@LisCarey @shuttersparks As I write this, I'm looking at my bookshelf in Connecticut where sits the US$25 shortwave radio my father gave me for Christmas 1967. It has a clock-like tuning gauge and requires the user to change plastic-encased plug-in coils when switching frequency bands. It' was how I first began listening to the BBC, Radio Moscow, Radio Tokyo, etc. Like for you, those stations widened my perspective of the world! I've been meaning to try it again and see what it still picks up.

@VinCrosbie @LisCarey Yes, sir. I was introduced to shortwave radio by my father in 1963 and I remember it all like yesterday. It was absolutely the most amazing thing ever that I could sit in the basement in Los Angeles with my Philips Philetta and listen to Radio Sofia, thousands of miles away. I knew the planet was round and where Bulgaria was. How is this even possible??? Mind-blowing.

I was just a kid so it took years of study before I eventually became an engineer and wrapped my head around the science of how it all worked. Digging deeper and deeper, radio was what drove me even farther into mathematics in order to understand the Special Theory of Relativity, which is at the root of it all.

It was all driven by curiosity about the apparent "magic" of radio. And even though it's not magic anymore, it still feels like magic. Every time I make a ham radio contact with someone more than a few hundred miles away it feels like magic. How is it possible that I can push 5 measly watts of power into a piece of wire strung in the air and put a readable signal into Australia 9,000 miles away? This can't possibly work. It's unbelievable. And yet it does work.