In June 1982 I wrote to my father, who was at sea, to ask him for a radio.
15 June 1982. Written to my father while he was away with the Navy. The fold has taken the last few lines. The scan is not here yet — the transcription below is the whole of it.
Dear Dad
Thank You for your letter. I go to camp on august the 8th till August the 15th a Lock Farm, Bishops Waltham. For my Smallholders badge all I have to do is the project nothing else. I have just been to see how much a good secondhand camera was and in the window of the shop was an F.M. C.B radio it was going for £50, mum says she won't get me it so do you think you could please as you said you might get me one before you went. and if you get me one when you come back they will cost about £150. The weather overhere is starting to get hot in some places yesterday it was 82°. … two Belgium squadron aircraft … coming through the … Are in the navy news
P.T.O
I had gone to look at second-hand cameras and come back wanting a radio.Note the sales technique. Fifty pounds now, a hundred and fifty if you wait — a child's first attempt at manufacturing urgency, deployed against a man on the other side of an ocean who could not check. Mum had already said no, which is why the letter went where it went.
He brought one back with him.
A handheld — a Realistic, or a Tandy, which in this country came to the same shop. I don't have it any more, and I don't have a picture of it yet.
The shop
There was a shop, and I went into it.
I don't remember what was said. I remember the tone exactly: that I was a child taking up the time of men who were busy. I left, and I didn't go back — not to that shop, and not to radio, for most of the next twenty-five years.
I had the radio by then. That was never the problem.
I've thought about that shop a lot since, and it turns up again in the tactical turn, because I don't think the instinct behind it has gone anywhere. It has just found better clothes.
The way back in
What brought me back was not transmitting. It was listening, which needs nobody's permission and no licence at all.
An Icom PCR-2500 on a desk, driven from a PC. Then aircraft — ADS-B first, then airband, because once you can see the aeroplanes you want to hear them. Then weather satellites, which is where it stopped being a diversion: pulling EUMETSAT imagery out of the sky with an antenna I had made, and watching a picture of actual weather assemble itself line by line on my own screen.
Then SDRplay, and the realisation that the receiver had become software and the interesting part had moved into the antenna.
Nobody was rude to me during any of that, because there was nobody in it. That is the honest reason I came back the way I did.
Now
Two radios that do the work: an Icom IC-7300, and a FlexRadio 8600 for everything the 7300 can't be in two places for. Outside, a pair of DX Commanders — the 9 m and the 12.3 m.
That is more than I need and less than the list makes it sound. The 12.3 m spent part of last winter lying across the garden, which is its own page.
What I actually do
Nearly all digital, and most of that FT8. I know the arguments. I've read the letters about how it isn't real radio and how the operator has been reduced to a man watching a waterfall. I do it anyway, because it works at the power and the antenna height I have, and because a contact that happens is worth more than a contact I'd have preferred to have made.
The first contact was on 1 March 2021, thirty-nine years after the letter at the top of this page. What the log has done since is its own page, holes and all.
And I'm learning CW. Slowly, badly, in the way you learn a thing at this age — twenty minutes at a time, mostly resenting it.
There is something funny about that combination. FT8 is what you're supposed to be embarrassed about; CW is the badge you're supposed to have earned. I do one and I'm working on the other, and neither of them makes me any more or less entitled to the licence than anybody else with the same piece of paper.