I hope the woman shown in this picture lived a long and happy life, but she apparently did enjoy taking chances, as shown by the positioning of this 1939 hot chassis 4-tube radio receiver. The set is described in the August 1939 issue of Popular Science.

Behind the plywood cabinet was a metal chassis that was hooked directly to one side of the AC cord. This means that there was a 50/50 chance that if you came into contact with the chassis and the water pipes, you would get zapped by 120 volts. Therefore, placing it right next to the water pipes probably wasn’t the greatest idea.

But assuming everything worked out, the set would pull in the local stations with a 6K6GT RF amplifier, 6J7GT detector, and 25L6GT audio amplifier to drive the speaker. The tube complement was rounded out by a 25Z6 GT rectifier. If you add up the filament voltages, you get 62, meaning that a 150 ohm “curtain burner” line cord resistor was also needed in the filament string.

As we previously reported, this month marks the 100th anniversary of Radio News, which first appeared under the name Radio Amateur News. The magazine was founded by Hugo Gernsback, and was published by the Experimenter Publishing Company. That company went bankrupt ten years later, but the magazine continued, sans Gernsback.

Undaunted, Gernsback formed the competing Techni-Craft Publishing Corporation, and put out the first issue of Radio Craft magazine 90 years ago this month, July 1929. The two magazines competed and prospered for decades thereafter.

Sixty years ago this month, the July 1959 issue of Electronics World carried the plans for this carrier-current transmitter. The set was billed as a “wireless neighborhood baby sitter.” Parents in the author’s neighborhood needed something to participate in bridge sessions and “kaffe klatches” while the baby napped at home. To avoid stringing wires from house to house, he put together this carrier current transmitter. It would cover all houses on the same transformer and could be heard on the host’s standard AM radio. To keep it legal, the author recommended checking to make sure that the signal didn’t go further than about 50 feet from the power lines. If the signal was too strong, then a smaller value for C19 should be used.

And when the kids got older, he suggested that it could be turned into a neighborhood broadcast station by adding a phono input in addition to the mike.

This ad, from the July 1939 issue of Radio Retailing, offers the reminder that your choice of tubes might be a matter of life and death. And if it is a matter of life and death, you should go with Raytheon tubes, just like many hospitals.

The dapper outdoorsman ham shown on the cover of Electronics World for July 1959 is none other than Don Stoner, W6TNS.

We wrote about Stoner previously in connection with his 1959 design for one of the first CB transceivers, a design which became widely popular, and which served as the basis for the Heathkit CB-1 and the “Benton Harbor Lunchbox” series of transceivers for 10, 6, and 2 meters. Stoner was also the idea man responsible for Project OSCAR, amateur radio satellites. He outlined the project in a February 1961 QST article.

In the cover photo, he is operating a 6 meter walkie talkie transceiver which he designed, the construction details of which are contained in the magazine. The set was actually available in two versions, either standard or deluxe. Either version used two tubes and three transistors. The tubes were used for the transmitter, with the superregenerative receiver being completely transistorized. The main difference was that the deluxe version had a transistorized power supply which allowed use of four dry cell batteries to completely power the set. A set of flashlight batteries were said to run the receiver for up to 2000 hours. The standard version used a 90 volt B battery, but Stoner made a compelling case that the small added expense for the deluxe version would pay for itself in short order with lower battery cost.

With the built-in whip antenna, the set had a range of about five miles. With an outside beam antenna, the author had worked stations fifty miles away. In the cover picture, he is working the station in the lower left corner, which is pulling him in with a Hallicrafters SX-101 Mark IIIA receiver, which could pick up 6 and 2 meters with a converter. The station also includes a Johnson Viking 6N2 transmitter and VFO.

Stoner died in 1999 at the age of 67.

Ninety years ago this month, the July 1929 issue of Popular Science carried this graphic showing how daily news dispatches were consistently making it to the New York Times from Richard E. Byrd’s first Antarctic expedition. Since the ship left New York, more than 150,000 words had made their way from the expedition to eager news customers in the United States. The dispatches were received each night at 10:00 New York time, the largest being an 8500 word dispatch sent one night. At the receiving end, a radio operator was set up in the New York Times Annex building. A backup station at Woodside, Long Island, was also receiving, and in the cases where the signal couldn’t be heard in Manhattan, the message was quickly relayed via telegraph from Long Island.

Within in hour, the story was going to press in New York, and was going over the wires to other papers throughout the world. After the news dispatches, personal messages from Commander Byrd and his men were sent. Then, a news summary was sent to the men in Antarctica.

At Byrd’s camp at Little America, Bay of Whales, the illustration here (based upon descriptions contained in those dispatches) appears to show a horizontal Delta Loop antenna at seventy feet.