Unaffordable for me and my parents.

I studied the radio man's instructions and got myself components from the garbage can in radio workshops. Finally I somehow got 2 RV2,4P700 tubes and built a 0-V-1 RIM piccolo.

That was in 1952 when I was 13 years old. In our village I was known as a radio hobbyist.

Someone brought me a radiosonde with an RL2T2. What kind of thing was that? Ask the teacher or the parents? - Better not, because the answer was clear: "Better do your schoolwork!"

At that time nobody could have imagined that Firefox or Google would one day exist, at best we had an encyclopedia at school. 

So I rode my bike to Osnabrück and looked in the bookstores, but only to read. I didn't have the money to buy.

Later I came across another weather probe with my favorite tube, the RV2,4P700. This probe operated at a frequency around 90 to 100 MHz. My friend had a 78-turn turntable with a magnetic pickup.
I don't need to explain what comes next. The modulation was a mixture of AM and FM, not hi-fi, but clearly audible. On Sundays, at 2 p.m., we were “on air” with marching music and had our audience.
In good time, before the word got around to the post office in Osnabrück, we stopped the broadcast.

In 1954 my parents had built their own house and I got my shack upstairs under the roof. In the same year I got out of school and started an apprenticeship as an electrical fitter.
After work, I repaired radios to make some money. It was the time of defective electrolytic capacitors and selenium rectifiers. In my shack I made a lot of 0-V-1, 0-V-2 and 1-V-2. - Superhet came later.

In the fall of 1956 I became a member of the DARC.