I have made no secret of my sympathy for those who seek to preserve AM radio, considered an anachronistic technology with its limited fidelity, susceptibility to man-made noise and lightning crashes. Thus it is only fair I give equal time to FM, the younger and prettier sister who, for decades, has threatened to eviscerate amplitude modulation.
My opportunity for equanimity results from a recent visit to the annual Winterfest of the Vienna Wireless Society, a ham radio club not based in Austria but the Commonwealth of Virginia. The items on sale mostly consisted of coaxial cables, RF connectors and other assorted ‘le junque.’ If you were in search of an old grid dip meter or an oscilloscope, Winterfest had you covered.
The rows of folding tables abounded with analog transmitters and receivers (before the era of the combined transceiver) that amateur radio enthusiasts — we’re always enthusiasts — affectionally refer to as ‘boat anchors.’ They’re big and heavy. They usually have hefty brand names, such as Hammarlund and Hallicrafters. They don’t make ‘em like they used to and there’s a reason: obsolescence.
Ham radio licensees, especially the baby boomers, once were required to master advanced electronic theory and Morse Code. Many became adept at these skills during their school days when they played with ohms, watts and volts as a consolation perhaps to being shunned by the fairer sex. (And nothing sexist here as probably 98% of amateur radio operators are male, although STEM classes are slowly turning the tide.) Geek and nerd are probably too honest of monikers for most hams, myself included. I have concluded over a half century in the hobby that many of us are on what is diplomatically referred to these days as “the spectrum” or for other reasons self-acknowledged social misfits.
That is not to say there are or were no cool hams. Walter Cronkite and King Hussein of Jordan were licensed amateur radio operators. Rock guitarist Joe Walsh of the Eagles is WB6ACU.
Marlon Brando was FO5GJ, taking to the shortwaves from his private island in French Polynesia. Even Elvis’ ex-wife, Priscilla Presley, was into the hobby for a time. But I digress.
Back at the Winterfest, the coolest thing I spotted was a CRI-43044. You can’t imagine how excited I was to spot this baby, a practically useless 28-80 MHz AM transmitter-receiver that could put out all of a half a watt. To the layman this is gibberish and an enormous door stop. To radio and military history buffs it is a World War Two U.S. Marine Corps radio used by the legendary Navajo Code Talkers. You could call it the radio that won the war. OK, perhaps more credit goes to the atomic bomb, but you get my nostalgic drift. However, the $400 price tag (marked down from $500) dampened my patriotic fervor for this radio.
Instead, I’ll admire the one on display a few miles from my residence at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, near Quantico here in Virginia.
I did purchase, for a tenth of the price, something called the Pilotuner T-601. It’s from the early days of post-WW2 FM radio back when most everyone just had an AM and maybe a shortwave receiver.
This device, made in Brooklyn, was sold as a superheterodyne 5-tube tuner — no built-in amplifier or speaker. The listener would hook it up to the auxiliary input of the family’s living room AM radio or phonograph.
I can only imagine the reaction of someone who had spent $30 in 1947 to buy one (that would be $425 nowadays), turning it on for the first time and — shortly after the vacuum tubes warmed — hearing music and speech via frequency modulation — static free and a much wider audio range than AM.
I recreated the experience by wiring the tuner’s output plugs to my Onkyo amplifier, which is connected to my upright stereo speakers. The sound quality is excellent.
These FM accessory tuners were only manufactured for a few years so they are a rare find more than 75 years later.
While AM radio’s days are certainly numbered, I fear a similar fate for over-the-air FM. There can be little doubt in the decades ahead we’ll increasingly consume our music and real-time information (the voices being not human but AI replicants) on cell phone ear buds or transdermal transceivers. If, by then, I am not what we hams call a Silent Key you’ll find me on a shortwave frequency hammering Morse Code into the ether and still wishing I had bought that Navajo Code Talker radio.