IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2014 - 16

From
Demodulator
From Receiver
Input Circuit

Audio
Stages

Converter
Tube
Local Osc.
Tank cct
Bias

Record Player
Bias Bias

Figure 2: Surgery used to convert our old AM radio to a transmitter.

shot backwards. As it turned out, the
battery in question was a 67.5 V one. I
had no idea such batteries existed. For
days after this, I had pain in my spine.
I learned to be very careful with high
voltage. A 400 V shock I experienced
years later (fortunately, not on my
tongue this time), while working on
a power supply, completed my "training" in this respect.
At 12 years, I read in a children's
magazine an article describing how
to make a batteryless radio using
a galena crystal. I built one, and it
worked. I was fascinated. I started
experimenting with longer and longer
antennas, trying to increase the signal
strength. I started collaborating in this
quest with a neighborhood friend. At
one point we decided to erect a vertical antenna on his roof. It was a very
tall wooden pole, several times our
height, with a wire wound around it.
As we were raising it, we felt (too late)
that we could not handle the weight;
the thing fell right onto the neighbor's
roof, causing serious damage. I still
remember that neighbor, coming out
in his underware, shouting that we
were "shameless." We decided to stick
to horizontal antennas (for the time
being); those could be 40 m long with
no problem. The signals started to get
stronger and stronger.

Teenage Years
Soon I was a teenager, and started
going to parties where they played
American popular music. I really
liked that music! But I could not
understand a word of the lyrics; at
our school, English was not taught
(except for a few basic words and
phrases near the end of elementary

fa l l 2 0 14

school), and my family could not
afford outside language lessons.
So I tried to learn some English by
myself, just in order to understand
some of the words in those songs,
or at least their titles. I gradually
made some progress, and could
finally understand what "Unchain
my heart" meant, although I was still
puzzled by "Itsy bitsy teenie weenie
yellow polka dot bikini." Anyway,
this partial success was encouraging, so I kept up the effort. But what
really gave a push to my self-training in English was a small book by
A. Marcus et al., "Radio for Beginners,"
found and given to me by a friend. I
opened it, and my mouth watered.
Starting with a picture of a pebble
falling into a lake and creating waves,
the book went on to explain how my
galena crystal radios worked, and
gave schematics for several radios
which used tubes for amplification.
I really had to understand this book!
I picked up a dictionary, and slowly
worked my way through it. At the
end of this effort, I had both understood, for the first time, how radios
worked, and learned basic English.
I have not had formal training in
the language, before or since. Years
later, I repeated this "self-training"
with other languages and subjects.
So now I could understand both
radio electronics, and what those
songs were saying. I was fascinated
by rock music, and for a time I participated in the rehearsals of a teenage rock group. I was trying to play
the drums, the others in the band
were trying to play other instruments,
and none of us really knew what we
were doing. We didn't last very long.

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

But rock, as well as other popular
genres at the time, became more and
more important to us. Greek radio (at
the time only four stations in Athens,
all government-operated) had started
playing some of this music, but not
enough for us. And the formal way
they used to announce the songs did
not go well with the improvisation
and downright craziness of rock. But
there was, during the Cold War, an
American radio station in Athens, and
that was a different story. Announcers
on it improvised, screamed, talked
over songs, sang along with them, and
somehow meshed with the music they
were playing. They were having a ball!
This fascinated us. We would listen to
that station for hours each day.

Radio Pirate
I decided that improvisation had to
come to Greek radio, and since the
staid announcers on government
stations were not doing it, I would
try to do it myself. In the meantime,
starting in 10th grade, I had enrolled
in a correspondence course on radio
repair, offered by a local school,
which furthered my understanding
of how radios worked. But my training so far included only receivers.
I started looking for a way to
transmit. We had a beautiful Lafayette cathedral AM radio at home. It
was a superheterodyne, with a selfoscillating mixer tube (or "converter"
tube), and I now knew what that did.
I connected a short antenna to its circuit. Sure enough, the local oscillator
signal could now be received at some
distance, as I could verify using a second radio (the one with the 67.5 V battery). This was extremely exciting; it
was my first radio transmission (other
than the more-than-ultra-wideband
attempt using a bell, described above).
I was now transmitting at a specific
frequency, which I could control with
the tuning knob. The problem was,
this was only an unmodulated carrier. How could I modulate it, and
make it carry music? The same mixer
tube that generated this signal had
multiple grids (for the young readers: an electron tube "grid" roughly

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2014