. Yeah, that's not happening any time soon.

#Blaugust2025

My Adventures over the Airwaves Part 1: "This... is London..."*

I was inspired to start writing about my history with radio after a comment by Shintar about my usage of the term "Dayton Hamvention" in this post. And after far too many words, I've broken it out into multiple parts. I'm not sure how far this will go --or if I'm going to post these on successive days or not-- but we'll see.

I'm old enough to remember my parents having a radio with a shortwave band on it.

I don't think it was this exact model, as ours was covered
by a leather case that matched the leather handle you see
above. Still, between these GE models and the Radio
Shack Patrolman series of portable radios, you get the idea.

Ours was a model similar to the one shown above, and it resided in our kitchen. Dad would take the radio outside when he sat on the back patio and read while listening to 700 WLW broadcast Cincinnati Reds' baseball games, with Marty Brennaman and Joe Nuxhall in the radio booth.** 

Marty and Joe from the Reds' glory years.
From The Notorious Meddler's post on the two.

When it wasn't outside, the radio's place was atop the refrigerator so my mom could listen to the radio while she cooked.

All I knew about that little section marked "SW" was that whenever I tried to listen to it, there were no audible stations. I figured it was busted, and as long as my parents didn't think I broke the radio I never called attention to it.

A couple of years later I asked my mom about that SW band, and she told me it was for listening to radio stations from all over the world. That sounded intriguing, but I remembered my experience of trying that band in the past and I left it alone.

Then the Pope got shot.

I was at my Catholic grade school when it happened, and being the dutiful Catholic I prayed for the Pope's recovery. After the announcement on the intercom, one of the teachers --or maybe it was one of the nuns, I can't remember who-- happened to mention that we might get more information from shortwave radio rather than our local television stations, so when I got back home I tried in vain to find anything on that shortwave band. Defeated, I left it alone, but Mom told me that she'd never gotten any stations to come in either.

So that was what I thought of shortwave radio: some radio band that basically was a waste of space. My dad eventually replaced that portable radio a couple of years later with one that had VHF television audio instead of a shortwave band. To him, that was far more useful.

Fast forward 7-8 years later, and I was in my sophomore year at UD, just beginning work as a lab assistant in a Physics professor's research lab. Part of my duties involved working on the lab bench that the professor had acquired from the Department of Electrical Engineering, and to say that drilling and tapping holes in steel weren't a lot of fun is an understatement. So to pass the time, I looked around for a radio to listen to. Surely, in this room with all of this junk there had to be something.

Tucked away in one corner, there was.

The radio in question didn't have those aluminum "wings"
on the sides, but otherwise this is the model.
The S20R Sky Champion, circa 1939. From eBay.

At first I wasn't exactly sure if it was a radio at all, but the bands on the main tuning wheel gave it away. I plugged it in and turned it on, and... 

Nothing.

I made sure the radio was on the regular AM band, and still there was nothing coming out.

Another of the professors in the department saw me fiddling with the radio and took pity on me. "You need to set the switch on the right to 'REC'", he told me.

"Oh."

I flipped that switch, and like magic the radio came to life. 

"There's a small bit of wire in the back for an antenna," he added, "but this was part of the ham station we had in the building."

A what?

"An amateur radio station. The professor who ran it passed away before you started here, so we dismantled it your Freshman year." He pointed out another device next to it: 

From eBay.

"This is the transmitter, but don't turn it on unless you've got it hooked up to an antenna, or it'll fry the circuits."

I made a mental note of that, tuned into one of the local AM stations on the Hallicrafters radio, and got back to work. When my day ended, I went back to the radio and began flipping to different bands. Surely if there was any radio that might receive shortwave stations, it was this one.

Lo and behold, something came out of the radio.

It was in Spanish, but it was better than nothing. I got an actual shortwave signal!

So, knowing now that shortwave radio wasn't a myth, I did what I usually do when confronted with a problem I was eager to know the answer for: research.

I went to a bookstore at the mall and roamed the stacks until I finally found what I was looking for in the Electronics and Hobbies section. I then visited the Radio Shack at the mall and picked up another book, so I had this as my haul:

If you're old enough and into science/electronics,
you might recognize the publisher of the one on
the right, TAB Books. Yes, it still exists
as an imprint of McGraw-Hill Education.

The Radio Shack book was very light on details, but it did provide a basic framework on shortwave radio. The other one, The Complete Shortwave Listener's Handbook, was much better overall. It provided me with real details as to how radios worked, and more importantly how shortwave radio worked. I also learned that those old portable radios --such as the one my parents had-- were terrible for shortwave reception. The book also explained how the shortwave bands were active at certain times of the day (the higher frequencies in the morning/afternoon and the lower frequencies in the evening/night) and broadcasters would take advantage of those differences to change the frequencies they broadcast based on the time of day. Finally, the book recommended the World Radio TV Handbook to get access to the current listings of shortwave frequencies.

"Okay," I thought, "back to the bookstore."

I couldn't find the World Radio TV Handbook, but I did find something that looked like it might be almost as good:

I haven't kept all of them, but a few
are worth keeping for sentimental value.
As the cover says, the 1989 Passport
to World Band Radio.

In it's own way, the Passport to World Band Radio was even better than the WRTH, because there were easy to follow reviews, reviews of shortwave stations --both reception and content-- and there was a huge section in the back showing the shortwave band activity in a graphical format.

If you zoom in, you'll see some old stations such
as Radio Moscow and Radio Yugoslavia.
From the 1989 Passport to World Band Radio.

Using the 1989 Passport as a guide, I learned to surf the bands and listen in while I was working. (The professor I worked for finally tired of hearing shortwave all the time and told me to listen when he wasn't around.) I also learned that in the absence of a "real" antenna, just using random wire as long as you can make it is your best bet. So, I did what any self-respecting student would do: cut some wire from the huge spools in the basement storage of Sherman Hall --the basement that at one time was a student run nuclear reactor***-- and ran it out of a second floor classroom and down to the basement. I then brought the wire into the lab I worked at and to the Hallcrafters radio, and it was like magic. The bands opened up, and I could hear all over the world.****

The thing was, I really couldn't take that radio home with me. I did ask the department chair if I could have the radio, and he said "is there a Department tag on it?"

"No," I replied.

He just gave me a look, as if to say "there's your answer." The thing was, I couldn't justify taking it back to my dorm: it was heavy, and my (then) roommate would not have been amused.

Living on the Eastern side of the US, Radio Australia
was always a more difficult station to catch.
From the 1989 Passport to World Band Radio.

That Fall, I resolved to buy a shortwave radio of my own, and since I now had a dorm room to myself*****, I didn't have to worry about annoying any roommates. Thankfully, one of the best rated portable shortwave radios could be found at my local Radio Shack:

It's the one on the bottom left. Definitely not
the one on the right. From radioshackcatalogs.com.

That page, from the 1989 Radio Shack catalog, was right up my alley. There were shortwave radios, a CB radio base station, and some handheld CB radios. But the focus of my attention was the Realistic DX-440, a Radio Shack rebrand of Sangean's ATS-803A. It may have not been the highest rated portable radio of its era --that belonged to Sony's ICF-2010-- but it was fairly well regarded and could easily be found at the thousands of Radio Shack stores across the country.

Oh look, the DX-440 on the top of the right-hand page.
Later editions of the Passport to World Band Radio
revised the rating upward to 3 1/2 stars.
From the 1989 Passport to World Band Radio.

All I had to do was scrape up $200 to buy one.

That actually didn't turn out to be as big of a problem as I thought it would be, since I worked about 15-20 hours a week for the Physics Department as a Lab Instructor and a Lab Assistant, and the radio went on sale a lot. One week in October I found it on sale for $179, and I somehow managed to scrape together the money, got to the closest Radio Shack to campus (I think I borrowed a friend's car), and bought it before they closed for the night. 

I still have the radio; it's sitting behind me
atop the bookshelf. The strap is in storage,
but I have it too. The box is long since gone,
however. The clock is set to UTC time.

I listened to shortwave religiously in the mornings before class and when I was in the dorm on the weekends, and in less than a month later I was eternally grateful for blowing a month's worth of pay on the DX-440 because I had a ringside seat listening to the Warsaw Pact implode.

From Wikipedia.
By Sue Ream, CC BY 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8377443

The day the Berlin Wall fell, November 9th, was just one of a series of events that proved (to me, anyway) the relevancy of shortwave radio.****** Getting to hear the news reports at the Berlin Wall from Radio Deutsche Welle, the Velvet Revolution from the newly independent journalists of Radio Prague, the broadcasts from the invasion of Kuwait by the BBC World Service in 1990, and the failed Soviet Coup of 1991 from Radio Moscow --who defied the Communist Party and began reporting without the "official" state bias--  were all ingrained into my mind. 

*This is the version I remember:

**This was back when the Reds were the best team in baseball. Kind of hard to imagine that now, but the 1975 and 1976 teams were two of the best baseball teams of all time. It's weird, really, but if you're of the right age when a sports team was dominant you just accepted that things were always going to be that way: the Reds playing in the World Series, Manchester United winning the Premier League, the New England Patriots winning the Super Bowl, the Detroit Red Wings winning NHL's Stanley Cup.

***It had long since been decommissioned, and no, it wasn't the sort that would create a nuclear accident akin to Three Mile Island. The isotopes used were very tame, but the reactor did provide some power. So no, I'm not gonna get cancer. (At least from that.)

****About a year later I was in that same classroom with a professor and two grad students talking about something, and one of the grad students noticed the wire I'd tied to a corner of the window. "What is that wire there for?" he asked.

"Looks like someone put that wire there as an antenna," the professor replied with a look at me. 

I feigned innocence, but I knew I'd been found out. (I still miss our classes together, Dr. Graham.)

*****I'm still not sure how that happened, but while I did request a single I assumed that I was going to get stuck with a roommate. I mean, that happened for my sophomore year when the person I was to room with decided to not return to UD, and that meant I was grouped with a Freshman. THAT was an interesting experience.

******That day was also quite important because that was the day that my now wife and I started dating. That was before I got back to my dorm and turned on the radio to find the reports about the Berlin Wall; I was a wee bit distracted, you know.

#Blaugust2025

Meme Monday: Dad Joke Memes

Yes, dad jokes. Because I'm a dad, and there's plenty of jokes abound.

I'm here till Thursday. Try the veal!
From Imgflip.

From Memebase (and PunHub).

Ah, Star Trek and dad jokes. You never
know if Worf actually got the joke.
From Imgur.

Although my wife is usually a bit better sport
than this. But yeah, been there. From Pinata Farms.

My kids do make me proud about their dad joke
prowess. From Reddit (and mematic).

Sometimes, the dad joke is visual.
Can't remember where I found this one.

And yes, I was a proud dad when the kids
started making these jokes. From Reddit.

#Blaugust2025

EtA: Added the reference for the last meme.

Time Marches On

My wife and I met our son and his partner for lunch today at our local bookstore, and afterward we wandered the stacks. I espied a few boardgames that the store had for sale, and I immediately felt a bit wistful. It reminded me that the first boardgame store I visited here, Boardwalk Hobby Shop, had closed during the pandemic. The owners had decided to retire, and like I said in a previous post, I couldn't begrudge them that. 

The day before I was out as an advanced scouting party for getting my youngest a new laptop, as her current one is far too old and slow to handle Windows 11, and I needed to reacquaint myself with how the various brands and models handled.* Naturally, I went to Microcenter, and afterward I stopped by my nearby Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS), YottaQuest.

I wasn't there to buy anything --because laptop, you know-- but it was good to simply roam the store and watch the steady flow of customers into the place. Those included a couple easily old enough to be my parents, and they weren't there just because their grandkids wanted to visit,** but to actually buy something themselves. 

I took this pic last Fall, when there were
leaves everywhere. Even on a nose or two.

Time marches on, but I hope that some things continue. Such as good bookstores and game stores.

*Having spent the last 12+ years buying laptops for the kids, I've seen a lot of trends. Such as the decline of HP in terms of quality --holy hell are those laptops flimsy-- and the rise of Acer as a viable brand. I remember when Acer's Aspire line used to be nicknamed "Expire" because of how poorly powered and built they were, but HP has certainly passed them on the way to the bottom in terms of consumer grade stuff. I still refuse to touch Dell because of my own personal experience with the brand courtesy of a work laptop that refused to have it's fan spin unless it sat perfectly flat. Tilt it just a hair and the fan would simply stop working. And I won't get into the overheating problems with that laptop, either.

**That was my experience as a kid when I'd drag my grandparents to a video game arcade or a bookstore.

#Blaugust2025

Wait, What WAS Considered Beautiful in 2004?

Okay, I'll admit that I wasn't expecting to be writing this post when I sat down on Friday morning before work, but things happen.

Well, this happened:

I've been watching Angelika's videos for over a year now, and her focus on items such as clothing, art, style, and other things in MMOs and RPGs (mainly Elder Scrolls and WoW) are interesting to me. So, when she decided to focus on the standards of beauty in WoW (primarily WoW Classic), I was interested in her take on it. 

The biggest takeaway for me was how she viewed Vanilla WoW through the lens of what was considered attractive and stylish in 2004, which was when the game released. I'll be honest in that I couldn't tell you much of what was considered "in" at the time, because our youngest was a year old and overall the years 1998 - 2005 were a bit of a sleep deprived blur. 

Then, this morning, this dropped:

I haven't watched the trailer either (I haven't watched a Retail WoW trailer except for Dragonflight since Mists back in 2012), so I can't speak to it myself, but I found her critique very interesting in that Blizzard is basically "going generic" as far as the Blood Elf look. If you looked at Liadrin, you'd not know it was a Blood Elf from WoW. She just looks like an elf, not a Warcraft elf.

Of course, that's not enough, because apparently there's a big divide on the reaction to the trailer. People either adore or despise it, with not that many opinions in the "meh" middle. Which is pretty much standard for anything in Retail, but a lot of the hate is focused on Liadrin's look and how "masculine" she looks. The pictures I've seen of her simply don't look like her, masculine or not. Liadrin has a specific look to her that dates back to TBC, like Angelika pointed out, and Blizz moved away from that.

Oh well. Nothing I can do about that, but yes, the videos are worth a watch.

#Blaugust2025