Radio and Chris

Sometimes I do write about the past on here, yes my childhood and white I am writing about this week is to do with it because I did have some differing interests  of which one was radio which for me wasn't just entertainment and spoken word programming for people in this country but of different sorts of transmissions.
These included things such as morse code, ship to shore, ham radio and international shortwave broadcasts from all around the world which was a bit out the ordinary for say a twelve year old boy.

There were a number of ways you could receive such transmission but all required a fairly specialized piece of kit to cover the frequencies and transmission modes used and the the one I had had  very important part in our countries "Battle of Britain" because it was actually the the receiver unit as fitted originally to the Avro Lancaster bomber during World War Two where it was used in tandem with a separate transmitter.
It's called the R1155.

As an aside I just loved that airplane.
Mine had a specially made power unit to rain of 240 volt AC mains and speaker unit because as originally designed it it had a power feed from the aircraft and the operator would of used a head set made from leather to listen to it from.

I did have a similar head set to this which was RAF issue at the time for operators.
As this was nineteen-forties technology it used big thermionic tubes which meant compared to more modern equipment it was a little bit noisy but fed with a good long antenna it pulled in lots of stations especially on the 49, 25 and 16 metre shortwave bands and related Ham bands where the ability to receive single-sideband and cw transmissions commonly used  helped even if the selectivity was a bit broad .
Traipsing around the side of the unit to the power supply and speaker were massive and banned for normal usage bulgin connectors. 
Indeed with a metal chassis, it would give PAT testers a nightmare and so be barred from any kind of institutional setting.
The radio came out at the time I was taking my GCE O Levels to our school classroom where I had a subminiture shortwave receiver in my dorm and long wire that annoyed the groundstaff as part of a demonstration or radio equipment and operating on conjunction with dad who is a ham radio operator.
My fellow pupils were in awe of that radio during and after the day it made it's appearance!
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