Phil Young, that is. W1JTH.  He is the Maine Sea Gull Net’s Friday Night Net Control Station, and has been for the past 20 years. He was the young lad, who at 7-years-old, around 1924, became the designated radio technician with the family’s broadcast radio set in Shirley Mills, Maine, some 85 years ago!

by Phil Duggan, N1EP

Phil - W1JTH and Dot - W1TGY in their “shack” in Augusta, Maine

7-Year-Old Technician

     An uncle talked Phil’s father into purchasing a Federal Broadcast Radio when Phil was 7. Back in those days there was no commercial power in the small rural community and so the radio was powered with batteries. “Nobody knew how to hook the damned thing up, so my uncle showed me how and I became the family technician,”  said Phil in a recent chat with N1EP.

     “I got real enthusiastic about that and then a fella gave me a bunch of [Science & Invention] magazines.” Phil was fascinated by the radio diagrams depicting two, three, and four tube circuits. He was excited and inspired. It was this job and those technical drawings that planted the ham radio seed in young Phil Young’s blood.

     That seed didn’t sprout, though, until Phil was a senior in high school. That is when he earned his ham radio “ticket.” Since Phil is a modest kind of fellow, his wife of 68 years, Dot Young (W1TGY), is quick to note that Phil was also the Valedictorian in that year of 1936.

Early Gear - Building From Surplus Parts

     His first real ham radio system started at the floor and approached the ceiling. It consisted of a Silvertone Communications Receiver made by Sears, and a home brew transmitter system that sported an exciter, speech amplifier, antenna tuner, final amplifier with a pair of “46” tubes, a “47” tube oscillator, buffer, modulator, power supplies and other supporting equipment.

     A spring-mounted double button carbon mike served to get Phil’s voice surfing the airwaves, and moonlighted as a public address mike at other times.

     The components were mounted breadboard style with no shielding. That was okay, said Phil, as there were no neighborhood television sets to interfere with in the 1930s!

W1JTH at his Ham Radio Station in 1936

    “When I close my eyes I can still hear the heterodynes caused by the AM carriers of other stations operating within 5 to 10 Khz,” remembers W1JTH. “That is a sensation which not many remember about the AM era.” Phil explained that in the pre-WWII period crystal controlled transmitters and separate receivers were the norm. Oftentimes the transmit and receive frequencies were not the same, resulting in interference since you could not  hear stations on your transmit frequency. “It was common practice to call CQ with your xtal controlled transmitter and announce ‘tuning the entire band for a reply.’”

     To reduce interference a 7 to 10 khz separation for AM stations was required. Phil said that Collins improved the situation when they came out with mechanical filters in the late 40’s and 50’s.  “That helped tighten the receiver bandpass and minimized some of the heterodyne interference.”

     He remembers the smell of hot dust after turning the radio on after a spell of inactivity. Another memory of the old “boat anchor” ham sets was that when using AM modulation, at high levels of audio, “you could actually hear your own voice coming from the modulation transformer in some cases.”

     Many of Phil’s rigs and ham radio accessories were built from scratch or modified military surplus rigs. Nowadays, most hams buy their rigs from commercial companies, all ready to unpack, hook up and get on the air.

     “Back when I started you couldn’t buy that stuff,” said Phil. “You had to build it or you didn’t have it.”  W1JTH continued to build and even design much of his amateur radio equipment until 1979. That is when he designed and built an iambic keyer/paddle that he uses to this day. “I’ve used that on the Pine Tree Net for 20 some odd years.”

     Until recently, W1JTH’s call sign was always on the packet system. He even designed and built his own TNC (Terminal Node Controller) once. “It took me all winter and part of the next spring, but I got the thing so it worked pretty good.”