Well, the 1938 Station is now the 1941 Station. This is in part because Matt, KK5DR, gave me a copy of the 1941 Radio Handbook. There are many useful designs contained therein (including a VFO and a 3-tube superhet) that I want to try. In addition, I found a transmitter I really wanted to build in a Thordarson publication from 1940. What makes this particular transmitter so appealing (besides its simplicity) is the fact that the project is designed so the transmitter can be built up in stages, from a simple crystal oscillator transmitter to a 50 watt three-stage 'phone rig. By consolidating the first two stages and using rack-mount construction throughout, instead of the breadboard construction recommended in the book for the first two stages, I can build the transmitter up progressively, without having to dismantle or duplicate previous stages when adding the next one on. This is going to save a LOT of time.
In addition to changing the flavor of the whole project, I have created a separate home page (this one) for it. This will allow separate pages for individual projects as their times come. So far, I have completed only the receiver, but I have already found plans I like for a transmitter, a VFO, and a monitor receiver.
So, by fiat, the 1938 Station is now the 1941 station. Ha! I'm running things around here, and I'll duplicate any vintage of station I want to!
And anyway, 1941 is a good year from a historical perspective, too. I had originally chosen 1938 because the spring and early summer of that year was the last time for many years one could work a lot of European DX. After Hitler abrogated the Munich Treaty by swallowing up what was left of Czechoslovakia the following spring, the nations of Europe seem to have pretty much curtailed all amateur activity. This is just a generalization; individual countries had their own policies, of course.
But, of course, 1941 was the last full year of amateur operations of any kind in this country. Once could still work DX, if he could find a country Hitler or Tojo hadn't already invaded. But in early 1942, all amateur stations were dismantled by federal order.
Many of these stations were never re-mantled. In a few cases, their owners were dead in Europe or the Pacific (may we never forget!). But most often, the flood of relatively advanced surplus gear after the war led to pre-war transmitters never being reassembled. This is one big reason why pre-war transmitters are so rare; if they survived the war, it is probably because their owners could not bring themselves to dismantle them as mandated in 1942!
A good example of how surplus replaced home-brew can be had by comparing the 1941 to the 1949 Radio Handbooks. Although manufactured receivers were beginning to replace home-brewed ones for wealthier amateurs in 1941, the Handbook had three receiver construction articles in it. The 1949 handbook has a two-tube regenerative construction article; the other articles deal with modifying surplus receivers for amateur use. In addition, the two most advanced exciters in the 1949 handbook use surplus Collins oscillator units instead of a user-built VFO.
Thus began the long, slow transition of amateur radio from a service that trained technicians to one that trained operators. There was still a fair amount of radio savvy involved in modifying a BC-348 for a more suitable bandwidth, or building converters to bring it onto ten meters. And of course, kit building continued to be an important part of amateur radio into the 'seventies (it still continues today, of course, but few people build entire stations from kits as they did then). But the end result was still today's very different state of affairs, where most hams licensed in the last fifteen years are basically ignorant of how the radios they operate work, and must send them off for the simplest repairs.
"Ham radio has changed. So what?" many say. I disagree with them. The Amateur Radio Service has certainly changed. I would not say for the worse, nor for the better; it is just different in a different era. But Ham Radio is timeless. Ham radio is marked by the passion to learn, to experiment, and to build, whether with vacuum tubes or sound cards. It is pursuit of the radio art for its own sake. Amateur radio has become more of a personal communication service, like the Family Radio Service or the Citizen's Radio Service (CB). Ham radio and Amateur radio exist, side by side on the same frequencies, and some few thousand of us are determined they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.