  Author : Norman Fallon Edition : 2 Number of Pages : 144 Publisher : Hayden Book Co Inc.,U.S. List Price: Our Price: $35.00 Used Price : $0.19 |
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Customer reviews
Very Userful Handbook by .. Tony Bernhoffer (Toledo, Ohio)
When I got into shortwave radio in grad school, I had purchased THE WORLD RADIO TV HANDBOOK. That gives you the adresses of all the shortwave radio stations in the world. And I have accumulated about 300 QSL Radio Verifcation cards from all over the world, including Syria, Iran and North Korea!
But SHORTWAVE HANDBOOK had some useful general information on this intriguing hobby. I know that they provided the basic plans to build both an outdoor clothesline antenna as well as an AM Broadcast Band DX loop antenna. The plan for a double loop with tuner was too comlicated for me, so I just built the crossframe thing with about 10 turns of magnzetic wire. And this book tells me that I need magnetic wire for the AM broadcast antenna. The clothesline or inverted L antenna that I built once with ideas from this book and a borchure from Radio Netherlands was apparently a good job as I could pick up stations like Iran, Iraq and Syria from Toledo, Ohio. And my old shortwave may have been partially damaged by a lighting strike; yet the service place for Sony refused to fix it-was that meddling from someone or was it really just too complicated for the man to fix?
The addresses of shortwave stations that are listed are useless, however. When I picked up Radio Dubai in 1993, I had to use the WRTH for adresses. Fallon had said that places like Syria and Norway do not QSL; but they gladly obliged me with a card.
Fallon had also said that he could not find a satisfactory way to store his QSL cards and advocated putting them in little 3 by 5 inch file card boxes. I had a plastic page catalog for 35mm slides for my photography; and saw that they sold plastic pages for baseball cards. So, I recokoned that my prized QSL cards were worth as much as someone's card of Mickey Mantle; so I measured that average size of a QSL card or QSL letter, or my membership certificates like the ones for Radio Berlin in the former GDR and Radio Prague from during the Cold War as well. Radio Berlin had even sent me the radio script that they had read on the air about my question about the Ishatar Gate from Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon supposedly being stored in the Berlin Museum. I had read about this in THE BIBLE AS HISTORY and wanted to see which side of the wall it was on! Such prized memories deserve preserving in plastic pages as much as someone's card of Johnny Bench!
Although this book has shortcomings it was worth my buying in 1989.
I was really into the hobby in the early 90's as POPULAR COMMUNICATIONS MAGAZINE had published in Feb 1992, my humorous article BROADCAST BAND DX WITH A $50.00 WALKMAN RADIO. It was an introduction to the world of broadcast band DX which I think I had discovered by Providence when my shortwave radio was no longer useable.
I also got a good education in news and current events. The world seems to be more socialist than the US. Like during the LA Riots, some western European countries were blaming the riots on Reaganomics. These are America's allies in the NATO. Or how Voice of Germany sent me a newletter depicting Cuban communist revolutionary Che Guevera as an idealistic heroic doctor who abandoned his practice to liberate the poor of Cuba. from opression! From some pubications stations sent me I see why so many nations despise Washington DC and its Military Imperialism!