Amateurs were making progress taming the QRM problem. Sometimes a solution did not involve a new invention, or even technology at all. In a drama worthy of a Broadway play, Central Division Manager R. H. G. Mathews, 9ZN, described the bleak situation in Chicago before the war.1 Acute rivalry between local clubs had resulted in “gangs” in the north, south, and west sides of the city, “each having as a primary object the annihilation of the aerials of the others.” … Continue reading
The League ran another round of transcontinental relays over several nights in January 1921, setting new records for coast-to-coast round-trip message relaying.1 Maxim’s station, 1AW, participated in several of them, even unplanned ones, operating all night with several guests sharing the duties as operators. On the first night, 14 January, the Hartford Courant and Los Angeles Times editors exchanged greetings, as did the editors at The San Francisco Examiner and Boston American. The second night, the mayors of Hartford and … Continue reading
If you’ve been following along you know that strays is a word hams used in the early years to mean static or other noises caused mostly by nature that would interfere with reception of signals. QST adopted the word as a heading for a collection of unrelated short topics of interest. In the first issues they were all grouped together and sometimes would take up a full page or more. Today, Strays lives on in QST, but distributed around the … Continue reading