[BC] Our Wild TECH Youth - more memories

[WFIFeng@aol.com]

In a message dated 07/08/2005 12:48:39 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
clewis at sto.ibb.gov writes:

 >     Even later I went into competition with the NCSU campus carrier
 >      current station with a home brewed 6AG7 & 6L6 carrier current setup
 >      in my room that covered two large dorms that were fed from a single
 >      transformer vault.

Cool! By "competition", you DON'T mean that you zero-beat their carrier, and
stepped on them, right? You just found another spot on the dial, and offered
"alternative programming"?

 >  I built it to look as crummy as possible. The
 >      object was to show the campus system's "chief engineer" that an
 >      absolute piece of junk could be made to sound much better than the
 >      campus system.

That brings back another memory! This same friend who took me on that
range-testing excursion while listening to Blondie, had a very nice stereo 
system
that his Mom and Wife bought for him. It was at least a couple grand worth,
and was quite nice.

Then there was my "Junk tech" special... the main PC board from a friend's
fried "boom box". (He wanted to keep the front with the big speakers, and gave
me the "guts". It was a high quality unit!) That fed a little homebrew audio
amp, based on a pair of LM386es. (I still have it, somewhere.) That in turn 
fed
a car equalizer, which fed my homebrew power amp. (Which I also still have.)
That drove home-built speakers. The whole thing probably cost me about $120 in
parts, and it sounded better than his! He reluctantly admitted it, but said
"That's OK, I can still brag that mine cost thousands of dollars!" Then I
laughed, and said, "Yes, but *I* can brag that MINE cost almost NOTHING, 
and sounds
BETTER!"

 >   (I must have been a real smart alec nerd back then!)

You too, huh? <ggg>

Another cool toy I had hooked up to that stereo, was an old 19" B&W TV set,
with the deflection yoke wired as a lissajous pattern generator. It mades some
really amazing patterns! I even tried putting a box around it, with a 12"
fresnel lense to project the patterns, ala lazer-light shows. It kinda 
worked, but
the room had to be very dark.

 >        I modulated it using a very large reverse connected audio line to
 >      voice coil transformer driven by a Heathkit Williamson mono hi-fi
 >      amp (KT-88s?).  What happened to that pile of junk after it proved
 >      its point at NCSU is another long story.

Cool! I'm interested in that "long story"!

As for looking like junk, but sounding great, check this out...

www.mymorninglight.org/ham/6146.htm

Willie...