73 Magazine was the first Amateur Radio magazine I ever discovered. There were some random issues kicking around in the library as I was growing up, and though I didn't understand much about Amateur Radio at the time, I sure understood that this "Amateur Radio stuff" was cool and interesting... at least the version of Amateur Radio as depicted in 73 Magazine.
As I got older, and especially after I got my Amateur Radio license in 1985, I valued 73 most of the four major Amateur Radio magazines. QST was the "voice of the ARRL". CQ was for the contesters. Ham Radio was for the degreed engineers. 73 was kind of for the everyman - the tinkerer, the experimenter, those hams who were a bit on the playful side. 73 was early to discuss FM and repeaters, transistors, operating on VHF and UHF, and especially microprocessor-based projects. (It's not widely known but 73 Editor/Publisher Wayne Green W2NSD/1 created Byte Magazine.) Near and dear to my particular interests was regular discussion (and even a column, if memory serves) of data communications over Amateur Radio - before packet radio, that took the form of Radio Teletype (RTTY).
Many would argue that the best part of 73 were Never Say Die, Wayne's "wide ranging" editorials. Occasionally, Wayne would even touch on Amateur Radio topics in NSD. Wayne's editorials were the best I ever read until the advent of Jack "Editor Rotundus" Rickard in Boardwatch Magazine.
73 is now long gone for nearly two decades now. 73 had a long run - 514 total issues (not counting compilations), continuous from October, 1960 to September, 2003. 73 lives on thanks to Wayne Green W2NSD/1's donation to the Internet Archive of his collection of 73 back issues. I've been saying to some folks that there's value in having these magazines freely available online because there is information in them that's still useful such as construction techniques, antenna projects, and just snapshots of Amateur Radio history. In fact, I'd argue that 73 Magazine is more relevant and useful to current generations of Amateur Radio Operators than either CQ Magazine or QST Magazine, because 73 is freely available online. In contrast, the content of CQ and QST are locked away behind paywalls - you don't pay, you can't see. For many, CQ and QST might as well not exist.
I owe Wayne and 73 a debt of gratitude - 73 published my very first freelance article. I think I still have the check stub in a file cabinet somewhere. I'll highlight my article when that issue comes up in rotation in a few years.
I'm going to try to make this a weekly feature of SuperPacket and profile one issue of 73 each week. With 514 issues, I've got plenty of material just in 73.
This week's issue is 73 Issue 1 - October, 1960 (PDF). I was 9 months old.
Some of the subtle gems of 73 were the subtitles in the Table of Contents, such as these from October, 1960:
Risky Hobby by Carole Hoover K9AMD Page 16 - How to fall off your tower for fun and profit.
Shock by Peggy Bates Page 28 - New facts on electric shock, or what to do until rigor mortis sets in.
Favorite article of this issue: How To Be An Amateur by John W. Cambpell W2ZGU, pages 34-37. Excerpt:
The Amateur has to be Egocentric. That is, nobody's going to pay him for all the hard work he does, so he'd better enjoy what he's doing because it pleases him. All his work will, 99.99% of the time, yield nothing but discarded materials, and passed time. In the course often years, an Amateur may spend $10,000 on his hobby, wind up with $2 worth of junk, and nothing else... except the self-satisfying fun he had doing it.
(That's a fair description of my Amateur Radio activities for the next several years as I prove out, or disprove, several data communications systems I've been curious about. Not many around me are interested in such things... but I am, and that's enough.)
Favorite advertisement of this issue: Radio Bookshop on Pages 60 and 61. They had me with this description:
Some three years ago one of our more obscure amateurs got the notion that since there were specialized nautical bookshops for the yachty gang and sports car bookshops for the adult hot-rodders, that there just might be a need for a radio bookshop for amateurs. After three years of exhaustion providing good service to the few people who answered the monthly ads it became obvious that the idea was a fiasco. Unfortunately he was in too deep by this time. What had started as a few books in the vestibule at home had grown to overwhelming stacks, imported computers, stopwatches, and an amazing variety of goodies. So, the next time you feel the need for expanding your library, check through this list. A hamshack isn't really complete without a good collection of reference books.
Runner up favorite advertisement of this issue: Fair Radio Sales in Lima Ohio - 61 years later, they're still going! (I visited their warehouse once on a cold, rainy weekday a decade or so ago. Based on that visit, I'm sure that they still have a lot of the same stock that they had when they ran this first ad in 73.)
Thanks for reading!
Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Bellingham, Washington, USA
2021-04-09