Seventy five years ago, Capt. William W. Orr, stationed somewhere overseas with the U.S. Army Coast Artillery Corps,  had a Zenith Model 6B16BT receiver similar or identical to the one shown above, but no way to listen to Morse Code transmissions with it.  The set covered the standard broadcast band and 2.3 – 22 MHz shortwave, but the set was intended for listening to broadcast programs, and didn’t contain a Beat Frequency Oscillator (BFO) for listening to Morse Code.  If there hadn’t been a war going on, adding a BFO would have been a relatively straightforward proposition of building a one-tube oscillator running near the set’s IF frequency of 455 kHz.  But as Capt. Orr points out, he was “unable to secure the parts needed for building one.”

Instead, he came up with a solution elegant in its simplicity.  It is shown here from Hints & Kinks in the August 1944 issue of QST.  He turned the IF into a regenerative stage by adding a “gimmick” capacitor to provide feedback.  This consisted of nothing more than two short pieces of wire, sticking out the back of the set.  It wasn’t even necessary to solder the wires.  One was stuck into the socket for the plate pin, and the other one to the grid pin.  To copy CW, the wires were moved close to one another.  For listen to voice programs, the wires were moved apart.

Interestingly, the Knight Star Roamer receiver later used a similar method for copying CW.  To copy CW, feedback was switched in to the IF stage to make it go into oscillation.

He used a similar trick to turn the set into a code practice oscillator.  The key was hooked between the speaker transformer and the phono input.  When the key was pressed, the resulting feedback could be used to generate the code.

I would like to thank Dave McClellan for providing the image of the beautifully restored Zenith receiver shown above.   You can read about his restoration and see more pictures at this link.

Shown here in the August 1944 issue of Radio Service Dealer magazine is the proprietor of Acme Radio Service Co., 880 Third Avenue, New York, NY.

Before the war, he got half of his business from repairs and the balance from sales and rentals. But there were no new sets to be sold, and labor shortages made service problematic. So he focused on rentals to the point where they represented 75% of his business. He acquired used sets, refurbished them, and put them into circulation.

He did this by canvassing all of the hotels within ten square blocks. He managed to place ads in rooms and elevators, but his real success came from the fact that he paid a flat $1 commission to the clerk or bellboy who made the sale. For the bellboy especially it was a lucrative proposition, since when he delivered the set and plugged it in, he was probably going to get an additional tip. Hotels were packed, and it became a very lucrative part of his business.

Good record keeping was key, and the magazine offered some suggestions. The article suggested that a set could be rented out for an average of 100 days per year at an average rental of $1 per day. The magazine noted that the resulting $100 was “many, many times over the original cost of the average midget or table model radio that would be used for rental.”

When “Dr.” Ernest C. Augsten entered the radio business in Hartford, CT, in about 1938, he realized that there were so many others in the field that he had to make himself stand out. So he decided to try a different angle, and make his shop at 714 Maple Avenue a Radio Hospital.

The dealership was featured in the August 1944 issue of Radio Retailing, which revealed that he employed one Nurse, his wife, who received the patients and maintained their records. His two interns assisted in operations.

Dr. Augsten wore a stethoscope, which he used on occasion in diagnosing a set. The article also explained how a hypodermic needle (filled with carbon tetrachloride) was used for cleaning a dirty part, and a scalpel was used for jobs such as loudspeaker repair. The ambulance was largely grounded for the duration, due to wartime gas and tire rationing. But before the war, when the ambulance was sent out to pick up a set, it was typically carried out in a stretcher.

This usually caused a crowd to gather, and invariably a member of that crowd had a set at home in need of repair.

Dr. Augsten had been licensed as a ham as early as 1924, as shown by this callbook listing, with callsign 1BFU.

Interns Cliff Islieb and Russ Johnston working on patients with a hypodermic syringe and scalpel.

A hundred years ago this month, the July 1919 issue of Popular Science reported on the seemingly promising work done to date on using trees as radio antennas. The Signal Corps had been working on the problem during the War, and there was hope that explorers, farmers, lost Army units, or downed aviators could be in contact with the outside world as long as they were in the neighborhood of a good sized tree. The article reported that European stations had been pulled in with trees, and various methods of making the hookup were discussed.