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Mine goes back somewhat further, but is a similar story. My gramma sent me a Lloyd's 6 transistor portable radio when I was about 6. For a couple of years, I listened mostly to the station my dad worked at as a morning-drive DJ (610 AM KGGM Albuquerque 5KW). One night, I was tuning pretty much randomly when I happened to land on WOAI San Antonio TX during a station ID. I was so excited! I raced over to my dad and he told me that a lot of more powerful stations could be heard from out of state. I began to tune a lot more slowly between the strong local stations, stopping at the slightly staticky, slightly fading voices and was thrilled to discover I was listening to Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles. Remember, this was with a tiny 6 transistor 9-volt powered radio with a thumbwheel tuning knob. I got pretty good tuning REALLY slowly across the band and also got pretty familiar with the "landscape" of the AM band circa 1968. That Christmas, I got a no-name solid-state multiband radio (AM, FM, "marine band" which could actually be classified as shortwave because it was 1.7 to 4.5 mHz, one SW band covering 4 to 12 mHz and VHF which was essentially a worthless band to manually scan). The whole world opened up to me then with BBC, Radio Nederland, Radio Japan's General service, RSA, National Radio of Spain, etc. I did a lot of AMDXing on that radio, too and was a regular listener of KOA, KFAB, KNX, Xrock80 and WOAI. dad and I spent a lot of time on our roof setting up some pretty involved antenna systems to feed that goofy little rig. A couple of years later, I found a Hallicrafters SX110 for $10 at the local flea market which worked perfectly and stomped the daylights out of that no name SS rig I'd been using for so long. A couple of years after that, I found a "military surplus" communication rig for $80 (including shipping!!) which turned out to be the venerable AN/GRR-5 ("angry-5") complete with power supply and I was all set. And hooked. Till I discovered music and stupidly sold it all to buy a drum set. Ah well. It was fun while it lasted. I'm glad I was able to get a hold of a nice working Hammarlund recently which has satisfied my skywave fix.
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