I thought I would get this category going with a bit of the story behind what
we all do on Sunday nights.
Banished to “200 meters and down”
Amateur experimenters were on the air almost as soon as there was an air to be
on. By the early 1900s home-built spark gap sets were common enough to be a
nuisance, and the Radio Act of 1912 was the government’s answer: for the
first time you needed a licence, and amateurs were pushed off the long
wavelengths and confined to 200 meters and shorter.
That was meant as a brush-off. Everyone knew the long waves were where the
real work happened, and the short stuff was considered close to worthless.
It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to the hobby. Those
“useless” frequencies are the shortwave bands, and they bounce off the
ionosphere. Amateurs had been handed the part of the spectrum that could reach
around the world, and nobody knew it yet.
Proving it
The ARRL was founded in 1914 by Hiram Percy Maxim, callsign 1AW - a name
that lives on in W1AW, the League’s headquarters station.
Amateur operation was shut down entirely when the US entered the First World
War in 1917, and did not resume until 1919. Then came the part I like best.
In December 1921, the ARRL ran the Transatlantic Tests. They sent Paul
Godley to Scotland with a receiver, while stations back home transmitted. The
amateur station 1BCG in Greenwich, Connecticut was heard across the
Atlantic on shortwave, running power that would seem modest to us now.
Two years later, in November 1923, Fred Schnell (1MO) in Connecticut and
Leon Deloy (8AB) in France made the first two-way transatlantic amateur
contact. Amateurs, not commercial labs, had worked out what shortwave could
do - and the commercial world moved in shortly afterwards.
The pattern repeats
That is the recurring theme in our history. Amateurs get the leftovers, find
out the leftovers are valuable, and the space gets crowded:
- Field Day started in 1933 - operating away from the shack, on emergency
power, which is still the point of it. - Amateur radio went dark again in the Second World War, and a great many hams
spent it as military radio operators. They came back with skills and surplus
gear, and the hobby boomed. - OSCAR 1 went up in December 1961 - the first amateur satellite, launched
barely four years after Sputnik. Amateurs have had birds in orbit ever since. - The Morse code requirement, argued over for decades, was finally dropped for
all US licence classes in 2007.
Why it still matters here
The reason we spot severe weather and run nets is the same reason the hobby
was tolerated in 1912: when the normal systems are down, a licensed operator
with a radio and an antenna is still on the air. That has not changed in a
hundred years, and it is worth remembering when someone asks why we bother
with radio when we all carry phones.
Over to you
Two things I would like this category to collect:
- The club’s own history. When was WAARC founded, and by whom? How did we
end up with the repeaters we have? If you know, please post it - right now
it lives only in people’s memories, and that is exactly how local history
gets lost. - Your first rig. What got you licensed, and what were you running?
73