Like the title says, what year and why did you get into the Radio Hobby?
My Dad painted houses and did remodelling for a living. People who could afford to hire a house painter often replaced "furniture" at the same time when they upgraded their house.
So he would bring me home these big cabinet radios that had shortwave bands. They were often un-working, and I would test and swap tubes and poke and prod, often finding a loose wire or some other thing an eager pre-teen could repair. It was often a broken or loose grid-cap wire.
I would stay up late at night, in rapt attention as I tuned the airwaves for weak and distant stations, sending them reception reports and getting QSL cards back in the mail!
I can't pinpoint the exact year, but it was in the late 1960s. Call it late 1965, when I was ten.
That was long before the Internet, and I got most of my information from magazines, like Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics. My grass-cutting money went into subscriptions, books, electronic parts (remember Poly Paks?) and eventually, a Lafayette five-band. It was $120, which was a whole summer of grass-cutting back then! (The Drake belonged to a high-school buddy.)
(Photo circa 1970.)
That fascination led me to get my first ham radio "ticket" at thirteen (WB7RRB) and a First Class Radiotelephone Operators License, too. I got a job as a technician-trainee, then started my own repair business out of high school, eventually working for a large company and travelling the world to maintain their communication gear.
These days, I play with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi boards. I'm currently building an interface to a geiger counter to automatically record and store ionizing events, getting ready for the next melt-down. (Manually recording 24-hour counts, I was able to detect the rise in background radiation following Fukushima. In a way, this is a form of DX "listening", no?)
