BOY, I WISH I HAD RECORDED THAT!
Setting Up a Tape Recorder For Your Shack
By Bob Patterson K5DZE There I was I remember one day in the early 1960s when I came into the Shack and turned on the equipment so it could warm up. I had a National NC-98 receiver and an Elmac AF-67 transmitter that I used for HF AM/CW. Both of these radios needed a little time to warm up and settle down to hold frequency. That day the gear was set to 15 meters, a band I used a lot back then. As I waited for the equipment to warm up, I picked up a magazine and walked across the room. To my amazement as the receiver came to life, coming from the speaker loud and clear was a station calling MAYDAY! It was an Amateur operator who was maritime mobile off the coast of New York on his boat and he was sinking! He did not panic, but he continued to repeat his position. Finally he said this would be his last call because water was coming in the door and he had to abandon ship. I had scribbled down all the info and was preparing to call the nearest Coast Guard station to pass along what I had copied, but I wanted to let the operator in distress know he had been heard, As I reached to flip the transmitter on, two New York Amateurs came up on the frequency. One operator asked the other if he had copied all that and the other operator replied that he had and he had already passed it to a NY area Coast Guard station. He said a rescue vessel was on the way to help. They settled down to monitor the frequency in case they were needed. Since I could now do little to help, I relaxed knowing help was enroute. Then I thought what a great story I had to tell at school. I always wished I had tape recorded that little episode, but in those days there wasnt funding for that kind of accessory at my shack. As time passed, I heard more ships at sea, river boats on the Mississippi, pirate broadcast stations near 40m, and military stations passing coded messages to aircraft such as: Sky King, Sky King, This is Andrews, This is Andrews, Do not answer, Do not answer. I often copied the well known numbers stations were often heard on both voice and on CW and wondered what spy was getting instructions and where he/she might be. Late one night when 15m was all but dead, I heard a strong signal come on in the middle of the phone band. I wound up having a nice QSO with an Amateur who was the pilot of a B-47 bomber flying over my house at 22,000 feet! Rescue work during Gulf Coast Hurricanes was all too often copied from my QTH (I was in North Mississippi). It was a day when Amateur Radio was often the only communications into and out of disaster areas. In the wake of Hurricane Audrey, I listened to an Amateur who, using his personal boat, had made his way to Cameron, Louisiana by water to set up a rig after the hurricane nearly destroyed the town. As I recall, he was the only communications in and out of Cameron for over 24 hours while help tried to get to the devastated town. During his request for help and supplies, I distinctly remember him asking for body bags for the more than 300 residents who had been killed. At the time, this was pretty heavy stuff for a kid in high school! I wished I had recorded that!
Technology Makes Recording Easy A few years later I again wished I had taped some of what I had heard, so I decided that I would set up a simple tape recording system for the shack. I started with a second hand reel to reel tape recorder I got in a trade. Later I moved to a quality Teac reel-to-reel tape deck which was a good quality, highfidelity recorder, but it was a deck and had no audio amplifier or speakers. This worked well, but the big reel of tape often made it hard to separate recordings. I soon learned to log the tape counter settings when taping something! When cassette tape recorders were introduced, recording on individual tape cassettes became more practical and convenient. To me, this was obviously the way to go for Amateur work and it really worked great! While a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War for a couple of years, I taped a few of my flights by making and inserting a patch cord in the headset line. This cord went to a small cassette recorder I put in the aircraft. I simply turned it on and let it run. In my room at the airfield, I set up a spare military receiver and used it with this little recorder to tape what the Amateur bands sounded like from Vietnam near the South China Sea. Several years later I made a similar recording from Germany and put it on the other side of the cassette. It made a neat tape of the HF bands as they sound from Asia and Europe. Today, these recordings are obviously pretty special. Recording Equipment for the Shack With the availability of CDs, MP3 players, IPODS and a number of other recording devices, cassette tape recorders are not as popular as they once were, but they are still readily available and are in fact, even less expensive than in years past. A quick run through the Internet will produce any number of small cassette recorders that sell for $29 to $99. These are quite capable for radio use. On the minimalist side, just pick one that has an AC adaptor and also has a LINE INPUT for recording. On the higher end of this scale, the $99 Crane VersaCorder from Universal Radio is made specifically for radio use and offers a host of features such as VOX recording, extended recording (4 hour), and built-in recording timers. Careful selection can get a number of useful features for use in your shack, so spend some time and choose wisely.

C.Crane VersaCorder

If you prefer a front loading, soft touch control, dual tape deck, these are available for $90-$175. You can get a high quality dual-deck cassette tape deck that will provide some neat options for your radio recording needs. Among these options are automatic forward and reverse direction (bi-direction) recording, one button instant recording, easy touch controls, and the ability to dub one tape to another to make multiple tape copies on the spot as needed. Recording time is about 45 minutes per side using a 90 minute leaderless tape. Using bi-direction auto recording, you will get a full 90 minutes without having to turn the tape. Note that these decks require an audio amplifier and speakers if you want to play back tapes for a room filling sound, but this is easy to set up.

Dual Deck Sony TC-WR350Z

Connecting the Recorder Connecting the recorder to your transceiver/receiver is not complicated. Many Amateur transceivers and most modern receivers come with a RECORDING OUTPUT jack on the back panel. This provides a fixed output for your recorder that is not affected by your volume control setting or your use of headphones. You simply plug an audio cable from this jack to the recorders LINE IN jack and youre in business. Note: Some manufacturers offer the recording output jack on the optional outboard speaker rather than on the rig itself. Some newer transceivers and receivers appear to have replaced this recording output option with a built-in digital voice recorder which offer a few seconds or more of instant recording at the touch of a button. Some rigs offer both. These digital recorders are nice, but their short record times dont meet the needs for long term recording nor can this information be easily saved from the radio.
If a recording output isnt available on your equipment, no problemyou can still easily record your receivers output. Plugging your recorder directly into the headphone jack wont work very well since the headphone output is high impedance and the recorder input is low impedance. This method of recording would also turn off the headphones and turn off the rigs speaker so you couldnt hear what you were recording. To fix this, get a Radio Shack Mono Y Adaptor (RS # 274-310) and plug this into your transceiver/receiver headphone jack. Then get a Radio Shack Attenuating Dubbing Cord (RS # 42-2152). This cord is 6.5 long with 1/8 stereo plugs on both ends. Plug this dubbing cord into one of the Mono Adaptors two Y adaptor jacks and plug the other end of the cable into the recorder. Into the other Y adaptor jack, you can plug in your headphones or a speaker. Note: Make sure these plugs fit your equipment and if not, Radio Shack likely makes adaptors or plugs that will substitute for what you need. (The plugs described here are mono plugs/cables.) The key is to use the dubbing cord for your rigs output to match the recorder input.

The rigs at K5DZE with the ever ready Sony dual tape deck on the top left shelf
Tips Here are some tips for using a recorder at the rig. I hope they will be of help to you. Always have your recorder connected and ready to record when you are tuning around. You never know when you will want to quickly record something. If you do not have to set everything up and your recorder on, its probably going to be too late to catch the signal you wanted. Use a good quality tape. Not only does it make a better sounding recording, it will last longer. Dont use Dolby or low noise settings for radio recordings unless you have tested recording with and without this feature and you are happy with the results. Communications tapes often seem to sound better without such settings. Use 90 minute tapes rather than 120 minute or 60 minute tapes. The 120s use much thinner tape and as a result these are more prone to breaking, jamming and getting tangled in the tape transport mechanism. While the 120 minute tapes are really nice, they are risky. Lose one tape and you could lose 2 hours of recordings! (Its your choice) The 60s are OK, but require 6 tape changes for 6 hours of recording vs.4 tape changes for 6 hours if you use 90 minute tapes. Use Avery White Audio Tape Labels (Avery # 8998) to make great custom cassette tape labels for your station recordings. You can make these as fancy or simple as you wish, and you can change labels as often as necessary. It really pays to jot down the date and subject on each tape you want to keep. If you dont, you will likely find yourself playing tape after tape to find the one you want. Put a simple self-stick color tab such as the 3M #686-2RY on the side of blank tapes that you have at the recorder so you will know they are ready for use. You can also put a colored rubber band around tapes that you have already used to record signals. This will help you avoid rerecording a tape you wanted to keep. Use leaderless tapes to insure instant and complete recording from the time you push the record button until the tape stops. You can order color cassette tapes (red, yellow, white, etc) from your local vendor or from the Internet. Color tapes can help you keep communications tapes separate from commercial tapes or personal music tapes. An inexpensive hand held micro-cassette recorder is also handy for portable or mobile recording should you need to do so. Just pick it up, press record and set it down next to the speaker. It not as high quality as other methods, but it is better than nothing.
While current technology is also available to allow you to record digitally to your hard drive or a CD, the cassette tape system still has much flexibility and versatility for Amateurs and SWLs and doesnt require a computer. Certainly the quality of cassette recorders has never been higher and the cost more reasonable. Tape recording what you hear is great fun and might be really important for copying details when you hear an emergency, a Homeland security situation, a frequency intruder, or when capturing that elusive DX signal. Try a recorder in your shack and you wont wind up saying, Boy, I wish I had recorded that!