CVH and I both used to commute to jobs well to the east of Louisville. So we programmed our weather radio to alert us to severe weather in Shelbyville and Frankfort as well as Louisville.
However, now neither of us travels out that way on a regular basis, and we’re getting tired of being awakened by a screaming siren in the middle of the night announcing a thunderstorm that is fifty miles away from us.
I couldn’t immediately find the owner’s manual for the weather radio on the internet, so I started digging through my massive file folder of instruction booklets and manuals. I did not find the manual for the weather radio, but I did find the manuals for a couple of radios that I bought about forty years ago when I was regularly practicing the AM radio DX hobby. Nowadays you can dial in radio stations from all over the world through your web browser, but back then it was a challenge to pick up signals. I particularly enjoyed searching for little low-powered stations with daytime-only broadcasting licenses – they were allowed by the FCC to broadcast only from sun up to sun down. The trick was catching them just as the ionosphere was lifting…
OK, I see that I’m losing you. Anyway, here was my favorite little radio. It wasn’t the most advanced one that I owned, but it packed quite a punch.
This was back when what was eventually to be called “hacker culture” was expected, not something you had to do from scratch. It was generally accepted (by the radio community, if not Radio Shack’s lawyers) that you would open up this radio, modify the antenna connections, recalibrate the frequency dial, etc, and it was constructed to allow this.
Most nostalgically, the manual recalls a time when Radio Shack was actually a “radio shack”; the back of the manual shows the schematic diagram:
