There’s a ham in Israel who records a podcast every week with a different ham from around the world about his/her life in radio. It’s a lot like Jean’s Micro Monday episodes, except much longer. This week he published Episode #257 which I listened to. He talked with Ray Heffer, G4NSJ, in the UK, who got interested in radio at age 5 and started repairing radios at age 10. He has made his living for decades repairing radios. He’s 68 and now only works on radios from the 1940’s. That seems like a pretty narrow focus, but he gets in 3-4 radios of that vintage to repair every week and it’s all he can do to keep up with them. No one told him he had to retire at age 65 and he is quite self sufficient, which is not unusual for hams around the world.

He says there are actually three people in the UK repairing radios of that vintage from around the UK and Continental Europe. Customers ask him what will happen when he is gone. Will there still be people who know how to repair them? To preserve what he knows, he started to record videos for beginners, showing them everything about how to restore vintage tube radios. His focus is on making the videos for beginners, using layman’s language.

For years I’ve been wanting to learn how to do such work. I have finally discovered a gradient that should work well for me. For a one time fee of 25 pounds, I will become a member of his website, with access to his videos, including all those from the past, as well as a new one every week, and also hundreds of service manuals for vintage tube radios. I already own one radio from that vintage and another one about one decade newer that need to be restored. They will be the first two I will practice on. And then I will start to keep my eyes open for other radios of this vintage in need of repair.