"Bago ako naging ham operator, tambay lang ako sa kanto." This roughly translates to "Before I became a ham, I used to hang around a lot at the street corner." Sometime back in the early 70s, somebody decided to put up a Radio TV repair shop at the main corner of our barrio. The shop would play Beatles vinyls often and soon I go to sitting on the long bench at the shop's entrance watching people go by and enjoying the good music off two baffles hanging on walls of both sides of the shop. In the 60s and earlier, a favorite pastime was to sit at the corner "lamyaan", an elevated wooden platform positioned at strategic corners of the barrio where men would sit around and share stories after a hard morning's work in the rice fields and river vegetable plots (called "tumana"). The PInoy word "tambay" is from the english "stand by". So indeed I was a "tambay sa kanto"
I got to know the owner well. He was trained in electronics and worked in the Civil Aeronautics Board and assigned at the Manila International Airport and knew a lot about electronics. Before long I had started in my informal education in electronics at that corner shop. I learned the resistor color code and the infamous memory aid. The shop owner convinced me I should invest in some electronics test gear and tools and pretty soon I was the proud owner of a Sanwa Tester, a Weller soldering gun and a few basic hand tools. A bit later, I managed to put together a five tube superheterodyne receiver but I must admit the wiring was a mess and mistakes in wiring were all over the place.
By 1972, I was ready to graduate high school and a few of my high school friends fancied the idea of applying for scholarships, so I went along for the ride. By some stroke of luck, I passed the NSDB exams (The NSDB eventually became the DOST). So, entering college I had to decide on a science course to take. I previously thought that I would take up an AB course and eventually get into law like my Dad, the scholarship offer was hard to resist. So it was engineering.
As I entered my third year in EE, I began to read more and more about electronics in the Eng'g library. There was no course leading to an Electronics Engg degree back then so I mostly self-studied in electronics at the library in my spare time. Later I managed to find may into the library back room where I found nice source materials including proceedings of the IEEE (the Institute of electrical and Electronics Engineers of the U.S.A.) One thing I noticed in those articles as the author byline which included the author's name, degrees and a certain combination of letters and numbers that I kept on seeing. I did not know back then, but these were the amateur radio callsigns of the authors.
Around this time Citizen Band was becoming all the rage. CB groups of all sorts were popping up all over the place. This new craze was something phenomenal and I would dare say, its social impact was very similar to the impact of social media today because it was something that transcended social classes. And people from all walks of life started talking. Eventually, radio "activity" spilled in to the 2m amateur band simply for the reason that many transceivers began to be available. (Which also became the reason why 146-148 was lost to military and commercial radio operators: there were so many ham FM radio transceivers available and commercial grade (and frequency) transceivers were too expensive.)
I soon discovered a circle of friends in the old crystal frequency of 144.800. A couple of these friends also started in CB but not on the phone side. They were RC operators and ever since the CB craze ramped up, they kept experiencing plane crashes so they migrated upward in frequency and got introduced to Japanese 2m FM crystal radios.
My technical knowledge bloomed when I got into CB. Everybody just had to have an extra watt added to their output and everybody wanted "uppers" which meant CB frequencies above the regular forty and so in no time every CB radio I owned got opened up and got "tweaked". HIHI Getting an SSB CB rig was another milestone, giving me an introduction to another mode, which I enjoyed a lot.
All this tinkering with the SSB CB led me to experimenting with a crystal oscillator and FET mixer experiment that would allow me to listen in on the 40m amateur band. The RF overload from broadcast stations at night was horrendous and manifested itself as very high backround noise and high s meter reading. This got me experimenting on radio filters made from recycled IF transformers.
Finally I made a quantum leap and was able to put together a forty meter two way radio and with my Class C callsign, I made a call at 7.045 MHz. A ham named Tony Lazatin DU1LOG pulled me out and was kind enough to give me my first 40m QSO.
Prior to all this, I had frequent 2m QSOs with with Bob Asensi, DU9BA (SK) a ham from Davao and former member of the old MINDARA (MIndanao Amateur Radio Association) who move to Manila and I sought his advice before I tried using 40m. At that time Class C hams were limited to 80, and I asked Bob if it will be ok if try and get a signal report on 40. I remember his reply to this day " Yung iba nga diyan, walang ka class-class, nag fo-forty meters, eh ikaw kahit papano meron class! Signal report lang naman."
It turns out it will just be a matter of time that 40m privileges were eventually granted to Class C operators.
With this, I hope my friends will have a better reference on where I came from as a ham. I consider myself lucky for getting to know good people that inspired, guided and shared my path through Ham Radio. To this day, we continue to meet new friends who continue to inspire, guide us proving that Ham Radio is its own reward. 73 DU1FV
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