At about 5 years old, I started to realize how cool amateur radio was. My dad, Jim Hilliard, W6CGS, was my mentor. Every weekend morning, he and I talked from our home in Concord, California, near San Francisco, to my Uncle Dick, W6TCU, 375 miles away in Santa Monica, using 40-meter AM. Dad's Multi-Elmac AF67 transmitter (Photo A) just hummed along, with its external homebrew power supply and fixed-frequency crystal. Back in those days, the late 1950s, the transmitters generally used plug-in crystals instead of a VFO to set the frequency. And both stations weren't always on the same frequency, either, because the crystal frequencies at each end were not necessarily the same. Some guys had only one or two crystals for each band. If you wanted to change a crystal's frequency, you could disassemble the FT243 holder, remove the quartz element and, using Ajax or toothpaste, grind the crystal a bit on a piece of glass and move it in frequency. But the change was permanent.
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