Onward, Downward

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

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