Chapters | Ham Radio History

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WWV

Posted on 0121z - 6 December 2013 by W2PAJune 2, 2021

At the ARRL’s request in the summer of 1923, the Bureau of Standards announced that it would begin a schedule of broadcasts on precise wavelengths so that amateurs could calibrate their wave meters and receivers.1 The Bureau’s station in Washington, D.C., ran a highly stable oscillator driving a one-kilowatt power amplifier and had a proven record of being heard over a wide area, even on the West Coast. In print its call sign, WWV, evokes the graphical visualization of a … Continue reading →

Call and Card

Posted on 1732z - 15 November 2013 by W2PAJune 2, 2021

CQ, usesd as a general call for initiating a contact, took time to become an acceptable practice in the early years. Serious operators frowned on its use, mostly because it had been used to excess in the old days among the “little boys with squeak boxes,” usually in exceedingly long and sparsely identified calls. In March 1921, QST announced an operating event called the “ARRL CQ Party,” to be run on April Fools Day.1 The writer (unnamed) asserted that CQ … Continue reading →

Onward, Downward

Posted on 0118z - 1 October 2013 by W2PAJune 2, 2021

Around 1:00 a.m. on 26 November 1923, Charles York had been handling routine message traffic at his station 7HG in Tacoma, Washington, when he heard a pure CW station calling him on 200 meters signing JUPU.1 They made contact easily at first. The JUPU operator, an American, gave him a message for his mother in Cambridge, Illinois, and said he was located in Tokyo. But the contact was lost before York could get the street address in Cambridge, find out … Continue reading →

Scooped

Posted on 2323z - 12 September 2013 by W2PAJune 2, 2021

On the evening of 27 November 1923, a mother in Connecticut sent Thanksgiving greetings to her son who was a great distance away, via radio.1 She paid nothing for this service since her message was handled entirely by amateur radio operators. Impressively, it arrived only six minutes after she dictated it to a local ham on the telephone, traveling more than 6,000 miles to reach its addressee. Since her son happened to be aboard a ship that was frozen motionless … Continue reading →

Call Sign Confusion

Posted on 0237z - 1 September 2013 by W2PAJune 2, 2021

With the arrival of international amateur communication, the lack of a worldwide system of station identification led to confusion over call signs. Without prefixes as we know them today, there was no way to use a call sign to identify a station’s country. And since each country issued call signs independently, duplicates were inevitable. This hadn’t been a big problem for US hams before the first international QSOs since Canada was the only other country within normal range having a … Continue reading →

The Fourth Time’s the Charm

Posted on 1425z - 25 August 2013 by W2PAJune 2, 2021

After the initial thrill of being the first to hear transatlantic signals, Paul Godley’s next thought was of making contact, and a helpless frustration at not having equipment to transmit a reply. And now, emboldened by the successful second set of transatlantic tests in December 1922, many amateurs were talking about the possibility of a first two-way contact across the ocean. In fact, in early 1923 US hams were already informally running two-way tests with Leon Deloy, French 8AB (one … Continue reading →

High Latitudes and Low Wavelengths

Posted on 2029z - 6 August 2013 by W2PAJune 2, 2021

Donald B. MacMillan, an experienced arctic explorer and geologist, visited Hartford in early 1923 to discuss amateur radio with Hiram Percy Maxim.1 Among his various scientific investigations, MacMillan was planning to study the aurora borealis. No one yet understood what the aurora was, but he had experienced it on previous trips and noticed that he could hear long wave radio signals through it. On his next expedition, besides photographing the aurora, he wanted to experiment with shortwave radio signals to … Continue reading →

Transpacifics

Posted on 0214z - 20 July 2013 by W2PAJune 2, 2021

Steadily increasing use of CW paralleled exploration of ever shorter wavelengths, and the two pursuits complemented each other. Amateurs were setting new records at a whirlwind pace. CW use in traffic handling had grown tremendously in the past year, and in June 1922 ARRL message traffic on CW exceeded that on spark for the first time.1 By the following February CW traffic accounted for nearly 90% of the total.2 Hams across the country found CW especially effective in summer when … Continue reading →