Radio History

When Hiram Percy Maxim helped found the American Radio Relay League in 1914, the word relay in its name was a promise, not a description. No single amateur station could reach very far, so messages had to hop from station to station. In the December 1916 issue of QST, Maxim put the promise to a test, asking whether a handful of operators could work up a plan to carry a message from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast and get an answer back the same night. Nobody, he wrote, had yet proved it could be done.

In the spring of 1914, Hartford, Connecticut, had two very different radio men with the same idea. Hiram Percy Maxim was a well-known inventor in his forties, a graduate of MIT and the son of the inventor of the Maxim gun. Clarence D. Tuska was not yet twenty, the secretary of the Radio Club of Hartford and already an ardent experimenter. Together, in May 1914, they founded the American Radio Relay League, with Maxim as president and Tuska as secretary, to do one practical thing: pass messages farther than any single amateur station could reach on its own.

In the spark era, wireless meant dots and dashes. A spark transmitter crashed out bursts of noise, a coherer tapped back Morse code, and that was supposed to be enough. Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, a Canadian-born inventor who had worked for Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, thought it was only the beginning. If a radio wave could be made steady, like a pure musical tone, instead of dying away in sparks, then a human voice might ride on it.

GMRS began with a dream of radio for everyone. After World War II, inventor Al Gross demonstrated a pocket-sized UHF radio, and FCC Commissioner E. K. Jett championed a citizens radio service that would work almost like a telephone, quiet until someone called you. On April 10, 1947, the FCC created that service in the 460 to 470 MHz band and called it Class A Citizens Radio Service. The early gear was tube-type, limited to 60 watts of plate input power to the final amplifier tube, and it ran wideband FM with 50 kilohertz channel spacing.

If you tuned across 20 meters in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s and heard a pileup suddenly tighten with excitement, there was a good chance the station everyone wanted was in Amman, Jordan. The callsign was JY1, about as short and memorable as a callsign gets, and the operator was Hussein bin Talal, king of Jordan. On the air he did not trade on his title. Fellow operators remembered a courteous, curious man who simply loved a good conversation, and the ARRL, of which he was a life member, regarded him as arguably the most famous radio amateur in the world.

When Hurricane Katrina came ashore on August 29, 2005, near Buras, Louisiana, as a Category 3 storm with winds near 125 miles per hour, it knocked out power, telephones and much of the Gulf Coast's ordinary communications. In Hancock County, Mississippi, the county had lost contact with the outside world except through amateur radio operators, who stepped in as 911 dispatchers and relayed messages in and out. It was dramatic, but it was not improvised from nothing.

In 1978, members of the Montreal Amateur Radio Club began sending ASCII data over VHF frequencies with homebuilt equipment, after Canadian authorities authorized the experiments. It was a bold idea for its time: instead of speaking into a microphone, a ham would let a computer chop a message into small bursts, send each burst with an address and error checking, and let the station at the other end reassemble it. When the United States Federal Communications Commission authorized ASCII transmissions for American amateurs in 1980, the experiment was ready to spread.

For most of its early life, two meters belonged to AM, CW, and homebrew rigs with modest range. A mobile station might reach a few miles on its own, and then geography won. The idea that changed everything was borrowed from commercial radio: put a receiver and a transmitter together on a hilltop or tall building, let the receiver listen on one frequency and the transmitter speak on another, and suddenly a small radio in a car could be heard across an entire city. FM, already proven by police, fire, and taxi fleets, gave the system clean, quiet audio to carry.

First, the housekeeping: no, "ham" is not an acronym. There is no hidden meaning in Hertz, Armstrong, Marconi — or Hammarlund, or any of the other clever backronyms that circulate at club meetings. The real story is better, because it starts with an insult.

On the evening of November 27, 1923, two American amateurs in Connecticut and a French amateur in Nice did something the experts said was impossible — and they did it with equipment most hams would now consider primitive. Fred Schnell, 1MO, and John Reinartz, 1XAM, worked Léon Deloy, 8AB, for several hours on a wavelength of about 110 meters. It was the first two-way transatlantic amateur communication, and it changed everything.