Old cordless phone channels in 49 MHZ band. Other frequencies as well. 

Six meters AM was a lot of fun.  There were plenty of band openings that summer, and working DX from the mobile was easy, even with low power. 

Prior to getting married, I had had a Heath Sixer in the car, and was dating the daughter of another ham.  He joked with me that he could keep track of his daughter by calling me on the 6 meter rig.  I added the Halo antenna to the car, instead of just a quarter-wave vertical.  I remember when this young lady, Marianne,  and I went to the beach at Rehoboth Beach on a date, parking the car, which had ham plates on it, and being asked if the halo was a rig for drying bathing suits!   Soon after that I ditched the Sixer, and Marianne (possibly a mistake!) and added the Lafayette HE45B.  It brought me many hours of mobile fun, and I also used it in the house, on a coat-hangar vertical in the basement.  Not very good for DX but certainly worked all around the city with excellent signal reports.

It was during the first year of my marriage that I ventured into CB radio.  I worked about four miles from home, and I thought it would be neat to have my wife get her ham ticket, so we could get on two meters as I was driving to/from work.  I didn't have a two meter rig at the time, but knew I could pick up a couple of Heath twoers if I wanted.  My wife, though, was not interested in ham radio.  I decided to try CB.  I bought two Knight CB radios and installed them, a story told elsewhere on this site.   After about three months, finding the radios too full of skip to be of any value, I scrapped the idea and sold the radios.  In fact, I traded one of them for a 38 revolver, the other for a Walther P38 automatic.  (I later traded a tape recorder for a better P38, resulting in my owning two of those guns at the same time.)  I was somewhat interested in guns anyway, and this was before the John F. Kennedy assasination, so mail order of guns was both legal and common.  In fact, I had received by mail order, two other 38 special pistols. 

In 1964 my wife and I moved to Massachussetts, as she was pregnant and wanted to be near her folks to have the baby, and I didn't have the world's greatest job.  Remember, her brother was a ham.  Well, so was her father, a Novice and Technician.  We moved into their two story house in Millis, 25 miles or so from Boston.  The basement was dedicated to the furnace - and ham radio.  We had lots of surplus electronics, most of it belonging to my father-in-law, some to my brother-in-law, and a small amount to me.  I recall one of the rigs I liked was an ARC-3, an 8 channel two meter transceiver from aircraft, that ran about 8 watts or so.  It was 28 VDC, and autotune.  My father-in-law had built a monstrous 28 VDC power supply, delivering something like 60 amps, using parts from a welder. 

I had kept the Marauder, and now had the Mosley CM-1 receiver.  What I also had were the parts to build an amplifier, a pair of 813s.  I spent a couple of months putting that together, basically my own design, but a modified version of a Handbook rig.  I finally put it on the air sometime that summer, and was a bit surprised to find it really worked!

By now I had again, under the rules, modified my license, and had received quite a surpise - instead of a K call, I had been given a very old call sign, W1BXP.  I recalled that shortly before moving from Dover a couple of hams who had moved into the area from other areas had received old re-issued W3 calls.  It was simply policy then, but I had never expected to get one.

As usual, I was into CW mostly.  I had been on the air on sideband a few times, running the Marauder barefoot, then into the linear, which ran about one KW PEP input.  In today's language, that meant about 300 watts output, to an 80 meter dipole.  I decided to try CW.

I tuned the Marauder down to around 3525 or so (there were no class subbands in those days) and as I brought the receiver down there, I heard a very strong CQ.  I had the amplifier on standby and decided not to use it at first.  Then, because it was my new "toy" I decided to flip the amp on.  I responded to the CQ, running about 300-400 watts output.  I got no reply.  Odd, as the signal had sounded amazingly strong.  He HAD to hear me.  I listened.  Was something wrong with the amp?  Was it on a spur, perhaps out of band?  I turned the amp off and then I heard the powerful CQ again.  Using the Marauder only, at about 180 watts input, I responded a second time. 

Silence.  Did he not want to talk to me?  Why not?   I called him again.  And I got an answer.  He gave his QTH as Millis.  Well, Millis was not a huge city by any means, more like a small village, with a one-block business district.  He couldn't be too far away. He asked me where I was and I gave my street.  He said he was on the same street.  Now we were really narrowing it down, as the street wasn't a quarter mile long, and I wasn't even at one end of it, but more like a third of a way along its length.  He then asked for my phone number and I gave it.  He called me.

Well, turns out we were about 400 to 500 yards apart at best.  I had never seen his dipole hidden in the treets and he had never seen mine, also hidden in the trees.  He asked me to come down and see him.  I shut off the rig and went down to his place.

I don't remember his call, or the transmitter he had.  But his receiver was a surplus BC342.  He had, he told me, called CQ, and had then turned up the gain to hear if anyone was calling him back.  And there had been a thump and the radio went silent.  It was working, but there was no sound.  It recovered after a bit and was OK, so he called CQ again.  And again there was a thump and the radio went silent.  I had, it seemed, been overloading the front end of his radio, even with my 100 watts output from the Marauder, and it was desensed to the point it heard nothing, not even background noise, while I was transmitting.   Later we had several QSOs but I had the Marauder brought down to about 5 watts input and he had reduced power as well.

Going back to 1964, earlier, before I moved to Massachusetts, and was still living in Delaware, I had two very interesting experiences in ham radio. Both will stick with me for all of my life.  Those stories, coming up.