I went to the FCC field office in Honolulu on July 2, 1951 ( a Monday ) the first day that the novice license was available and took the test with about 6 others. We all passed as far as I can remember. I had all 5 minutes of code perfect copy except for the AR end of message. HI HI! I was 16 years old at the time and was going into my senior year in high school. I got my ticket in about a month as we didnt have instant gratification back then.
When the license arrived I was on the air with a National NC-57 receiver and a homemade transmitter running 25 watts; 6AG7 osc and 6L6 amp. The ant was a dipole. Started working the guys that had taken the test the same time that I had. They were WH6NER, WH6NES, WH6NEU, WH6NFN and KH6IJ Nose. Soon Nose who was teaching physics and math at Kauai high school had a group of new novices on the air, but I dont remember any of their calls. Then a whole group of new novices came on the air from Honolulu. I upgraded to class B around Oct 51 now general class and started to work some DX. I graduated from Roosevelt High in June of 1952 and that ended my Ham Radio operations for a while. I then went to RCA Institute in New York City and took a course in electronics; 'Advanced technology'. There was a bunch of hams in my class, so we sort of stuck together. Graduated top in my class in Dec 1954 and got a job as a technical aide at Bell Telephone Labs in Murray Hill, NJ in the Solid State lab where Dr. William Schokley invented the transistor. I was working with Dr F.M. Smits and Dr Robert Batdorf in the solid state lab. We were working on UHF transistors at that time with alpha cut off frequency of about 1000 mhz. These were double diffused emitter-base transistors ( planor ). I also made the first solar silicon cell, about the size of a half dollar that put out .6 volts at about 5 ma. In Aug of 1956 I left the Bell Labs and went home to Honolulu to attend the U. of Hawaii and major in Physics and Math. Graduated in 1960 with the double major and did another 6 months of Graduate in Physics. During the under graduate work I also worked at the university solar observatory during the IGY and also used my ham radio to track and record the Russian sputnick and US Explorer and Echo satellites.
Thats all for now.
Elmer Harger , N7EL
(c) 2007, Cliff Cheng, Ph.D., WW6CC, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
