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Franklin Institute W3TKQ QSL Card from 1958

Being a Philly native, I have fond memories of the Franklin Institute from class trips and family outings. Growing up in the 80s and 90s I remember there being a new-ish ham radio station on the 4th floor where the telescope still is. Sadly like many things there it’s long gone, but I happened to find and acquire this old QSL card from the original station in 1958!

I do collect some FI ephemera, especially looking for ANYTHING from when they had the Futures center in the 1990s. Hit me up if you have any!

The ham radio station at the Franklin Institute was a partnership with a local ham radio club called the Philmont Mobile Radio Club. You can read more about the history of the station on the site here: http://www.phil-mont.org/tfi-hist.html . On a side note, I’ve hung out with the guys at Philmont and even got my ham radio license via their monthly testing sessions. If you’re looking for a local club, they’re a good one to check out!

I purposely left the rear of the card off as I have to censor some of the data, but the operator at the time was Nelson Schurr, W3DYP who filled and sent the card.

Stay tuned for more cool Franklin Institute stuff!


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Heathkit H89 Acquired!

Recently picked up a new to me Heathkit H89 computer. It actually dons the H19 tag on the back, which means this started life as an H19 terminal, and was updated to a full blown computer by adding an internal motherboard and disk system. This computer runs a Z80 and can run CP/M, H-DOS, Basic, Fortran, and likely anything else a Z80 can do. Since the monitor and keyboard are technically an internal “terminal”, its mostly limited to text and some crude graphics.

Its in great shape, and turned on and worked right away. I did give it an internal once-over to make sure things were seated good and no loose parts rattling around.

More info here: http://oldcomputers.net/heathkit-h89.html

It came with all it’s original books and disks, including Microsoft Basic, CP/M and Fortran. It does boot but it seems to be struggling with accessing the floppies, so it prob needs a good cleaning. Its actually immaculate inside and out.

One interesting part of this computer is it’s floppy system – its one of the few I have that actually uses “hard sectored” floppy disks. What this means is that it actually uses timing holes in the disks themselves to time when a track begins and ends. Unfortunately this means it takes “special” floppy disks, and normal “soft sectored” disks aren’t gonna work, and reading/writing images to floppies for this may be a challenge.

Here’s a few links to some techy info about the H89:

Floppy Format info: http://sebhc.lesbird.com/h8d.html
More info about Heathkit 8-Bit computers in general: http://sebhc.lesbird.com/

Flashfloppy Firmware Discussion:  https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/issues/182

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Welcome back to Junknet.net

Back from the dead just ta mess wit ya head…

Yeah…my long abandoned web site slowly makes it’s return. Briefly considered letting it go as I rarely use this page, but I had some good arcade how-tos and what not that I’d like to continue to provide. Nothing was lost but the old Joomla install had to go, and some hosting provider issues eventually took it out.

Things have interestingly come full circle…my old site had rants about how much I hated social media, only to have more or less full on switched over, and now, I’m slowly coming back around to find myself again 🙂 Thankfully I never let go of my little corner of the internet.

First priority will be to restore the arcade page to get those links fixed, then I’ll backfill with other fun stuff.