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Soon after, I spotted for sale
some receivers called R206 Mk I for £20, and after saving
up, purchased one which arrived on a lorry in an enormous crate.
I still have this set which I reckon is the best wartime receiver
ever made. In the early sixties I helped start up the University
of Liverpool Amateur Radio Society which used the callsign G3OUL.
Shortly afterwards after taking my morse test at the Liver Buildings
I became G3PIY, using homebrew transmitters with my R206. I converted
various surplus VHF transmitters and receivers and built an SSB
2 metre rig with a QQV06-40A amplifier. In those days one usually
operated on a specific frequency in the 2 meter band using a
government surplus 8MHz crystal which had been taken apart and
rubbed with Vim to place the output clear of other band users.
You generally called CQ then optimistically tuned the band for
a reply. I decided to improve on this, and after obtaining various
free samples from Plessey Semiconductors, and using a bit of
knowledge gained in my job with a large Defence Contractor, I
made a fully tunable, frequency synthesised, 2 metre transceiver
and with a homebrew amplifier and managed to work lots of stations
from Liverpool as far as Switzerland. (I suppose this is commonplace
today with Japanese black boxes). See Story No.34 for a description
of this rig.
While all this was going on I continued to mend TV sets and radios
for neighbours and I still do more than 50 years later but I
had to extend my repertoire, since leaving the Defence Industry
(because I now do it for a living) to virtually anything that
works off electricity excluding washing machines! The smallest
things I've tackled, I suppose, are electronic keyfobs and the
largest to-date a plastic extrusion machine over 30 foot long
and weighing 6 tons. The keyfobs were brought to the workshop
but, naturally- to fix the latter, the machine being too big
to go in the owner's car boot, I had to visit the factory. For
the last few years I've stopped repairing run-of-the-mill items
because they're too inexpensive and now fix mainly circuit boards
for lifts and escalators.
PS The photo was taken in 1964 and the young
lady is G3SGL, now the mother of our 4 children & 9 grandchildren
Allan Isaacs, B.Eng., C.Eng.,
M.I.E.T., G3PIY
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