First exposure to sw was when as a wee lad, we had a big black dial Zenith console in the garage and it worked! BBC story time with Winnie the Poop and etc! This would be around 1974 or so.
Been sw/radio crazy ever since.
Next foray was a few years later, pa let me borrow his portable, dunno if it was a black plastic Sony or Zenith but it had a fold out tray/map thingy and I think a round time calculator thingy too you could turn to see what time it was wherever.
I listened to Radio Moscow preaching about "the evil imperialist capitalists and all their running dogs", with similar porpaganda coming from Radio Tirana, Bejing, Habana, and elsewhere, the hfbc bands where packed cheek and jowl.
The one thing that amazed me was there was even some guy whose job was to read the time every minute, with ticks every second in between reads, couldn't imagine being able to not fall asleep at a job like that.
Needless to say, even though I turned them on and tuned around and listened to lots of stuff, I did not really understand radio whatsoever.
My HAM uncle gave me a pair of wonky tonkys (walkies) for xmas, we put batteries in them, powered them on, and they had me run to the far side of the yard when I heard my uncle's voice come out of the thing clear as day.
I was flabbergasted! I mean, this is my dork uncle on the other side of the house whose gigantor HAM antenna tower we were forbidden to climb, not some radio station like WHO or whatever!
I kept turning it over and looking in the battery compartment for the tape recorder that my uncle must have used to trick me, but no it was live radio, even had a morse button and morse chart on the face so you could send mcw, not that I had a clue what mcw was then. MCW means Modulated Continuous Wave, the talkies had an audio oscillator to input a 1kc tone into the tx chain if you pressed the cw button.
Later on at about age 12, another great xmas gift from HAM uncle, the rat shack 160 in 1 electronics kit, that got me started in electronics projects on a grand scale and was the basis for my understanding of solid state electronics and radio waves. Later on would have to relearn everything to figure out how tubes worked.
Then many (many) years later, I was reminded of the existence of sw by a high quality boombox that had several sw bands, I'd tune in to some sw station and the missus would turn it right back to some crap fm stereo pop station. She would have to go.
Then, years later, at the same time as a foray into an exciting career in law enforcement, a Halli SX110 for sale was noted in the local paper and I wanted to see what that meant. So I end up carting it home with the original manual, this thing was in great shape and I couldn't wait to get it home and fired up.
Got it home and it worked fb! Simple wire antennas produced sigs on every band! The best part for me was the vertical s meter, way cool. I went to rat shack and found they could get me new tubes so I retubed it and had an even better time with increased sensitivity and so on. The only downside was when the furnace or ac came on the temp change would make it drift a bit so you had to ride the dial to keep those Aussies on 20m ssb tuned in. That began my pastime of preferring to listen to dx work other dx stations.
Then a few months later in a local (Counciltucky IA or Omaha club) HAM club monthly, was an ad for an Icom R-70 for a few paltry hundreds. I had to have it after seeing one in a HAM magazine. Payments were accepted and I can still recall making that last payment, picking it up in a law enforcement vehicle and driving home with it. The gf was def jelly of this new toy.
What a revelation.
Digital readout, absolute stability under most any conditions, selectable filtering, selectable demodulation modes, pre amp and attenuator, reference oscillator adjust right on the top!
It looked and worked like new. Holy crap you could listen to USAF bombers and hq on 6761 and 11176 ssb! Russian volmet on 11297! later on like a fool I traded it to Surplus Sales of Nebraska for a new AEA AT300 pi section antenna tuner cuz the cb bug had hit. Happily enough after the regret set in, saw Universal Radio had a R-70 for sale in an issue of Monitoring Times and called Fred, proposing a swap for a as new AEA AT300 tuner for the R70, and made the deal.
This R-70 was in as good or better shape than the one I had before, and it came with several professionally done mods such as a better AM filter and the legendary FL-44A 2.4kc xtal filter. AM passband tuning as well as preamp on AMBC were other mods, shoulda kept that one but it went somewhere else in trade as I was by then quite trade crazy.
Only thing impressed me as much as going from a halli to an Icom was getting a rig with dsp and a fish finder. And of those I've had many and still do, ate up with radios.