This is my first Ham radio Transceiver, a Heathkit HW-101. I bought it as a kit and assembled it myself. It required a lot of soldering and wiring and installing small components on circuit boards. I worked very carefully, and triple checked every step I did, and when I turned it on the first time, it worked perfectly! I remember my first contact with another Ham, an electrician who worked in a coal mine in West Virginia! We used Morse code and slowly tapped out messages back and forth with a telegraph key. That was a thrill - communicating by radio. I think this was about 1978 or so, long before the advent of computers. Later I talked to people all around the country and the world by voice, instead of Morse code, with this radio. I even met one of my best friends, Chuck, who was in Texas, when we met just by chance on the radio. Eventually I bought a more modern commercially made transceiver, and this one sat on the side unused. But it has a special place in my heart because I built it, and because it was my first.
This is what the inside of the radio looks like with all the old-fashioned radio tubes! It has spent the last 40 years pretty much unused, stored in the attic or in the basement. I don't remember the last time I used it. But I held on to it for all these years. Until today. It was time to take it to recycling and leave it with the rest of the electronic waste. Man, it was SO hard to leave it there and walk away from this! The radio, as you can see, is in mint condition, but most likely the capacitors in it are dried out and no longer working, but it still looks nice. But it is time to clean up and throw out and get rid of "stuff."
