Things mechanical and electrical have always been a fascination, likely a result of coutless evengings spent in the basement of a modest home in a small north-eastern Quebec town, watching Dad make and repair things. A top-class welder, metal worker, lathe operator and carpenter, Dad was highly skilled. His young son was an eager and observant sponge, soaking in every detail.

Eventually, the time would come to put those observations into practice.

That auspicious beginning - driven mostly by curiosity - ended, predictably in demolition: the disassembly of Dad’s night-table radio. It was the legendary All American Five, an AC/DC, 5 tube AM broadcast radio built in the 1940's. Known as the "Baby Champ”, it featured octal tubes: the 12SA7 converter, 12SK7 IF amplifier, 12SQ7 audio detector and signal amplifier, 50L6 audio power amplifier, and 35Z5 rectifier.

Remember those?

Not surprisingly, without a soldering iron, solder, proper tools, a schematic - or for that matter, the requisite knowledge - reassembling the Baby Champ was out of the question. It was a true "Humpty Dumpty" moment!

And so the junk box was born. Mom was not amused. Dad smiled and said nothing.

Word soon spread around the local paper mill that Fred’s young son was dismantling old tube radios - for parts. And as luck would have it, this coincided with the transistor revolution. Tube radios were out - transistor radios were in.

Dad’s friends began dropping off their old tube sets on the front porch. What a bonanza! 

Quickly, disassembly and de-soldering skills grew, and so did the junk box. Before long, a large, neatly sorted and catalogued inventory of components had been amassed - resistors, capacitors, wires of various lengths and colors, RF coils in metal cans, chokes, transformers, tubes, miscellaneous hardware - along with the skeletal remains of once-proud radios, their tube sockets empty and their chassis painstakingly stripped of components and solder.

By age 12, custom-built shelving and dozens of small wooden boxes housed a veritable treasure trove.

Thanks to magazines like Radio World and Popular Electronics - and a steady supply of recovered components - experimentation led to the construction of a small broadcast band transmitter. Its harmonics just might allow operation on 80 and 40 meters.

A citation from the Canadian Department of Communications monitoring station in Montague, Prince Edward Island later confirmed that theory.

The true watershed moment came about a year later, during a Boy Scout "Jamboree-on-the-Air." That’s when the ham radio bug bit - hard and deep. The passion continues to this day.

For nearly every baby boomer ham operator, military surplus gear was a rite of passage: the Number 19 Set, the AN/ART-13 transmitter, the BC-348 receiver. These eventually gave way to Hallicrafters, National, Heathkit, Drake, and Collins equipment - and later, to sleek Japanese rigs from JRC, Icom, Kenwood, and Yaesu.

The solid-state revolution ushered in a new era: smaller, lighter, more compact equipment with performance characteristics previously unimaginable. What an exciting time it was to be a Ham!

With each new generation of gear, performance standards continued to climb.

And beyond radios themselves, a great part of the enjoyment was building antennas. Everyone in the antenna game knows: bigger and higher is better!

Remember the Johnson Matchbox and open-wire feed lines?

Building RF amplifiers brought immense satisfaction, too - using tubes like the 813, 4-125, 4-400, and the mighty 4-1000. And who could forget oil-filled filter capacitors, swinging chokes, and vacuum variable capacitors?

As the saying goes: Life’s too short for QRP!