Boatanchors! OK. Ham experience check. How many remember the original rule sheet that TRWonderful put out for swap meet sellers, maybe eight years ago? Remember the part that said, "Please do not leave boatanchors behind?" At the time, it wasn't a joke. Nobody wanted to haul 100 pounds of junk home, and find another place for the garage for it, hopefully one with fewer spiders this time. Simpler to leave it in a dumpster, to dent the trash truck when finally collected. Even the name "boatanchor" is reputed to have come from a sailor's use of an old radio for just that. Today, however, it's a good joke. "Boatanchors" are the fastest growing sub-hobby in ham radio. Prices are, unfortunately, beginning to reflect this. Like your author, you may be looking at the $400 R- 390 in the Fair Radio catalog and muttering, "I could have had a better one than that for ninety bucks." Yup, it's coulda woulda shoulda time all over. In fact, it's probably the R-390 that started it all. This legendary, milspec box came on the surplus market about a decade ago. As a ham radio, it was and is pretty useless, but as a shortwave broadcast receiver it's still the best ever made. Trust Hugh on this. You want one of these. You just don't know it yet. Like all real boatanchors, it takes a buddy to help get the thing home, and some serious rethinking of your living space once it's there. R-390s were made by at least 20 companies, but all weigh about 90 pounds, with mechanical tuners driven by the most awesome mess of counters, chains and gears you ever saw. In fact, it's part radio and part pinball machine. Once revived, the only way to stop one is with a thermite bomb, which is exactly what the military specified for destruction. You probably won't take it to Field Day. Right up front, let's get something straight about boatanchor people. They're the kids, of whatever age, who liked the Tesla coil in science class. Hell; they're probably the ones that built the coil in science class. It's an alternate paradigm of ham radio, perhaps a better one, certainly an older one, in which the ham was the odd person down the street whose lights were always on late at night, and who was reputed to have heard Jupiter or something. He was certainly the guy with the least fear of electricity. He became the neighborhood expert on broadcast interference. He had to. Everyone knew that, as the local Frankenstein, he had to be the real reason the cable TV went away in thunderstorms. Oh wait, that part's still true. And so the R-390 scene led to the first boatanchor magazines, ELECTRIC RADIO and THE HOLLOW STATE NEWSLETTER. Anyone who's into tubes will want to find back issues of these. ER has long since branched out into all the other classic ham radios; the Collins, Johnson, Hallicrafters, National, Hammarlund, Drake and whoever else in Indiana was making HF rigs for the Air Force at the time. The last address I have for ER is PO Box 57, Hesperus, CO. [The below was added 5/2/96 -hugh] The nice thing about Web publishing is that people e-mail you with info you didn't know or had forgotten. We didn't have an address for HSN, but an editor read this and now we do. I quote: We are on a 3-times per year publishing sked and have just mailed out HSN #38 to our 200+ international membership. Most of the publication still relates to the R-390A, but other receivers such as the RA-17, SP-600, 51J's, etc. still get some mention. Subscription rates are (US,Canada & Mexico) $5 for 4 issues (double if outside North America). Write to Ralph Sanserino, PO Box 1831, Perris CA 92572-1831 (he's the publisher) or e-mail him at 74041.2430@compuserve.com I'm the editor and all items for publication should be sent to me. You'll see my business address at the end of this, but all inquires other than those relative to becoming a subscriber should be sent to my home address - Reid Wheeler, 5910 Boulevard Lp SE, Olympia, WA 98501-8408. Also reachable most evenings (up to 9pm PLT) at 360-786-6756. E-mailers can use reid@crab.wa.gov [business address, in sig file, deleted] [end addition of 5/2/96 -hugh] The saga continues. About four years ago, boatanchors came out of the closet, or the garage at least. In big cities, they grew scarce. No more dumpster diving, or being paid to haul the things away. No more dusty "junk" from garage sales. No more stopping at a curbside in Hollywood, as your author once did, to rescue a huge, tube-type, audio, power amp from someone's trash. After the Young Thomas Edisons, next people aboard were the old- time hams. As youngsters, they'd flipped a lot of burgers, washed a lot of cars, mowed a lot of lawns in 110-degree summers, just to buy some old croaker's half-zapped Heathkit. Now the Collinses of youth were grown-up junk, at decent prices, sort of, and still working, sort of. Such a deal. Later, around 1993, came the yuppie speculators. They're your classic Baby Boomers. They'll snap up anything made in the 50s or 60s, and if they're hams you know what this means. Been to an antique store lately? They're a long way from grandma's Early American sideboard. Today, it's neon signs, metal furniture, psychedelic lamps, and... tube radios. So what's going on? Why are normal, respectable people suddenly filing up small apartments with huge old boxes? For most of us, it's quality. All of the boatanchors worth bothering with were made for the military, or for commercial HF utility stations. Transmitters, if sold to hams at all, had simple (and easily undone) tuning mods to keep them in-band. Like a B-52, most were designed to a spec, not a price. Like the Big Ugly Flying F[ellow], they had to be maintained by semi-trained techs with standard parts and procedures, forever. This kind of design requirement changes things, fast. Hams liked their bells and whistles, just like now, but ad copy touted beam-switched modulators and improved spectral purity, not auto-coffee and self-working DXCC while-U-sleep. Tubes required a certain simplicity in circuit designs, which carried over into the controls. They're big, they're rugged, and a normal person can actually get a hand around them with some real finesse. This is good, because tube radios have to be peaked, dipped, loaded and generally fussed with at all times. It's a nice feeling, however. You're back in the left seat, instead of some unknown programmer in Osaka. Finally, there's something retro-chic about all this. Art has caught up with the clunky old boatanchors. They're now Classic Industrial Designs. They buzz, glow in the dark, and keep your room nice and warm. Even when turned off, they just look like real radios. It's a style, and an easy one to like. Boatanchors come in two types. First is the box that's already been restored, or at least checked out on a service bench, the expensive kind. Second is the one that's just sat for years, with leaking caps and layers of grunge. This USED to be the cheap kind. Either way, the boatanchorist will eventually have to get into real restoration. This is going to get rid of the yuppies in a hurry. Time marches on, especially when your technology doesn't. It's best to cultivate other radio collectors, the ones who've been scrounging Philcos and Atwater-Kents for years, and changing out capacitors just as long. You're going to need a lot of Elmering here. Beyond the new philosophy, there's also a learning curve, and some real hazards. This ain't your TH-78. There is some SERIOUS electricity in tube gear. Mistakes don't cause dead batteries. They cause dead people. Getting killed can definitely ruin your day, not to mention those of your heirs. Give all these electrons the same respect you'd give firearms, and they'll respect you. Especially watch out for the old filter caps. These guys can store some big-time juice. As with guns, just assume they're always loaded, and deal with the situation accordingly. Discharge 'em, and replace any blown bleeder resistors while you're in there. If a cap is large, use a "shorting stick," because it'll take the blade right off a screwdriver. If you don't know how to make and use a shorting stick, you haven't been Elmered enough. Worse, if the cap has been discharged for any long time, there's an even bigger problem, which is why you don't just smoke-test old gear. It'll have to be re-formed, with a Variac and someone who knows how to use it. Your local radio restorer comes in handy again. It's hard to find much documentation, since it's beneath the dignity of modern tech writers to think about the stuff. Old docs are best. One thing that helped me a lot was a 1964 ARRL HANDBOOK. Needless to say, nearly all of the theory and practice in this thing was tubes and more tubes. They had solid state keyers, and maybe a code oscillator or two, but otherwise it's all grid leaks and cathode resistors. There's another old book, BETTER SHORTWAVE RECEPTION by Orr and Cowan, that really gets into the alignment and tweaking of these old beasts. I wish I'd read this chapter before I just turned on WWV and went for it. It would have saved a lot of learning the long way. Read it before you grab the plastic wand. Finally, there are companies, usually garage operations, that advertise in QST and other places for tubes, parts and old service manuals. Also check local libraries for old SAM'S PHOTOFACTS. These were made for TV repair shops, and they specialized in entertainment stuff, but it's amazing how many old shortwave radios got in. One might save your butt, the way it saved mine on my dad's old Hallicrafters. Talk about your leaky-cap problems. The main bypass had shorted B+ right to ground, exploding and taking the whole first RF with it. No wonder "It didn't work." I'm running out of room. Read QST for further, and good luck if you try this hobby in a hobby. The rewards are great. After a life in Nissans, a nice run up the mountain in an old GTO does wonders. See you on HF.