Twenty-two in ’22

Driven by rapidly expanding and radically changing uses of radio, a fitful and frustrating process of legislative and regulatory proposals and counterproposals was just beginning and would continue for a decade or more before it would begin to stabilize. As spring arrived in 1922, new broadcasting stations packed the air with signals as growing crowds of listeners in the general public clamored for even more. Ten years had brought changes unimaginable in 1912 when the first radio law was enacted.  … Continue reading

Strays—The Twenties Begin

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

Naval Maneuvers

Despite the political and regulatory-control disputes between amateurs and the Secretary, the Navy well understood how much it had benefited from all the trained amateurs ready to volunteer for service during the war and the likelihood of needing them again someday. In August the Navy announced it would begin broadcasting test messages containing weather information and text for code-copying practice at 15 and 25 words per minute every night on 476 meters from NAJ, the Great Lakes station, “in order … Continue reading