Nocturnal emissions...

I was a preteen when this all started. My family moved to Florida in the 1960's and we stayed in a motel on Miami Beach while my parents shopped for a house. My parents became friends with an older couple from New Jersey who came to Florida only in the winter. They owned a restaurant at the time that was up for sale. When it was sold, they retired and moved to stay in Florida year round. The house they bought was an hour north of Miami and my parents would visit once or twice a month, usually on Sunday afternoon and we would head home after dark.
That's when I first saw it... Grundig. It was a radio. Not just any radio. Grundig was a multi-band short wave radio a monster sized piece of furniture in a honey brown colored wooden case with buttons, dials and a display that would light up to show the tuning frequency.

A quick lesson in radio waves. They usually travel in straight lines. If there are no obstacles, radio waves (like FM radio) can travel hundreds of miles. Often, you can see antennas on the mountain tops that transmit signals over large areas. Depending on the frequency, the lower band signals can travel for thousands of miles.
A unique thing about the earth is there are layers in the atmosphere, curved layers and some are affected by solar radiation. This energy makes the edge of each layer act as a mirror to radio waves. Some waves pass through the layers and some are actually reflected back to earth. Since the layers are curved, it's predictably unpredictable as to where the signals will bounce back to.
In the daytime, there are lots of bouncing signals... literally noise in the lower bands. But at night, noise drops out and only the low bands (called short wave) come through clearly. Radio stations from around the world can be heard!

The FCC allocated different bands, some for business, many for commercial use, lots for amateur operators and they reserved 11 meters for Citizens Band radio. It was only good for mobile radios using 5 watts (legally) that could communicate a few miles. What they didn't count on was sunspots and increased radiation had the same effect as some amateur bands. During the day you could hear other radio operators from a few thousand miles away. Sometimes, the signals were perfectly clear and other times it was garbled.

Talking long-distance became my hobby.

We started out with AM transmissions and later switched to a different type of signal called single-sideband (SSB) that used 25 watts and could filter our much of the noise that affected AM. When conditions were perfect, I could communicate with friends in South America using a high-gain antenna on my car. Lucky for me, I had a job that had me on the road 3-4 hours a day and it was easy finding someone to chat with.

At home, I had some large multi-element antennas and on weekends would stay up in the middle of the night with perfect conditions to communicate with radio operators in Europe! Faint signals, often strong signals open band for a few minutes and sometimes for hours.

Part of the hobby was to exchange the other operators information... typically a post office box so you could send and receive post cards to confirm your long distance communication. I collected hundreds of cards over the years until I dropped out of the hobby.

In preparation for selling my house, I went through boxes in my shed and came across some of my gear... out dated now but it reminded me of those nocturnal emissions!

Thanks for reading my blog!